Michael Whaland went to Moultonborough's school board meetings before he worked there.

"Attending School Board meetings and visiting both the SAU Office and the Academy revealed a culture defined by a thoughtful, student centered approach to decision making and a drive for academic excellence without complacency," he wrote in response to questions from The NHEdTribune.

He is now the superintendent of Moultonborough^↗ET, a Lakes Region district he already knew from the other side of a tuition agreement. Moultonborough Academy takes students from towns that do not run their own high school, and Whaland says that arrangement is what put the district in front of him in the first place.

"My deep connection to the Lakes Region and firsthand work with Moultonborough through sending tuition agreements drew me directly to this district," he wrote.

Some of that arrangement is his own work. Immediately before Moultonborough, Whaland was the superintendent of the neighboring SAU covering Tamworth, Madison and Freedom, and he says he worked with Moultonborough leadership from that side to open Moultonborough Academy as a high school option for Tamworth's elementary and middle school students. The board meetings and campus visits came with that job rather than with a job search. By the time the search did come, he says, the district was already familiar.

"As I went through the months-long interview process my knowledge and experiences with the district really assisted me feeling comfortable, and that Moultonborough was a great fit," he wrote.

He is inheriting something unusual in New Hampshire

Most of the state has been emptying out. New Hampshire enrolled 183,604 students in 2014-15 and 160,322 in 2025-26, a decline of 12.7 percent. One student in eight is gone.

Moultonborough lost nine.

The district enrolled 515 students in 2014-15 and 506 in 2025-26, down 1.7 percent across twelve years. Had it fallen at the statewide rate from its own 2014-15 base, it would have shed about 65 students instead.

The district's decline was nearly eleven percentage points smaller than the state's over the same reporting window.

He is not walking into a growth story either, and the record is worth stating precisely rather than flattering. Seven of the eleven annual transitions in that span were declines. The district bottomed at 465 students in 2020-21 and has added 41 since, including increases in each of the last two years totalling 30. What it has done is refuse to keep falling, which in New Hampshire is its own achievement.

The band he wants to grow has already doubled

Whaland's stated first priority is early childhood.

"My focus centers on expanding high quality early childhood pathways, fortifying multi-tiered systems of instructional support, and creating authentic partnerships that connect classroom learning to real world experiences," he wrote.

The state's numbers show that pathway already widening under his predecessors. Moultonborough's prekindergarten band held 13 students in 2014-15 and held 30 in 2025-26, last school year and the most recent published enrollment year. It is a very small base and seventeen additional children, which is worth saying alongside the word "doubled," but the direction is unambiguous and it runs against everything else happening in New Hampshire.

The rest of the bands have moved in different directions. The middle level is up 25 students since 2014-15. Moultonborough Academy is down 33. Nothing in the enrollment file explains why, and Whaland arrived after every year in it, so the question of what those two lines mean for the Academy's future is genuinely open rather than rhetorically open.

New Hampshire publishes enrollment in bands rather than single grades, so there is no kindergarten-to-senior ratio to compute here and this article does not offer one.

Three schools, two buildings, and he thinks that is the point

Moultonborough runs three schools out of two buildings. Moultonborough Central School serves the district through fifth grade and enrolled 243 students in 2025-26. The Moultonborough Academy building houses the other two schools: the middle level, which enrolled 109 students last school year, and the Academy itself, which enrolled 154. Together they are the whole district.

Asked what a structure that size makes possible, Whaland did not treat it as a constraint to manage.

"An enrollment of roughly 500 students across our three-school continuum is a distinct advantage," he wrote. "It offers the ideal balance: the warmth of a close knit community paired with the robust academic, athletic, and co-curricular programming typically found in larger districts."

His argument is operational as much as cultural. "Our scale and campus layout also makes vertical curriculum alignment manageable," he wrote, and the same size lets the district "deliver multi tiered Systems of Support with precision, meeting students exactly where they are, whether they require targeted intervention or advanced coursework."

He returns three separate times, unprompted, to the same formulation: that every student should be known, supported, and challenged. It appears in his answer about why he came, in his answer about what he is listening for, and in his answer about the three-school structure.

What he says he is listening for

Whaland describes his opening months as deliberately unfinished.

"I believe educational leadership is about listening, amplifying voices and having courage in action," he wrote.

From staff, he says he wants to hear about mathematics instruction, curriculum alignment, and tiered supports, and specifically about "where instructional barriers exist, and how we can continue to refine our practices without creating initiative fatigue." From families, he is asking about "their aspirations for their children, their experiences with our school climate, and how effectively we are communicating and partnering with them."

Another focus faces outward rather than into the buildings. Whaland says he wants to strengthen ties between the district, the town, and local community groups, and he names three places to start: "shared resources, town recreation initiatives, and student internships." He makes the case in terms of trust and cost as much as programming, writing that partnerships like those would "build public trust, improve operational efficiency, and deliver richer opportunities for our students in a fiscal minded way." Those are the outcomes he is aiming at, not results anyone has measured.

What he is asking families is where the tuition arrangement stops being background. A share of Moultonborough Academy's enrollment is decided in other towns, by families and boards Whaland does not report to, and the state's file does not separate those students from resident ones. A district that has held its enrollment while the state shed an eighth of its own has done something. Exactly how much of it is Moultonborough's own doing is not a question the enrollment record can answer, and it is the one sitting underneath every plan he described.

Enrollment figures are from the New Hampshire Department of Education. Michael Whaland responded to written questions from The NHEdTribune on August 19 and August 24, 2026, supplied additional written context on August 27, 2026, clarified the district's school and building configuration on September 1, 2026, and supplied the photograph used with this profile on September 8, 2026.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.