There’s a moment Michael Mai keeps coming back to.
He’d just started as principal of Great Meadows Regional School District. New building, new community, no established reputation. A parent approached him at a school event. She wasn’t complaining. She wasn’t requesting anything. She was just… surprised.
She was impressed that he knew all the students’ names.
“What seemed to me as just a part of my job carried a whole other level of meaning for the students and their families,” he says.
That moment didn’t just stick with him. It became the lens through which he’d eventually see everything: fiscal crises, COVID shutdowns, contract fights, AI rollouts. The idea that knowing people, actually knowing them, isn’t some soft leadership bonus. It’s the job. And if you let go of it when things get hard, you’ve already lost.
In 2020, Mai stepped into the superintendent role at the worst possible moment. COVID protocols, teacher contract negotiations, state monitoring, and $3.8 million in cumulative state aid losses, all at once, in year one. Most leaders would’ve gone into pure survival mode. What Mai did instead was communicate. Relentlessly, transparently, sometimes uncomfortably.
What followed was more than a decade of leadership that tells you something real about what it takes to keep a small school district intact when the ground keeps shifting.
The road in (And what it actually taught him)
Mai didn’t take a straight line to the superintendent’s office. He started in Jersey City at a school with tremendous potential stuck under leadership that couldn’t get out of its own way. It frustrated him enough to go back to school. In 2006, he enrolled in educational leadership courses at the University of Scranton. Not because he had a mapped-out plan, but because he kept thinking about what different leadership would actually look like.
He moved to Hackettstown, NJ, fell for the community, and taught 4th grade for five years. Then came the assistant principal role at Hackettstown Middle School, where he was working with many of the same kids he’d once taught. The relationship part of the job didn’t disappear when he stopped being a classroom teacher. It just changed shape.
When the principal position opened in Great Meadows, a district that feeds directly into Hackettstown High School, it felt like a natural move. He learned the inner workings of the district under Superintendent David Mango, who became both his boss and his mentor. When Mango eventually moved on, Mai applied for the role.
He got it.
In March 2020.
“I have often said that if I could survive that, I can handle anything,” he says. Looking at what hit him in year one, a global pandemic, a multi-year funding crisis, contract negotiations, and state accountability monitoring, you believe him.
Here’s where the money got really ugly
Between 2017 and 2024, Great Meadows Regional lost approximately $3.8 million in state aid funding. New Jersey’s S2 law was designed to move money away from overfunded districts toward those that had historically been underfunded. The intent wasn’t wrong. The impact on Great Meadows was brutal.
The district landed in the top 10 in New Jersey for the most money lost under S2. For a small suburban-rural district, that’s not a budget line problem. That’s an existential one.
Cutting without gutting the core
Mai’s approach wasn’t to quietly absorb the losses and hope nobody noticed. He made two things non-negotiable from the start: keep as many jobs as possible, and keep programs running. Everything else was on the table.
He shopped for health benefits annually, finding the best deals rather than defaulting to automatic renewals. He issued RFPs for transportation, legal services, and architectural work to find cost-effective providers. Small moves, each of them. But in a district operating on thin margins, small moves are exactly how you survive.
Then COVID hit. And the federal relief funds that followed created an opening nobody had expected.
“By utilizing federal funds made available as a result of Covid-19, Great Meadows Regional was able to renew curricular programs and provide programs beyond the school day,” Mai explains.
The district used those funds to restore what seven years of S2 cuts had hollowed out: curriculum, extended learning, summer programs for the students hit hardest by the shutdown. They also used the money to save jobs that would otherwise have been eliminated.
It’s an irony Mai acknowledges without embarrassment. The worst educational disruption in a generation ended up providing the financial runway to preserve the district’s core. Sometimes the crisis carries the solution inside it. You just have to stay calm enough to see it.
What “People-First” looks like when you’re actually under pressure
Ask Mai about his leadership philosophy and he reaches for a sports analogy almost immediately. He sees himself as the Team President, not the one calling plays on the field, but the one making sure the General Managers (his principals) have what they need to support the Coaches (teachers) and the Players (students).
It’s a useful frame. But what makes it real is how he talks about the less glamorous parts of the work.
He holds three Virtual Town Halls per year. He recently started doing live “Ask Me Anything” segments on the district’s YouTube channel. This year, Great Meadows was featured in BusinessView Magazine. A monthly district newsletter launched. He doesn’t describe any of this as marketing or outreach. He talks about it as obligation.
“Without trust and communication, a district cannot successfully move forward,” he says. “By maintaining transparent communication with all members of our school community, everyone knows where they stand.”
That includes the hard stuff. Fiscal realities. Program constraints. Difficult decisions with no clean answers. The instinct for many leaders is to manage the message, soften the edges, bury the bad news in careful language. Mai’s instinct is to just say the thing, explain the reasoning, and let people respond.
What He Actually Expects from His Teachers
His evaluation feedback to teachers consistently comes back to two things: student engagement and differentiation. When a teacher struggles in those areas, his first response is professional development, not punishment.
