School Board Welcomes New Shady Lane Principal

As the new principal of , Brad Hoffman wants to bring the school closer to the community.

Using social media is one way. Strengthening bonds with the PTA is another.

“Schools are under a microscope,” he said Monday, shortly after the Menomonee Falls School Board officially approved his contract. “We need to connect with the community, and show them what we are doing, and encourage them to invest in us.”

Hoffman, a fourth-grade teacher at Shady Lane, W172 N8959 Shady Lane, since 2003, received a round of applause from School Board members after the vote. He replaces the retiring Andy Heinowski.

A native of Medford, WI, he didn’t grow up in a family of teachers. His father was a car dealer and his mother ran a daycare out of the home. But they encouraged all of their children to go to college. Hoffman knew he wanted to be a teacher by the eighth grade.

He was influenced by two teachers of his own, who were also coaches and are now principals, he said in an interview after the board meeting Monday.

“They took an interest in their students outside the classroom,” he said.

After attending the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (he also has a master’s degree from Marion College), he followed his wife to Menomonee Falls, where she had obtained a job as a nuclear medicine technician at . They have three small children. A job substitute teaching at Shady Lane followed, then teaching, and now, just nine years later, he’s principal.

Hoffman said he loves the small-town feeling of Menomonee Falls, and he enjoys running into families in the community. He said his goals for Shady Lane include continuing to work on student intervention programs that take into account the diversity in the student body. He has served as  a coach for the school’s Positive Behavioral and Intervention Supports program. 

“This is now home,” he said of his own family. “We will never leave.”