Wareham Middle School principal Dan Minkle will end his three decades in Wareham at the end of the current school year.

The news of his retirement on June 30 was announced Wednesday night at a meeting of the Wareham School Committee by school Superintendent Kimberly Shaver-Hood, who said the search for his successor will begin almost immediately.

“I certainly appreciate all that Mr. Minkle has given to our school district. His strong leadership, sense of humor and the guiding force he so generously provided to our student, staff, parents and community will be missed. A high bar has been set for his replacement,” she told the Committee.

Minkle said he chose to retire, because he needs “to start the next chapter” of his life. His plans post-retirement include finally visiting Hawai’i and Alaska, and going off the grid for a while to travel the continents he has not yet seen.

Minkle, who become the middle school’s principal in April 2014, has been with the school system since 1986, and began his Wareham school career teaching English in what is now the Multi Service Center. Back then, though, it was a school building for grades 7 and 8.

Minkle even remembers encouraging a young girl in her writing in what is now Director of Curriculum and Instruction Andrea Schwamb’s office.

“I would say, ‘Honey, I love the way you wrote your name.’ And something little extra in me said, ‘This child is fragile. She’s probably never experienced success in a traditional way, so you have to start somewhere,’” Minkle said. “She brought out the best in me, because she never quit. … I think she went into nursing, and I am pretty sure she is successful.”

Writing and literature have always been central to who Minkle is as a teacher and administrator. Though he is a devoted lover of Edgar Allen Poe’s foreboding, bleak works, he said his eyes were opened by none other than Charles Dickens, when he read the English author’s “Great Expectations.”

“I just said, ‘Wow, people write like that?’ There was just something about Miss Havisham,” Minkle said, referring to the book’s decaying virginal bride, who weaves her ghostly way in and out of the book’s plot.

Minkle made the transition from teacher to administrator fairly smoothly: during the district’s brief flirtation with the house system, he was a housemaster for one of the middle school’s three houses. The house system separated students and teachers into different wings of the current middle school, and, while he said he enjoyed the closeness the smaller groups fostered among staff and students, he also recognized there was a slight disconnect among students of different houses.

“We had our own identity … the downside was that those kids didn’t necessarily communicate as much as they wanted to with the other two houses,” Minkle said.

When the district did away with the house system five years later, Minkle said he was tapped to be the principal of the middle school – and the rest, as they say, is history.

And to hear him talk about his career, it’s been a good history, too. Under Minkle came several programs, including the two-year-old Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Humanities, and Mathematics program, known as STEAM, at the middle school. Since its inception two years ago, cohorts of students have been immersed in advanced learning, and have even tended their own cranberry bogs, located behind the school.

In the age of grooming students for standardized testing, Minkle is proud to say he has created a bit of academic wiggle room for the middle schoolers, as well as some wholly non-academic time for students.

“We have teachers who are also certified to teach yoga, and they teach the students yoga,” Minkle said. “We’ve had kids go to the Museum of Fine Arts [in Boston], we had kids see flamenco dancing in the winter, we have a drama club that has something like 60 kids in it.”

He and the high school Principal Scott Palladino also partnered on the dual-enrollment program at the high school, in which eighth graders from the middle school take higher-level classes in the morning at the high school.

Minkle attributes his style of administration to the feelings he remembers from his own principals and teachers. In remembering how they responded to him and his classmates, he tailored his own responses to several generations of students.

And that’s really it, Minkle said – that human connection, that encouragement, those, “making a kid feel they can do anything” moments that span his tenure that he remembers the most.

“It’s hard to explain, if you haven’t seen it,” Minkle said. “But it’s a reason to get up in the morning. … those successes. To this day, experiences I had with kids 28 years ago – I still remember their names.”

Shaver-Hood said she will meet with faculty and staff at the school to outline, and engage them in, the search process. She will also meet with the PTA, School Committee, and students. The window for applications will close on Feb. 8.

A survey, found here, permits parents, staff and community members to participate in the search process. The search committee will meet the week of Feb. 1 and begin interviewing candidates the week of Feb. 22 with the goal of determining an outcome in April.