Anyone familiar with Southport will likely know Southport Central School’s new kindergarten and first grade teacher Nikki Tibbetts is big news. Tibbetts used to learn in the very room she now teaches in. So far, it has been a wonderful and surreal experience, she said.

“It's been fun to come back. I was in first grade in this room and it's pretty cool to be on the other end, now.”

Tibbetts entered her college career at Thomas College with a major in teaching, but switched halfway through to psychology. Because her boyfriend, fellow Boothbay Region High School graduate Myron Hahn, was attending Maine Maritime Academy, she started working as an educational technician at Ellsworth Elementary Middle School when the pair moved to Castine over three years ago.

Tibbetts began taking online classes through the University of Maine at Augusta to finish her teaching degree about two years ago.

When she started working at EEMS, Tibbetts enjoyed working in the second, third and fourth grade classrooms.

“Then I was like 'I want to do this on my own, in my own room,' so I put in the hours and made it happen."

Her time in Ellsworth has been the most influential so far, Tibbetts said. “The teachers I worked with down there really took me under their wing. They knew that I wanted to do this full time, so they let me kind of play around and lesson plan and let me fill in for them when they were out and get a feel for how it was actually going to be.”

Tibbetts said the difference between EEMS’s 800-student enrollment and SCS’s three classrooms – kindergarten and first grade, second and third grade, and fourth, fifth and sixth grades – is astounding.

“We're a lot more relaxed here with 23 kids in the whole school. The rules are a lot different and these guys, here, can handle a lot more responsibility.”

While structure ruled her Ellsworth classrooms which would often match SCS’s entire enrollment, Tibbetts said the smaller class sizes here on Southport let her give her students much more freedom and responsibility, and because SCS holds kindergarten and first grade in the same room, she is equally excited to have students for more than a year.

“That'll be fantastic to really get to develop an even bigger relationship with them rather than just shipping them off to a new teacher every grade … With teaching, you're just getting to know your kids on the deepest level at the end of the year … I feel like you can pick up where you left off the following year.”

What's her favorite part of being a teacher? "All of it,” she said.

“I love the energy that the kids bring. Especially at this age group, everything is a brand new experience for them and it's fantastic to be able to be the one that gives them that experience. I mean, we get excited over cutting and gluing, we get excited over going on a field trip. They're so ready to learn, I just love that.”

Tibbetts, who knew Principal Lisa Clarke and administrative assistant Eileen Higgins from her learning days, said it was also surreal to interview for a job in such a familiar place without being nervous at all.

“I knew the people interviewing me and it was just like I was coming back home … It's such a great opportunity to be able to work with people that you knew and that watched you grow up. I think that's my favorite part about this whole entire adventure.”

Tibbetts said she and Hahn will continue their adventure by finding a place to live in the area when Hahn, now an engineer on a ship back and forth between Denmark and Greenland, comes back from sea in mid-October. The opening for her job at SCS was well timed, Tibbetts noted.

“We kind of made the decision that he was going to be on a ship and I didn't want to be (in Castine) all by myself, so I was like 'Oh, here's a job opening at the school that I went to! Let's go for it.’”

At the end of the day, it is only a little weird coming back and being on the teaching end at SCS, Tibbetts said.

“It's been so much fun. We do so many projects. We were just out picking the pumpkins to bring them in so we can start carving for Halloween. There are so many opportunities here to do fun things every day.”