Margaret Scally and Sonia Pearson didn’t know each other when they started work as secretaries at Wiscasset High School a day apart in August 1987. They quickly became a team with the other secretaries and formed a friendship the two Wiscasset women will continue after they retire at the end of the school year.

“We’re lifelong friends now,” Scally, a Gardiner native, said.

They’ll meet for lunch, shopping and trying out area walking trails, in some of their free time that will take the place of the busily paced school days they worked for three decades. Scally, 65, looks forward to doing volunteer work and having time to travel with husband Bruce Scally; the number one priority will be being more available to the youngest generations of the couple’s family, including ones out-of-state.

Pearson, 61, a Dresden native, has no set plans yet for her retirement years. If you leave your time open, opportunities can come along, she said.

“I’m game for just about anything. I don't even have a bucket list yet. I’m going to have to make one,” she said in Friday’s joint interview filled with smiles and laughter about their decades on staff and why school jobs worked for them.

Pearson said in a school, anything can happen, and every day is different. The fast pace also appealed to them. “I don't think we would have lasted 30 years if it didn’t,” Scally added, laughing.

Neither had worked in a school before Wiscasset High, now Wiscasset Middle High, where Pearson works as a secretary for special services and athletic director-assistant principal Mandy Lewis and Scally is a guidance secretary. Scally had been looking for a job with hours that would work for her young family. Her  children were all school-age.

So were Pearson’s. She was working in clerical support at Bath Iron Works. Her sister worked at Wiscasset Primary School and encouraged Pearson to apply for an opening at the high school.

It paid better than her BIW job did, Pearson said.

“It turned out to be more fun than I expected,” Scally said about working around children. “And it’s meaningful work. Some days are challenges, but there’s a feeling of being needed, and a sense that you’ve touched a lot of young lives.”

Scally has pondered retirement for a couple of years and decided going into this school year that it would be her last. Pearson hadn't known she would, but decided to after determining she could afford it. Both expect it to be strange and a little scary at first to not be back at their jobs next school year. It takes time to get used to the idea, Pearson said. They think it’s fitting they are finishing the same year. “We came in as a team, and we’re going out as a team,” Scally said.

Both plan to keep living in Wiscasset.