SHERBURNE – Beginning this school year at Sherburne-Earlville, students are going to notice a few new faces filling important administrative roles. Kyle McFarland, Maizy Jaklitsch and Heather Sweet will take the positions of high school principal, assistant high/middle school principal, and director of special education, respectively.

Prior to his arrival at Sherburne-Earlville, McFarland was assistant principal at both Cambridge Central School District and Cohoes. For the past eight years, Jaklitsch has been a counselor in the Catskill area at the Otsego Northern Catskills BOCES. While there, she organized a partnership with SUNY Oneonta to help enrich students educational careers and teach them leadership skills.

Sweet, a Chittenango native, is not a newcomer to S-E schools. She is a veteran S-E teacher who has been involved for the better part of a decade in the school’s special education program. Sweet began work at S-E in 1997, but left in 2001. She then expanded her experience with special education programs at other locations including a four-year stint in Connecticut, followed by two years in the Adirondacks and a year in Liverpool, before returning to Sherburne. As S-E’s director of special education, Sweet will be overseeing key functions in the special education programs, facilitating faculty meetings and staff evaluations, and managing students who have individual education plans.

The newcomers, McFarland and Jaklitsch, are in agreement as to how they will initially tackle their roles as lead administrators in a new school district. To begin with, they plan to pay close attention to how the school is functioning in an effort to discern what is working and what is not before they begin implementing any major changes at Sherburne-Earlville. They will especially be keeping an eye out for “what has been done well in order to strengthen it,” McFarland said.