Pat Maness, who has been the principal of Richmond Drive Elementary School for the past 17 years, has been named the principal-elect of the district’s new K-5 language immersion school which is set to open in August 2018.
Maness has a long history with language programming in Rock Hill Schools. Beginning in the late 1990s, discussions had begun around offering world language programs to students in third through fifth grade. By 2003, three schools including Richmond Drive under the leadership of Maness, volunteered to pilot KITE-LL world language programs. Expansion to all elementary schools soon followed. The first hurdle in the program’s history was cleared during the Great Recession.
During this time, district leaders scaled the program back and recognized then that it would need to focus the program in fewer schools so it could weather the district’s financial challenges. In 2010, at Richmond Drive and Ebinport Elementary – under the direction of principal’s Maness and Shane Goodwin – became the district’s first schools of choice for World Language and began offering a Spanish curriculum in Kindergarten through 5th grade. The Fall of 2012 saw the district welcome the first group of students into the Spanish immersion at Richmond Drive and Ebinport. The following year, Rosewood Elementary opened its doors to offer French immersion. Excitement and energy for each program strengthened as each year passed and the district’s future commitment to language immersion is demonstrated by building a campus dedicated to language immersion instruction later this year.
While the new school will operate independently from Sullivan Middle School, the two campuses are aligning programing to create a seamless language immersion program from kindergarten through eighth grade.
For more on the construction of the new school, please visit our Build on the Rock website.