Called “an exemplary leader in Alaska,” Homer Middle School Principal Meghan Redmond has been named the Alaska Association of Secondary School Principals 2027 Principal of the Year.
“She leads with purpose, compassion and a deep commitment to creating opportunities for every student to succeed,” AASSP President Mike Nigus also said of Redmond.
Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Superintendent Clayton Holland echoed Nigus’ characterization.
“She puts her heart into everything she does and has built a school culture where students feel connected, staff feel valued and learning is at the center of the work,” Holland said. “What I admire most about Meghan is that she is never satisfied with simply doing things well. She is always looking for ways to make Homer Middle School even better for students.”
Redmond, one of eight regional winners selected last month, was announced last week as the statewide winner.
Redmond has served as HMS principal since 2021. She first came to Alaska from Wisconsin in 2010 with her husband.
“We were just ready for a big change in our lives,” she said. “I saw an ad in the paper for a job fair in Minneapolis for Alaska school districts, and that got us thinking about how neat that would be, to get to experience a place like that.”
She attended the fair and walked out with a teaching job in Twin Hills, a “tiny village of (then) just 80 people” in the Southwest Region School District.
“It was an incredible experience,” Redmond said.
She worked in Twin Hills for six years before transferring to Chief Ivan Blunka School in New Stuyahok, another Southwest Alaska village, where she was assistant principal and was named 2019 Alaska Assistant Principal of the Year and National Assistant Principal of the Year.
Redmond said she and her husband first visited Homer during their second summer in Alaska at the invitation of local educator Dave Cloud, who was Redmond’s administrator coach while she taught in Twin Hills.
“I guess you could say the rest is history on that,” she said. “We fell in love with Homer. We used to come here in the summers, and we knew we wanted to be able to move here someday and raise a family.”
Redmond’s tenure at Homer Middle started square in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. She said the experience of “trying to build up a new culture and getting to know how things run, because nothing was normal,” led her to incorporate student and staff voices in how the school runs.
Recently, Redmond worked with HMS faculty to update the school’s mission and create four common expectations for all students and staff:
- Be a good learner
- Be a good teammate
- Be a good citizen
- Be a good Husky
“Everyone’s been working together to implement that, from classroom rules to how we pick our students and staff of the months to deciding what we spend our time doing,” she said.
Redmond will be honored at the AASSP Alaska’s Principals Conference in January.
As this year’s AASSP Principal of the Year, Redmond also is in the running for National Principal of the Year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
“I love my job. Middle schoolers are super fun, and I’m really appreciative of the whole amazing staff here,” she said. “We do everything as a team here, so this is just as much for them as anybody else.”
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