Excerpt:
Rickey was hired in May to lead the turnaround of Richmond’s Binford Middle School.
The once-popular school in the Fan District struggled academically for years and, after its enrollment dipped to barely 200 students last year — about 40 percent of building capacity — city school leaders debated whether they wanted to keep it open.
Instead of closing the school, Superintendent Dana T. Bedden and his staff proposed using it as the home for two new-to-Richmond academic programs, the College Board’s Springboard program and their own arts-integrated curriculum.
Then they hired Rickey from Chesterfield County, where she had been a teacher and an administrator, to make it all work.