COLUMBIA — The Richland County School District One board voted to remove the Lower Richland High School principal after a year marred by three shooting deaths of students, reassigning her to another position in the district without explaining why.
District Superintendent Craig Witherspoon sent an email to parents after the board's vote announcing that Ericka Hursey, the third principal of the 1,100-student school in Hopkins in the past decade, had been reassigned, but he also did not say why she is leaving or where she is going.
Hursey said her district contract runs through 2023, but she declined to comment further on the board's decision.
Hursey's reassignment came a little more than a month after she gave a speech during Lower Richland's commencement ceremony where she noted "roadblocks" and "uphill battles" she faced over the course of the school year. The obstacles, which were not detailed, led her to contemplate quitting her job at one point before changing her mind "after much prayer, counseling and conversations with people who really understand me."
"Instead, I needed to give up on people, situations, negative thinking and relationships that were causing me to feel the way that I did," she told graduates.
Asked what she meant by adversity, Hursey said June 29 that she was referring to the deaths of several students over the past school year.
"It was a lot of emotional distress that I had to deal with, losing five or six kids in the last 12 months," said Hursey, who spent four years leading Lower Richland High. "Some was related to violence, some was related to COVID, but that's the kind of trauma that I experienced."
During the commencement, Witherspoon and Richland One Board Chairwoman Cheryl Harris are seen in a video exchanging a note with each other when Hursey mentioned her adversities.
Efforts to reach Witherspoon and Harris for comment June 29 were unsuccessful. A district spokeswoman said Hursey's reassignment was part of typical annual staff shuffling. The change at Lower Richland was one of a dozen administrative appointments the school board approved June 28.
The school board is replacing Hursey with Latanya Williams, an assistant principal at W.J. Keenan High School.
Hursey's reassignment and placement was approved in a 5-1 board member vote, with Beatrice King voting "no" and Robert Lominack abstaining.
"We're not filling an opening — or at least, we're filling an opening that the administration has created," Lominack said at the June 28 meeting.
Lominack and King both said they do not see a clear reason for Hursey's reassignment.
"My vote does not reflect the character or the liking of (Williams), whom I do not know," King said at the June 28 board meeting, "but more the absence of justification for this decision by the administration, and I feel really strongly about that."
Asked why she changed her mind and stayed at Lower Richland after almost giving up, Hursey said, "I love my community, and I want to always do what's best for children. That's all."
