Photo: Wellington Elementary School.

They have met with teachers and staff, a parents group and administrators. And the selection of the next principal of the Roger Wellington Elementary School is in the home stretch with one of three candidates to be selected to take the reins from Amy Spangler, who left after five years at the school. The finalists will soon meet with Belmont Superintendent John Phelan who will make the final decision in the next few weeks. 

The three finalists are:

• Martha Wiley of Oxford
• Jody Day Klein of Newton
• Allison Franke of Somerville

Wiley is the principal of the Clara Barton Elementary School which is part of the Oxford Public Schools. Wiley has been leading the 3rd- through 4th-grade school since July 2016. She came to her current position in central Massachusetts from the Fitchburg public schools where she spent nearly five years as assistant principal of the K-4 Reingold Elementary. For 17 years, she was an elementary school teacher in the Northborough district.

Wiley has a B.S. in Elementary Education from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an M.A. in Elementary and Middle School Education from Cambridge College and an Educational Specialist degree from Bay Path College.

Klein has been the interim principal of Newton’s Lincoln-Eliot School for nearly two years, after spending a decade as the director of English Language Learning in the Newton School District. She started in Newton as the World Languages Coordinator. Klein is a Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) Administrator Trainer for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. She also works with Research for Better Teaching and is an instructor of Studying Skillful Teacher. 

Klein received her B.A. from Washington DC’s American University, her M.Ed. from Boston University, and a C.A.G.S. in School Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Franke is an assistant principal of Somerville’s Capuano Early Education Center, a pre-K, and Kindergarten school, for nearly four years, after working for four years as a literacy specialist at the Franklin Elementary School in West Newton. She’s held numerous posts in and out of elementary education after starting her career as a kindergarten and second-grade teacher in the Los Angeles schools for nearly four years. 

A DC native, Franke graduated with a computer science degree from Amherst, earned an Ed.M in Language and Literacy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and a masters in organizational management from Endicott. 

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