Mr. Cooper is a 71-year-old retired middle-school principal whose fashion statement features a black windbreaker, track shoes and clip-on polyester tie, which he often yanks off in a burst of theatrics.

There was a middle-school principal and a retired police chief.

After he talked to Mr. Cosgrove, Corin's middle-school principal, he called the Denver P.D. and eventually got to talk with the detective who had investigated Mrs. Street's gruesome murder.

Tucker was born March 13, 1955 in Monroeville, Alabama, the daughter of Mary Louise Marshall Tucker, a high school English teacher and John Tucker, a middle-school principal.

In a room of future middle-school principals, the walls were covered with posters describing the merits of various administrative techniques, including dividing a school into "intimate learning communities" called houses and limited to 400 students.

John Barnes, who is studying to be a middle-school principal, said that he and his classmates were working on a fictional school named Transform Intermediate School.

Mrs. Glovin is the assistant to the middle-school principal at the Trinity School in New York.

It was a first day of school unlike any other, as corporate managers and Ivy League professors consulted with elementary- and middle-school principals and even directed jittery parents and children to their newly stocked classrooms.

Mr. Sandler, who has been principal there for 12 years, has had a strong record, in the past winning a private group's award as middle-school principal of the year.

Ms. Coletti noted that after receiving a $10,000 award for being middle-school principal of the year, Mr. Sandler donated the money to the school.