Lexington 1 announces 5 finalists for superintendent job, including familiar faces
Almost two months after its former superintendent stepped down, Lexington 1 announced the candidates for the school district’s top job on Tuesday.
Some are familiar faces in the district. Gerrita Postlewait is currently serving as Lexington 1’s interim superintendent after six years as superintendent of the Charleston school system. Heath Branham is the principal of Centerville Elementary School in Gilbert, and Lucas Clamp was the first principal of River Bluff High School and is currently the district’s secondary schools director.
Of the two other candidates, Ron Garner is the superintendent of the Spartanburg 1 school district, and Nakia Hardy is the deputy superintendent of schools in Durham, N.C.
“We are excited about the highly qualified professionals who are interested in leading this school district,” school board chair Anne Marie Green said in a statement after the Lexington 1 school board approved the candidate list Tuesday. “We look forward to our community learning more about them as we move into this next phase of the search.”
Greg Little stepped down as superintendent at the end of June after six years running the school district that covers the central part of Lexington County. Little left the district for a job with the state’s technical college system, after the COVID-19 pandemic and the construction of multiple new schools as part of a $365 million bond issue.
For the last two months, Postlewait has served as the district’s interim superintendent while the Lexington 1 school board worked with the S.C. School Boards Association to search for a new full-time superintendent.
Postlewait had been superintendent in Charleston County since 2015. She received a contract extension from the Charleston school board in 2018 that would have seen her continue in the job until the end of the 2023-24 school year, but a split school board voted to accept Postlewait’s resignation in December, the middle of the previous school year, WCSC-TV reported. A Georgetown native, Postlewait was previously superintendent of Horry County schools for 10 years.
Branham started with the district in 2005 as principal of Saxe Gotha Elementary, but before starting at Centerville he worked for the education management group EdisonLearning as head of their school turnaround program, working with struggling schools across the country. Clamp has been in education in Lexington County since 2002, when he started as a science teacher and assistant football and baseball coach at Irmo High School. He joined Lexington 1 in 2006 as an assistant principal of Lexington High School.
Garner has been superintendent in Spartanburg 1 since 2010 and was “superintendent-elect” from 2008. The South Carolina native has taught in Upstate schools for 28 years. Hardy has 24 years of education experience that include a stint as director of teaching and learning for Baltimore City Schools.
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