Outgoing Pojoaque Valley Intermediate School principal Robert Quintana admits that leaving what he calls “the best job I’ve ever had” is proving bittersweet.

After 30 years in education, including 10 years as an administrator in the Pojoaque district, Quintana is retiring this summer.

The district is still choosing Quintana’s successor.

Eight candidates applied for the opening before Monday’s 5 p.m. deadline, according to Pojoaque Superintendent Toni Nolan Trujillo. All applicants must be screened, she said.

Quintana’s replacement will oversee the intermediate school’s phased move to its new campus in Jacona over the next 12 months, she said.

While the intermediate school accommodates the district’s fifth- and sixth-grade students, Trujillo added, this will change beginning in the 2008-2009 school year. To solve capacity problems, the new intermediate school will house fourth- and fifth-graders, and a separate sixth-grade academy will open at the existing intermediate school site in Pojoaque, she said.

Quintana will have a role in helping the district choose the school’s next principal, but he said that hasn’t made saying good-bye to staff members and students any easier.

Sometimes he said he wonders, why not just stay around for another year?

Part of reason he enjoyed the job was the intermediate school’s small scale, which allowed him to build close relationships with many staff members, Quintana said. He oversaw just 12 classrooms and 15 certified teachers.

The school’s size gave him and the staff freedom to experiment with some unorthodox approaches, he said. This included the optional same-sex classes for reading and math that the school offered fifth-graders this year.

The school has also tried rotating students for some subjects rather than having them get instruction from a single teacher for the entire day.

“I think just the smallness of (the school) made it easy to do things that other schools can’t,” he said.

Quintana came to the Pojoaque district after spending 17 years at Santa Fe High School as an assistant principal and vocational teacher. Before that he taught for three years in the Los Lunas Public Schools.