FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) – The school board for Florence School District 1 named an interim superintendent Thursday night.
Dr. Dan Strickland, who retired as Marion County’s superintendent in 2016, will replace Dr. Randy Bridges. Bridges suddenly announced in November that he would resign at the end of the year.
The resignation upset most board members, but member Alexis Pipkins and activist group Lifeline Plus had called for it. They criticized the district’s leadership and the handling of a racially insensitive email sent by a board member who later resigned.
Before the board named Strickland as the interim superintendent, at least one person at the board meeting begged Bridges to stay with the district through the rest of the school year.
When Bridges announced his resignation, he said “significant items to address over the next three to five years” and “having a new superintendent to lead these efforts is better than starting them and bringing someone in after the processes have already begun.”
Among the top priorities is addressing school overcrowding. The school board stopped in March a plan to “reconfigure” which grades attend each school. A months-long fight over where to build new schools and where to renovate others stalled in October and the board chair decided to effectively restart the process after multiple controversial plans failed to move forward.
“Dr. Strickland’s familiarity with Florence School District One and its programs—having served as Superintendent in a neighboring district as recently as last year—in combination with his administrative and leadership experience, led us to offer him the position of Interim Superintendent. We anticipate a smooth transition and look forward to working with Dr. Strickland for the remainder of the academic year,” said Board Chairman Barry Townsend said in a press release.
According to the district, Strickland served as superintendent of Columbus County Schools in Whiteville, North Carolina from 2005 to 2011. He led Marion County Schools from 2011 until he retired in 2016.
Townsend said one of the reasons the board chose Dr. Strickland was because of his familiarity with school programs that Dr. Bridges had implemented.
“We’re very excited about the direction that Dr. Bridges has set us in and with many innovative programs that he fostered and some of those are actually pretty new and in a fragile state right now,” he said. “We had a lot of principles, teachers, and parents at the individual schools where some of these programs have been instituted that were concerned that Dr. Bridges leaving would mean that the programs would be impacted in a negative way,” he continued. “And that was something that Dr. Strickland had a very good handle on, having been a superintendent in a neighboring district, he was quite familiar with our programs and understood the importance of them to us.”
Townsend said Dr. Strickland will start on January first and said there will be some transitional time before he starts so he can interact with Dr. Bridges and the district’s senior staff.
“As we get into next year, we will start the process of searching for a permanent replacement for Dr. Bridges and we’ve got to finalize the actual process we’ll use for that and fortunately the timing of this works well for us though because that is the contract time of year for educators so that’s when people have the freedom to be looking.”
Townsend said a lot of people questioned the timing of Dr. Bridges’ resignation, but the timing will work in the favor of the board.
“We get to go into this season, when people are available to talk and they’re not under contract, and so it widens the pool a great deal,” said Townsend. “Had Dr. Bridges waited until the end of the school year to tender his resignation, then we would have most likely had no option but to use someone in an interim role for a full school year.”
Townsend said Dr. Strickland had all of the qualifications the board was looking for.
“We anticipate a smooth transition with Dr. Strickland and we’re looking forward to working with him and the months to come,” he said. “I think that his ability to step in and into this role and maintain the sense of continuity, it was very important, because we are going to have this other task ahead of us of searching for a new superintendent,” he continued. “It’s going to be a really busy winter and spring so we felt very comfortable that he’d be able to step in and provide that continuity we were looking for.”
The board hasn’t indicated when it expects to name a permanent superintendent.