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Leigh Warren once walked the halls of Green Valley Elementary School as an assistant principal, but this year returns as its principal.

She said that in 5 1/2 years, some things have changed, but others are largely the same. She said there are some new families to get to know, and some new staff, but she sees reflections of students she once knew in their younger brothers and sisters.

"I get kids asking me if I remember my brother," Warren said. "I have to ask them, ‘was your brother blonde?'"

Warren moved to the school from Monocacy Elementary in July, taking over the post from Kevin Cuppett.

She said she was excited to get to know the school better, and was interested in its "earthology" club, which encourages gardening and recycling efforts around the school. She said students and staff at Green Valley are very polite and eager, and she was looking forward to the school year.

The transition has been a smooth one so far, she said. The biggest adjustment she's needed to make is spending more money on gas. Warren said she lives on Rosemont Avenue in Frederick, and driving to Monocacy took her only five minutes. She was used to only rarely having to fill her gas tank, but now has to do so a few times a week. "I feel like I'm always at Sheetz," she said.

Cindy Alvarado, the new principal at New Market Elementary, also did not have to make a huge adjustment when she took over the post from Jason Anderson this summer: she was the school's assistant principal last year.

Alvarado said she was lucky because she already has a connection with the school's community and staff, and her transition was easier than some principals, who have had to start out in a new school.

She also said Assistant Principal Randy Pearl made her job easier.

On the first day it was obvious that the students were ready to return to school, she said. "We had lots of excited, enthusiastic kids, and the school day went extremely well," Alvarado said.

David Kehne, new principal at Linganore High, also had a bit of a homecoming. Before serving as principal at Walkersville High, Kehne had been an assistant principal at Linganore from 2000-2007, when the student body was still attending the original site on Old Annapolis Road.

Kehne wrote in an e-mail to The Gazette that the community was so welcoming to him that he felt as if he'd never been away. "Working with staff and hearing both their commitment to excellent teaching and their hopes for Linganore's future leaves me feeling sometimes as if I'd never been away," he wrote. He wrote that this year would be a great one for Linganore High School, and he looked forward to the student body returning to its new campus next year.  

He wrote that one of the ongoing issues at Linganore's Oakdale High campus was getting students into class on time, but at least on the first two days of school, most students were in class 10 minutes before school started. Kehne wrote that this was evidence of students' and teachers' desires to begin the school year.

The only principal in the area who can be considered entirely new is Gerald DeGrange, who recently moved to Liberty Elementary from Brunswick.

However, he said the sense of community is very similar in both school, and though he had a bit of adjustment to the different style of administration at Liberty, he feels quite at home there.

He said he spent the summer getting to know the community in Libertytown, and even went to the Libertytown Volunteer Fire Department Carnival.

He said students and staff fell into their roles "like clockwork" on the first day, and even when a student boarded the wrong bus, and his parents had to wait for the bus to return him to school, DeGrange was never worried. He said staff knew the procedure, called the bus garage, and got the student back to school after the bus completed its route. "Everybody knew what to do, even when [something unusual] happened," he said.

E-mail Christian Brown at chbrown@gazette.net.