The members of the Great Neck School PTA in Waterford were pretty sure they knew who they wanted to nominate for the state PTA Outstanding Elementary School Principal award.

Pat Fedor, who started as a reading teacher in Groton and will retire this year after 44 years, was an obvious choice.

“She’s just amazing,” Great Neck PTA secretary Erica Baumgartner said. “All the kids are upset that she’s leaving.”

Fedor won, and found out at the beginning of April when members of the Great Neck PTA presented her with the award at a school-wide assembly.

After teaching in Groton, Fedor started a two-decade career in Waterford that coincided with some of the biggest changes in the town school district.

She was the principal of Southwest Elementary School, which closed as part of a consolidation of the town’s elementary schools and replaced by the Dual Language & Arts Magnet Middle School.

She became the principal at Great Neck in a brand-new building, nestled just south of the Great Neck Country Club and close enough to feel breezes coming off the Long Island Sound, in 2010.

The transition was complicated – Southwest’s students were divided between Great Neck and Oswegatchie Elementary School for a year, leaving Fedor commuting between the two schools.

“In the end it was time very well spent,” she said last week. “We put the kids, and then the adults, first, and then the building came second. It’s not like we’ve been together that long, but it doesn’t feel that way.”

In a letter nominating Fedor for the award, Waterford Superintendent Thomas Giard said her efforts made the merger a success. Since the new school opened, he said, she has developed “a strong sense of community” both in and out of the classroom, mentored other principals, improving communication between parents and teachers, all while welcoming students as they get off the bus each day.

The Connecticut PTA, a non-profit that supports local associations across the state, gives awards to nominees each year for outstanding teachers and administrators.

Fedor, along with a Hamden middle school principal and a West Haven teacher, were recognized at an awards dinner hosted by the PTA earlier this month.

Fedor will retire after this school year, with 21 years in the Waterford district under her belt.

“This is a great place,” she said. Often, she said, sitting in a classroom at Great Neck, “I think, ‘I wish my kids could be here.’”

It’s a high compliment for the mother of two children who graduated from Waterford Public Schools.

Fedor says she plans to stay in Waterford post-retirement. Leaving school for the first time since she was a kid will be “a little bit … scary,” she said.

“We’ll kind of take things as they come,” she said.

Fedor leaves big shoes to fill, said Baumgartner, the Great Neck PTA secretary who is also a teaching assistant principal at Waterford High School.

“It’s just a hard person to try to replace,” she said.

m.shanahan@theday.com