People hear “former school principal” and picture someone who knows how to run assemblies and manage lunch duty. Kelly Collins New Hampshire did both of those things. She also spent two decades managing budgets, personnel, facilities crises, legal compliance, board relationships, and the daily operational reality of keeping a large institution running while the people inside it barely noticed the work involved.
That’s a different picture. And it’s a much more accurate description of why the transition from educational leadership to corporate executive support isn’t as unlikely as it sounds.
Leadership Under Public Pressure
Principals operate in public. Their decisions, their missteps, and their handling of sensitive situations are all visible to staff, parents, students, and community members simultaneously. There is no recovery time between a difficult call and the next interaction.
Collins served in both Principal and Assistant Principal roles at the Kearsarge Regional School District in New Hampshire. She was nominated for Principal of the Year in New Hampshire in 2023. That kind of experience produces a specific quality: composure under scrutiny. A C-Suite Executive Assistant who can hold their composure when the executive is under pressure, when a stakeholder is upset, when something has gone wrong in a visible way, is worth significantly more than one who handles only smooth situations well.
Project Coordination at Scale
Running a school district building means running a complex, interlocking set of projects simultaneously. Budget planning for the following year while managing current operations. Capital improvement timelines alongside daily facilities maintenance. Staff development programs running concurrently with curriculum initiatives. All of it with the same pool of time, staff, and resources.
Collins coordinated that kind of complexity for more than two decades in New Hampshire. The terminology in a corporate software company is different: sprints, deliverables, stakeholder mapping. The underlying discipline — keeping multiple threads moving, managing dependencies, communicating across functions — is identical.
What Change Management Looks Like From the Inside
Educational institutions change slowly, which means when change does happen, the person leading it has to know exactly how to bring people along. Collins spent years implementing changes in school buildings: new systems, new expectations, new configurations of how work got done. Each of those required communicating clearly about why the change was happening, what it would require from people, and what would be better on the other side.
That skill transfers directly into corporate environments where executive support professionals are often the people who implement and communicate changes to how an executive’s office operates. Collins manages those transitions with the same approach she used in New Hampshire: honest, specific, and attentive to how the change will affect the people involved.
The Reputation That Precedes the Role
When a Principal leaves a building, the culture they built stays behind for a while. Staff remember how they were treated. Parents remember whether the school felt like a place that cared about their kids. Those impressions don’t disappear when the leader does.
Kelly Collins New Hampshire colleagues have consistently described her as someone who made institutional culture a real priority. That orientation doesn’t leave when the job title changes. It shapes how she approaches every working relationship, every communication, and every decision about how to use the time and trust she’s been given.