Veteran members of the Cape Elizabeth School Department who are retiring or leaving the system this year will remember Cape as a place with high academic standards, excellent students and very supporting colleagues.

Eight members of the staff from all three Cape schools are retiring. Half of those are from Pond Cove Elementary School, which Principal Tom Eismeier said is a higher number than past years. He said it is a sign of a new trend, with the Baby Boomer generation heading into retirment.

Julie Mullen has been teaching first-grade for 18 years in Cape.

“It’s been a great career, and I’m glad to leave it on such a happy note,” she said.

Eismeier said Mullen represents the spirit and community of the first-grade at Pond Cove.

“I’m having a hard time leaving,” Mullen said. “I’m grieving.”

Mullen said she loves music and wants to start training on the piano and guitar, both of which she said she isn’t very good at yet. She also said a long-term substitute position teaching first-grade on Peaks Island has peaked her interest, but she’s not sure if she will go ahead with the job. She said she wants to “get the feel of retirement first.”

“Who knows? Maybe I’ll find another adventure,” she said. One she does have planned is a trip to Tanzania to volunteer for a few months at an orphanage teaching first-grade. While at Pond Cove, Mullen said she sent at least 40 boxes of old schoolbooks, crayons, pencils, and teaching material to the orphanage.

Two second grade teachers – Rindi Martin and Charlotte Muzrall – are also retiring from Pond Cove. Eismeier said Muzrall, who taught at Cape for 26 years, was known for her professionalism and ability to adapt to the changes of the times. Even though her retirement was planned, Muzrall still kept up her work on the Learning Results that teachers all over the state are facing. “Up to the very end,” Eismeier said.

Martin, who taught in Cape for 19 years, was also a grade level team leader. Eismeier said Martin was upfront, honest and very professional.

At the middle school, long-time Principal Nancy Hutton is retiring after 25 years in the Cape school system. She began as a seventh- and eighth-grade reading, English and social studies teacher and became the principal of Cape Elizabeth Middle School in 1990.

Hutton said she will miss the relationships she fostered with students, colleagues and parents.

“Just being part of a system that’s moving from good to great… that’s exciting to be a part of.” She will also miss the daily problem solving, which she said she found “quite invigorating.”

She said being a principal is a 24-hour job, which she knew going into it 15 years ago. “Now I want to use some of those hours in different ways,” she said.

Hutton is currently teaching a course at the University of Southern Maine and will begin doing consulting work with middle schools in the literacy field.

“I had a job that I loved, and I wanted to go out while I still loved it,” said Hutton.

Two other members of the Cape Elizabeth Middle School staff are retiring. Nancy Scott after 17 years as an educational technician and Suzi VanWye as an art teacher.

One staff member from the high school is retiring this year. Judy Liberty taught French and English at Cape High School for 20 years. She said “the excitement of being part of the everyday life of students,” is what she will miss, as well as the excellent staff and “the high academic expectations at Cape.” But, she is retiring, “because it is time.”

Liberty and her husband are retiring together, and they plan to spend a lot of time on their boat this summer and with their two grandchildren.

“Our plan is not to have a plan for a while. That’s the plan,” she said.

Liberty was part of the group that worked to get foreign language offered to younger students in Cape Elizabeth. Rather than waiting until eighth-grade to begin teaching French or Spanish to students, fourth-graders at Pond Cove can now take a foreign language.

Liberty also organized four foreign language exchange programs over the years, that sent Cape students overseas and brought foreign students to Cape for three weeks.

“It’s wonderful to use the language in a meaningful way,” she said.

School Board Chairman Kevin Sweeney said Cape has “some very talented people” moving on, and they will be missed.

“Don’t it always go to show, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” Sweeney said.

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