Both schools in Great Meadows operate on the Professional Learning Community model, which builds daily and weekly time for teacher collaboration directly into the schedule. Monthly articulation time lets subject and grade-level teams align curriculum, assessment, and instructional practice. None of that is unusual on paper. What’s unusual is that Mai treats it as foundational, not a nice-to-have that gets quietly cut when schedules get tight.
“Education is a people business,” he says. “You can have all the shiny bells and whistles in the world, but you will not motivate a child to learn if you do not connect with them on a human level.”
Learn their names. Learn their favorite shows, their TikTok trends, their musical tastes. Care about your staff as people, not just employees. Understand that family comes first. These aren’t warm platitudes the way he says them. They’re operational.
Now the next chapter: AI
Great Meadows is growing again. Enrollment is up. Preschool is expanding. The district that spent seven years in financial triage is starting to rebuild what was lost, and into that rebuilding moment comes artificial intelligence.
Mai isn’t a skeptic about AI, but he’s not a convert either. He’s something rarer and more useful: someone asking the right questions. His district recently partnered with EduTech, their IT provider, to develop a formal AI Plan with age- and grade-level guidelines, guardrails against misuse, and realistic frameworks for actual classroom use.
His position is unambiguous: teachers need to understand AI before students touch it. Students need real training on safe, effective use before they’re permitted to apply it to assignments. The goal isn’t efficiency for its own sake.
“AI allows them to dive deeper into topics,” he says. “So expectations may need to be raised for what can be accomplished with these tools.”
That last sentence is easy to scroll past. Most of the conversation around AI in education circles revolves around risk management, cheating, misinformation, over-reliance, the slow erosion of fundamental skills. Mai is asking a different question. If students now have access to tools that can accelerate and expand their thinking, shouldn’t we expect more from them?
It’s the same instinct that shaped his whole career. Don’t manage down to the constraint. Figure out what’s actually possible and push there.
The future he describes for Great Meadows is more inclusive classrooms, smarter AI integration, a growing preschool that gives the youngest learners an earlier foundation, and partnerships with neighboring districts to optimize programs without blowing the budget. And underneath all of it, the same thing that made that parent stop him in the hallway all those years ago.
“We want to help create good people who love to learn,” he says.
That’s the goal. The funding fights, the COVID pivots, the RFPs, the AI plans, the town halls – that’s all just what it takes to get there.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
Mai’s advice to emerging leaders isn’t complicated, but it is honest in a way that a lot of leadership advice isn’t.
The first thing he’ll tell you: you won’t please everyone. Trying to will paralyze you. Make the best decision you can for the people in your charge, explain your reasoning clearly, and accept that respect and agreement aren’t the same thing. People can disagree with a decision and still trust the person who made it. That’s actually the goal.
The second thing is harder. Know when to push and when to back off. He invokes the old question, is this a hill worth dying on?, not as a cliché but as a real daily check. You can be completely right about a needed change and still read the timing completely wrong. If the staff, the community, and the board aren’t ready, pushing anyway doesn’t make you brave. It just makes the change harder when you eventually get it through.
“Be willing to regroup and move in a different direction,” he says. And coming from someone who navigated $3.8 million in losses without losing his footing, that reads less like a management tip and more like hard-won wisdom.
The Name Thing Was Never Small
Michael Mai took over a district in crisis and spent years doing unglamorous work: keeping jobs intact, renegotiating contracts, hunting for cheaper health benefits, writing honest budget letters to a community that deserved honesty. No dramatic turnaround arc. No silver bullet. Just clear communication, creative problem-solving, and the stubborn insistence on knowing every kid’s name.
That parent who stopped him in the hallway probably didn’t know what the moment meant to him. It confirmed that the relational work he’d built his whole identity around as a teacher didn’t disappear when he moved up. It just reached further.
Great Meadows is rebuilding now. The enrollment is climbing. The preschool is growing. The AI plan is in motion. And at the center of it is a superintendent who still believes the most important thing he can do is make sure every student in his district knows they’ve been seen.
That might sound small, but it isn’t.
Why TomoClub Is Sharing This Story
At TomoClub, we believe the future of education isn’t shaped by flashy reforms. It’s shaped inside schools by leaders who quietly build systems, strengthen trust, and respond to real challenges with intention.
The Education Hall exists to surface these stories – not polished case studies, but honest leadership under real pressure. Michael Mai faced the kind of year-one gauntlet that would’ve broken a lot of people: a global pandemic, a seven-year funding crater worth $3.8 million, contract negotiations, and state accountability monitoring, all landing at once. These aren’t hypothetical pressures. They’re the ones small districts across the country are living with right now – just rarely all at the same time.
Michael Mai’s work at Great Meadows Regional reflects a kind of leadership that often goes unnoticed. Steady. Relational. Fiscally creative. The kind that understands that before you can improve outcomes, you have to earn trust – from your board, your staff, your community, and yes, the kid in the hallway whose name you actually know. That kind of leadership is exactly what education needs right now.
