“This staff has so far surpassed my expectations,” says Brent Kermen, the new principal at the William D’Abate Elementary School. “These teachers personify a collective commitment to education.” The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

PROVIDENCE — Brent Kermen doesn’t let a child walk past him without giving him a handshake or a high-five.

“How’s it going, handsome?” says Kermen, principal of the William D’Abate Elementary School near Manton Avenue.

Kermen is in front of the school every morning, greeting students and parents with a smile and a few cheery words to begin the day. As a new principal, he says, it’s important to be visible so parents can connect a face with a name.

“I have to put myself out there for them to judge,” he says. “Every kid that passes by looks me up and down.”

Kermen has big shoes to fill. Lucille Furia, who retired in June, spent 39 years at D’Abate, the past 13 as principal. In a district where principals rarely stay at one school for very long, Furia was nothing short of an institution. And, because of her longevity, the school has one of the most stable communities of teachers in the district.

“This staff has so far surpassed my expectations,” says Kermen, who is 37 and lives in Cranston. “These teachers personify a collective commitment to education.”

Kermen cut his teeth as an administrator in Newport, where he was assistant principal of Thompson Middle School. One of his biggest accomplishments there was developing a guide to help teachers prepare students for the state assessments.

Kermen represents the new breed of principals, who see themselves as instructional leaders, not simply school disciplinarians. After the morning bell rings, he pops into one class after another to make sure that students and teachers are engaged in honest work.

Friday is only the fourth day of school, but Kermen, who spent four years in the Marines, including a tour in the Gulf war, has already begun to identify the “alphas,” the children who are natural leaders.

During lunch, he points to a fifth-grade girl who looks far older than her peers, an adolescent trapped in an elementary school. She sits facing away from her classmates, a look of supreme boredom on her face. Kermen nods his head and predicts that she will turn out to be one of the leaders, the student that the other fifth-grade girls look up to.

“You can learn more in the lunchroom about who’s who on the social ladder,” he says, “than any place else.”

Details matter to Kermen. He notices that teachers flock to the teachers’ room for their lunch break, which means that they enjoy each others’ company.

He also notices that each of the three lunch periods runs like clockwork. The students queue up for lunch, sit down right away and throw away their trash before lining up to return to class. Although the noise level is high, it is not deafening and there is no fooling around. When lunch is over, the gym teacher blows a whistle and students automatically put their heads down and stop talking.

Kermen shakes his head and smiles. This order is the result of years of consistent leadership on the part of the principal and staff. The children know what it is expected of them and they model that behavior for the newcomers, especially the kindergarten students.

“The teachers here are so welcoming, so nurturing,” he says. “Lucille deserves a lot of credit.”

During the third lunch, a fifth-grade girl buries her head in her hands and starts crying. A teacher assistant tells Kermen that one of the boys said something nasty about the girl’s looks. Kermen asks the boy to apologize, and then pulls the girl aside.

“You know,” he tells her, “I don’t think he meant to be mean. Sometimes, when a boy says something like that to a girl, it really means he likes her. But if anyone does that to you again, tell me about it or your teacher. Are you OK? All right, let’s have a good afternoon.”

An urban principal wears many hats: cheerleader, disciplinarian, data guru, master teacher and social worker. Sometimes, the principal also has to be a clerk of the works.

When Kermen arrived at D’Abate shortly before school started, he found a building in turmoil. Construction crews were installing sprinklers and there were wires hanging everywhere and a thick layer of dust on every surface. Meanwhile, the courtyard was littered with broken glass and graffiti.

Kermen got on the phone to central office. He called the building’s union representative. For the two or three days before school started, maintenance teams worked double shifts to clean up the building.

“I had everyone down here,” he says. “Central office was outstanding.”

Since this is Kermen’s first year, the district has assigned a veteran administrator to be his mentor, Mary Brennan, a retired principal hailed for turning around Vartan Gregorian Elementary School on the East Side.

Brennan has given Kermen the kind of advice that only a veteran of a school district knows about, like how to get the buses there on time and who to call when a parent is late picking up his child.

But even in the best-run schools, plans can go awry, as they did on Friday, when a little boy bolted from the classroom and was caught running down the hallway. It seems that his mother had promised him that he would attend the same school as his big sister and when he wound at D’Abate, he had a meltdown. This was the second day in a row that the boy had tried to run away.

Kermen tried to calm him down.

“Lunch is coming up,” he said to the tearful child. “You can buy me an ice cream.”

Kermen called the school social worker and the district’s director of special education and explained that the child needed a more secure setting. In the meantime, he made sure that the teacher had a walkie-talkie in case the boy tried to make another run for it.

All too often, Kermen says, something at home sets the child off and that emotional upheaval travels with the child to the classroom.

“As a child, my family moved from Central Falls to Newport,” Kermen says, “and I remember like it was yesterday what it was like to be the new kid in school.”

In Providence, it isn’t unusual for students to move a half-dozen times by the time they reach high school. Sometimes, the family moves from Providence to Pawtucket to Central Falls, depending on the availability of affordable housing. All these changes add another level of anxiety to what is often a fraught moment anyway — the first day of school.

Bring it on, Kermen says. He is ready for the baddest boy, the toughest fifth-grader, because this is what he was meant to do.

lborg@projo.com