School district christens new Welcome Center with highlights from the past year

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Manchester School District Superintendent Dr. Jennifer Chmiel (Gillis) held her third State of the School District address on Thursday, the first event held by the district at its new Welcome Center.

Occupying the upper two floors of New England College’s French Hall on Concord Street, the venue for the speech was a point of pride in itself for Chmiel, with the building serving as a new “one-stop shop” for parents in need of information or registration for their children.

Chmiel also noted several accomplishments for the district in the past year in addition to the Welcome Center including…

• New modular classrooms as part of Phase 1 in the district’s facilities plan
• The dual-language immersion program at Bakersville Elementary School
• Championship seasons for ROTC and FIRST teams
• Manchester teachers reaching the finals of the New Hampshire Teacher of the Year competition
• An Amazon scholarship for West graduate Vick Mahindru
• The school district’s new in-house school bus network

“Once again, we are building on progress. We are coming off a school year in which we saw measured improvements in student assessments, and we are awaiting more data points from the state to further measure our efforts,” said Chmiel. “What we are doing together is working.”

The list of highlights was complimented by a series of annual updates from the district’s department heads as well as Aimee Kereage of Manchester Proud.

Chmiel also took several questions submitted to Manchester Chamber of Commerce CEO Heather McGrail, continuing to praise the district’s accomplishments over the past year and defend certain decisions such as difficulty funding programs for refugee students. Those refugee programs and others became part of difficult choices brought forward by the end of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, running out following the petering out of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, despite balancing this new fiscal reality, Chmiel said that the district was still able to keep 44 added staff positions while other districts were cutting staff following the loss of their ESSER funds.

She also praised her team as the thing she is most proud of during her tenure and has been grateful for the connection she has made as an educator in the city since 2014, getting an advantage as an internal candidate for her position while her predecessors came from elsewhere.

“I knew what was coming ahead. I had internal instructions, internal knowledge when I needed information, I knew exactly how to get it right and how to fact check. The superintendents that came before me had great ideas, great visions, but they got stuck,” she said.