Growing up in Wiscasset, the Wiscasset School Department’s new gifted-talented teacher Karina Sprague didn’t think about becoming a teacher. “I always played school, but I didn’t think anything of it.”

After graduating Wiscasset High School in 2010, Sprague studied a semester at the University of New England. She’d been very interested in science throughout high school and had thought about becoming a veterinarian or doctor.

But while at UNE, she realized she was paying more attention to how her instructors were teaching, than to what they were teaching.

That’s when she knew she wanted to go into teaching. “I realized that was what I’d always wanted to do, I’d just never realized it.” 

Sprague, 23, got her bachelor of science degree in elementary education, with a focus on English, last spring from University of Maine at Farmington. She comes to the Wiscasset job after serving as an educational technician at Gardiner Regional Middle School, where she also did most of her student-teaching.

During her senior year at UMF, Sprague stayed on the lookout online for a Wiscasset opening. She kept looking to Wiscasset even after getting the Gardiner job. “And there was finally one (in Wiscasset) that fit me, so ... I knew I had to at least apply and try and get it. It’s been an amazing welcome,” she added.

Asked what it is like to return to Wiscasset schools as a teacher, Sprague said, “It’s awesome.” She’s always loved Wiscasset High School, she said. “As much as some people have negative things to say about it, I know that it’s an awesome school and it can be an awesome school. And the teachers are just amazing, which I never realized until I went out and saw other schools and teachers. Wiscasset does it way better.

“I just wanted to come back and be a part of it and help make everybody else realize how awesome this school is.”

Sprague is the first teacher in her family, and the first to graduate college. “So that was a feat in itself,” she said. Generations of her family have graduated from Wiscasset. “So it’s been a long time coming to have one of us in Wiscasset on the other side of the desk.”

Grandfather Frank Sprague, owner of Sprague’s Lobster, said she was one of his best workers so he would have liked to keep her working in the business; but he said of her college degree and her career choice, “I’m very proud of her for doing it.” As for her teaching in Wiscasset, he said, “What could be better?”

As a Wiscasset resident, Wiscasset High alumna and now as a Wiscasset School Department employee, Karina Sprague said she is glad Wiscasset left Regional School Unit 12. The district had just formed near the end of her high school career.

Wiscasset has a lot of ideas that work better when the town is on its own, she said. “I was really happy that they pulled out and I’m happy to see we’re still strong enough to be on our own.”

Although it’s her first teaching position, she said she can picture herself staying in it throughout her career. “I think this is the first job I’ve ever had that I could actually see myself doing it for the rest of my life, and being happy doing it.”

She hopes the job lasts; Wiscasset is home and will continue to be. She and fiance Kevin Decker, also a Wiscasset High graduate, just bought a house in Wiscasset. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She said the only thing that might end her teaching service in Wiscasset would be job loss, since she’s a new teacher and gifted-talented can be an area that school departments look to for cuts.

“So I have applied pressure on myself to make people realize it’s worth spending the money and worth keeping this program, not only to save my job but for the students, they need it.”

She started work Monday, Nov. 16 and by Friday morning, Nov. 20, had met most of the students she’ll be working with. What most appealed to her about the gifted-talented position is that she will be working with students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. In the elementary grades, she expects to be spending a lot of time inside classes, teaching or co-teaching and providing lessons to gifted-talented students as part of their work in the stations that teachers have for the classes.

In the middle grades, Sprague said she will probably be providing her students with support and advanced lessons, mostly in math. And at the high school level, she plans to initially be mentoring her students and helping guide them in their advanced placement classes, then later this school year start offering them independent study courses.

Outside work, Sprague, a horseback rider, is busy training her new mare, an Arabian-quarter horse; and she’s obsessed with her golden retriever, Gatsby, she said. “He’s my baby.”