At its meeting on June 12, the school board approved a series of administrative changes in Rock Hill Schools that will be effective July 1.
The school board approved the administration’s recommendation to appoint Lesley King as the new principal of Northside Elementary School of the Arts. King, who has served as principal of Independence Elementary School for the past two years, returns to Northside where she previously served as an assistant principal from 2012-2015. Her experience at Northside and understanding of the arts choice program will allow this change to be a smooth transition. She also has extensive experience in school construction from her time in Greenville County Schools where she was assistant principal of Grove Elementary from 2002-2007 and Robert E. Cashion Elementary from 2007-2012.
Jason Ramey, who has been an assistant principal at Independence for the past year, will join King at Northside School of the Arts in the same role. Ramey began his career in Rock Hill Schools as a lab assistant before earning his teaching degree and becoming a middle school social studies teacher. He was the 2015-2016 teacher of the year at Castle Heights Middle School before moving into administration at Independence.
To more fully support the district’s language programs, the school board also approved Delandris Jones as the district’s world language coordinator. He joins Rock Hill Schools after five years as the director of world languages at Meadow Glen Middle School in Lexington, S.C. Jones is fluent in French and Spanish and presently teaching himself Chinese. He is a board member with the South Carolina Foreign Language Teachers Association and the Southern Conference of Language Teaching. In Rock Hill, Jones will lead foreign language programs including the French and Spanish language immersion programs and assist in the opening of the district’s new language immersion school that is scheduled to open in August 2018.