CASSOPOLIS — Ross Beatty Jr./Sr. High School and Sam Adams Elementary will have new leaders at the helm when the school year starts, after a decision made at the most recent school board meetings.

Deb Stermer will serve as principal at Sam Adams, and Robin Hadrick will be principal at  Ross Beatty.

Stermer was awarded the position of principal at Sam Adams at the meeting on June 14. She is the current assistant principal.

According to her blog, Stermer has been with the district for more than a decade. She started as a fifth-grade teacher and then taught fourth grade for nine years. Next, she moved onto the position of Lead Teacher and then became assistant principal.

She attended Western Michigan University for both undergraduate and graduate school. She has a masters in K-12 leadership.

Hadrick was awarded the position of principal at Ross Beatty Jr.-Sr. High School at the school board meeting this past Monday. She is the current principal at Ballard Elementary School, where she has been since 2015. Until February of this year, she was a co-principal at Ballard.

In 2017, Hardick was part of the administration that helped Ballard be taken off of Michigan’s Focus List, which school are put on if it is one of the 10 percent of Michigan schools with the widest achievement gap between high- and low-performing students, the data for which was gathered through the MEAP test. The school was placed on this list during the 2013-14 school year.

“This is just a huge testament to the hard work of all of our teachers, students, staff and administration,” Hadrick said at the time. “[We] worked to make this school one of the best in the area.”

According to her Linkedin, Hadrick has been with Niles Community Schools since January of 1995, when she became the assistant principal at Ballard Elementary School. Since then, she has had stints as principal at Oak Manor Elementary School, Oak Manor Sixth Grade Center, Eastside Connections Magnet School and Niles High School. Prior to becoming a school administrator, she spent 10 years as an elementary school teacher in LaVille, Indiana. She has an education specialist degree from Indiana University South Bend in Administration and Supervision, K-12.

Both administrators are said to be currently on vacation and were unavailable for comment.

Also at these meetings, the board recognized students who had received all A’s and B’s this past year and retiring staff members.