A little boy who walks into Winthrop Elementary School Principal Jaye Wilson's office looking apprehensive emerges five minutes later with the hint of a smile on his face.

Wilson pats him on the shoulder and sends him back to class.

"I was supposed to yell at him, but I couldn't," she confides in the raspy voice that is recognized locally wherever she goes.

The school year is young, and Wilson is in her glory. For this 56-year-old New London native, being an elementary school educator in the community where she was raised is like "dying and going to Heaven."

Though Wilson says she never needs a microphone to make herself heard, yelling is not her style. Instead, she says, she explained to the child how his transgression — spreading gossip — is hurtful. She ended the short conversation with some encouraging words to show she doesn't hold a grudge.

Everything that happens within Winthrop's four walls is a learning experience, Wilson says. She wants the students there to be well-prepared for middle school and to go on and become productive citizens. She also wants the school to feel like a second home for families.

"To be an elementary administrator is the cat's meow," she says.

Jaye Wollridge Wilson grew up on Belden Street in New London, one of nine children. Her parents each worked two jobs to feed all those mouths, and the kids helped out with chores and looked after each other.

"You just learned to get along, because there was no other way," she says.

She carried the family's "must make do" values into her adult life. To her, none of the challenges that face the city's school system, like low test scores, a new teacher evaluation system and parents who are preoccupied with their own issues, are insurmountable.

Winthrop, which last year was temporarily housed in portable classrooms on Cedar Grove Avenue, is now in another temporary location on Beech Street. Halfway through the school year, the staff and students will relocate once again, to their newly renovated school across town on Grove Street.

The multiple moves could be disruptive, but, "we do it with a smile," says Wilson.

"Grace under fire, that's her," says her longtime friend and colleague Louis Allen, who is director of the Science, Technology, Engineering & Math magnet school at New London High.

Allen admires how Wilson has dealt with tragedies over the years, like the death of a student's parents or a sick child.

"Behind closed doors to me and some other friends, maybe there's some tears shed," he says, "but on the outside, she puts on a good face. To a parent, that's very comforting."

A couple of weeks earlier, on the day before school started, everything was in its new place and the staff was calm, but Wilson predicted she wouldn't sleep at all that night.

"I'm worse than the kids," she says. "I can't sleep at all. I tell them I worry about the same things they worry about."

Wilson considers her empathy for students one of her strongest qualities. Having grown up in New London, she says she can tell the kids, "I'm no different than you."

She says it's "geeky," but she scours the newspaper and counts the number of her former students who have made the honor roll, graduated and become successful. She loves to run into students at their workplaces, like the young man who was at the cash register when she bought some smiley face balloons at the Dollar Tree recently.

"That's a success story, to me," she says.

Wilson had no ambition other than getting married after high school, but her parents encouraged her to go to college.

"You're so bright," they said. "Just give it a year."

She went to Mount Ida Junior College, where she said her love for learning "bit" her. After getting her associate's degree in early childhood education, she returned to New London and enrolled at Connecticut College, where her mother worked.

After earning her bachelor's degree in 1977, she got a job as a reading resource teacher at New London's Edgerton School. A year later, she transferred to Jennings School, where she taught third grade. She stayed at Jennings for 19 years, teaching several grades.

Wilson, by now a single mother of two, said she went back to school for a master's degree in administration after spending a week of sleepless nights because of the way a principal had treated a first-grader who pulled a fire alarm.

"I decided if I wanted things to be changed I'd have to do something about it," she said.

She attended Sacred Heart University on Friday nights and Saturdays. By now she was teaching fourth grade at Winthrop. In 1995, she became dean of the Bennie Dover Jackson Middle School, a position she took even though her heart was in elementary school. She became interim assistant principal in 2001 and then became principal.

Her career was soaring, but Wilson said middle school was not a good fit, and she began counting the days to retirement. After five years, a good friend talked her into trying for an elementary school job.

Now Wilson feels as if she could work forever

The Winthrop School is in the process of becoming the Science, Technology, Engineering & Math magnet school. Though Wilson's background is not in math, science or technology, she says she's learning and that the region is rich with resources. The school will be partnering with the high school's science and math magnet school along with the U.S. Coast Guard, Connecticut College, Electric Boat and Dow Chemical.

"We are in the right place for this to happen," she says.

One of her closest friends, retired teacher Kathy Nahas, says Wilson never backs down from a challenge

"She has a real heart for New London and really cares about New London," says Nahas. "She's the type of person who takes things in stride. She has to do it, so she just does it."

The two of them love shopping, and inevitably some child will approach them in the store and say, "Mrs. Wilson! Mrs. Wilson!"

"She just glows when she speaks to the kids," says Nahas.