KINGSTON — As construction of the $38.5 million school building that will house 800 North End students when it opens in 2007 takes shape, the search for the principal who will take a lead role in configuring that school’s culture is progressing.

With two of its previously open secondary principal positions — at North Kitsap High School and Poulsbo Junior High — filled, the North Kitsap School District’s attention is now pinned on the final principal post that will be of paramount importance to NK’s secondary schools — Kingston High School.

“This school will unify this community like nothing else ever has,” said NKSD board director Dan Delaney at a recent community meeting with J.D. McMahan, one of the four candidates on the list for the KHS principalship.

The remaining KHS candidates, NKHS assistant principal Christy Cole and Battle Ground High School assistant principal Katharine Gleysteen will be interviewed May 30 and 31, respectively, with community meetings scheduled for 7 p.m. in the Kingston Junior High School home and family classroom.

McMahan, currently principal at Toledo Middle School in Toledo, Ore., and Merrilee Carey, former assistant principal at Timberline High School, interviewed with a gamut of North Kitsap education stakeholders and community members May 23 and 24.

“I see this, professionally, as the absolute, ultimate opportunity,” McMahan said of his thoughts on opening a brand new high school. “I’ve opened schools, but I’ve opened schools within schools.”

McMahan has served in a head, assistant or vice principal capacity in five different Oregon high schools and one middle school in the past 16 years during which his speciality has been curriculum construction and supervision along with program development.

Most recently at Toledo Middle School, McMahan led the fifth-eighth grade school into a two school configuration under the same roof, designing separate curricula for the fifth and sixth grade group and the seventh and eighth grade group.

Kingston High School is in need of a flexible, but stern leader who has the experience to work through the growing pains of a fledgling school while always keeping the ultimate goal of student achievement in focus, NKSD officials agree.

“I think it’s evident that (the NKSD) is ready for the next step,” Carey said at her meeting with the community May 24. “There is a common ground that gets us to where we want to be.”

Carey comes from a people-to-people driven background as she worked in the customer service sector of the retail business before starting down the school administration track in 1990.

Since then, she has been working in North Thurston public schools starting as an instructor/work coordinator at Puget Sound Alternative High School before becoming an assistant principal at Timberline High School.

“I feel that this is a very positive community,” Carey said, noting her excitement about the NK community commitment and involvement she had seen. “Whatever is out there, we can get through together.”

“The strongest thing I can bring to a new setting is experience with things that don’t work,” McMahan noted.

McMahan’s experience reaches into various school outlets from the principal’s office to the teaching and counseling posts.

“I chose the principalship because it gave me a bigger classroom,” McMahan said, noting his hunger for teaching and learning. “I’ve been looking a lifetime for this kind of environment and this opportunity. I think it is going to be a divine location, superb.”

During each candidate’s visit to the district, they took a walking tour of the KHS site off West Kingston Road. They also interviewed with KJH and NKHS students and staff along with community and district officials before their marathon days were done.

Following the district’s final in-district candidate interviews next week, two finalists will be chosen. Then a NKSD team will visit each finalist’s schools before Executive Director of Student Support Services Gregg Epperson makes his recommendation to the school board, tentatively June 10.

Profiles of the final two KHS candidates will be featured in the June 3 edition of the Herald.