ABSS Administrator Wins Recognition from the White House

Mike Wilder
Times-News

An Alamance-Burlington School System administrator whose focus is preparing students for success after high school has been recognized by the White House and the U.S. Department of Education.

Robyn Hadley, executive director of the system’s What’s After High School? program, is being honored as a Champion of Change in the White House-sponsored program.

Hadley, a native of Alamance County, was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Rhodes Scholar. She said there’s a possibility she will be invited to visit the White House as part of the Champion of Change honor, but that is not guaranteed.

She wrote about her efforts,  with those thoughts posted online at www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/30/rural-educator-bringing-change and www.ed.gov/blog/2012/01/rural-educator-bringing-change.

Hadley said starting the What’s After High School? program in 2005 was inspired by the success of previous efforts.

She had worked with a group of friends in 2004 to start “Yes I Can,” a one-time, faith-based college access program at Children’s Chapel United Church of Christ. The goal was to help the families of 25 African-American students in middle and high school learn how to prepare for and pay for college.

“By the end of the summer we had served more than 100 students and parents,” she wrote. The program evolved into Youth Enrichment Services, a non-profit that helps students prepare to attend two- and four-year colleges in North Carolina and other states, and Hadley used what she had learned to start the Alamance-Burlington system’s program.

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