Bryan County High School principal Dr. Dawn Hadley and assistant principal Dr. Rod Backman have resigned and the search is on for replacements, school officials said Thursday night after a brief called meeting.
The resignations were announced after the Bryan County Board of Education met with schools Superintendent Dr. Paul Brooksher at the Richmond Hill PreK Center.
After convening at 6 p.m., board members promptly went into executive session and stayed there some 40 minutes before returning to open session and voting 4-0 to accept the resignations of the two administrators.
Paine Bacon and Dennis Seger, board members whose districts include BCHS, abstained from voting. School board member Joe Pecenka was on vacation and did not attend the meeting.
After the vote, BoE members declined to talk about the resignations, which Brooksher said took place on May 29 when Backman resigned and June 2 when Hadley resigned.
Neither administrator was present at the meeting, and Brooksher said he could not comment on why the two stepped down.
“We accepted the resignations of two of our administrators so we could begin posting those positions and begin moving forward as quickly as we can,” he said, noting the district intends to have a principal in place by next school year.
“My goal is to have a principal on board when we open school,” he said. “But it’s going to be the best candidate for the job.”
According to the BCHS website, Hadley was in her third year as principal at BCHS after spending 10 years as an assistant principal at Richmond Hill High School. She also was a guidance counselor for five years and taught high school English in Effingham County for three years and one year in Bulloch County.
Backman was in his 10th year as an assistant principal at BCHS, the school website said. A retired Army lieutenant colonel and a West Point graduate, Backman spent time as an assistant principal at Bryan County Elementary and as a math teacher at Richmond Hill High School after his military career.