Millville Senior High Principal Kathy Procopio retiring

MILLVILLE - The beach is calling out to Kathleen Procopio, and she’s like, "Oooooh, yeah!"

Come July 1, Procopio departs as principal of Millville Senior High School. Her five years in the MSHS main office will cap 32 years in education, which some time last year she realized was quite long enough.

“My husband retired in June, and I’ll be old enough this year to retire even after 32 years,” Procopio said on Tuesday. “And I think it’s time.”

The Board of Education on Monday night officially accepted her retirement application. A replacement still is to be named.

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Procopio and her husband, Anthony, plan to move from Vineland to Ocean City, guaranteeing time under the sun and in the sand.

“I want to spend time with my family and do some fun things,” Procopio said. “As you know, being in this field and being a principal, especially a high school principal, takes tons of time away. I’m ready to be at the beach all summer. That’s what I want to do — be at the beach all summer.

“You know I love it here,” she said. “And I’m going to miss everybody. I’m going to miss the kids. Words starting to trickle out. The staff I told about a week and a half ago. They were kind of shocked, some of them. Some of them said, ‘Oh. I didn’t think you were old enough.’ "

A native of Washington Township, back when it was farms and not developments, she took a winding road to Millville. Actually, she took it twice to Millville.

Procopio started teaching math at Washington Township High School, from which she had graduated. She worked there for 10 years.

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And while there, she met her future husband, also a teacher and a Vineland native. It launched a voyage of discovery — to Cumberland County. The couple moved to Vineland when they got married.

“It was funny,” she said. “I ended up here, where he’s from, and he ended up there, where I was from. That’s where I went to high school, too. So I started out there. We didn’t go too far out of our world over there. And when I met my husband, I was like ‘Where is Vineland? Where is Cumberland County?’ I’d never been down here.”

At the Washington district, she moved into guidance counseling. She stayed in that work as she changed districts and until taking over as MSHS principal for the 2011-12 academic year. She replaced Christy Thompson as principal.

In between all that, Procopio spent a year at the Pitman school system as a counselor after leaving Washington.

“And I loved, loved Pitman,” she said. “I would still be at Pitman, except for the fact that it was so far and my son was little at the time, going to kindergarten, and I wanted to be closer to home.”

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She was a guidance counselor in Vineland before taking a position at Millville in 2002 as a counselor at the senior high school. In 2004, she became the MSHS guidance supervisor.

That was her second stop in Millville, though. She also spent a year here as an elementary school counselor after leaving Pitman in order to be closer to her home in Vineland.

“I’d never done elementary anything in my life,” Procopio recalled. “After one year, I looked at my husband — ‘I need the big kids. I can’t do this anymore.’ And then Vineland had an opening, so I went there for six years. Then, when Millville had another opening, I came back because I really liked Millville.

“Like, even though it’s bigger, it does have that `little town' feel,” she said. “It really does. And it’s very much `family.' This school feels like a family. People take care of one another.”

One signature feature of Procopio’s time in the MSHS main office is the raising of the bar for how many emails can be generated by one school to a newspaper to announce events and achievements. She figures she averages at least five a week (although she may be low-balling that number).

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“Let me tell you,” Procopio said. “That was one of my personal goals when I became principal. I called The Daily Journal when I became principal and I said, “Why is Delsea (Regional) always in the paper?’ Because when I got this job, all I ever saw was Delsea students. And they said, ‘Well, they send us stuff.’ I said, ‘That’s all I have to do?’ They said, ‘That’s all you have to do.’

“That’s all I had to know,” she said. “I started flooding you guys, and you’re awesome because everybody puts it up, like, the next day. I keep telling my teachers, ‘If you’re doing something fun, take a picture. Send it to me.’ Because, too many times, there’s only bad things going in the paper, and our kids are great and our teachers are great. They do great things. And I wanted to promote that.”

Procopio said she still gets calls asking what the trick is to getting coverage.

The decision to retire means that Procopio won’t be here through the high school’s reconstruction and expansion, preparatory to the district consolidating all high school grades at the North Wade Boulevard campus. “I won’t be here, but I’ll look at it from the outside,” she laughed.

Joseph P. Smith:  (856) 563-5252; jsmith@gannettnj.com