Troy Gobble, Riverside-Brookfield High School’s interim assistant principal for instruction, will be leaving RB at the end of the school year to take a job as an assistant principal at Adlai E. Stevenson High School.

Last week the District 125 school board unanimously voted to hire Gobble as Stevenson’s assistant principal for teaching and learning.

“I loved my time at RB,” said Gobble. “It’s a wonderful school. I made some great relationships with the community and teachers and I’ll miss them.”

Stevenson High School, located in Lincolnshire, is one of the largest high schools in Illinois, with an enrollment of 4,345. Gobble will start at Stevenson on July 1, replacing Dr. John Carter who will take over as Stevenson’s principal, said Jim Conrey, the director of public information for Stevenson.

Gobble, 40, said that the administrative position at Stevenson was attractive to him.

“It’s a fantastic high school, one of the best in the state, and opportunities like that don’t come along very often, so it was an easy choice,” Gobble said.

He came to RB in 2001 from Sandburg High School as a physics teacher and was named science department chairman one year later. In 2006 he was named the Illinois physics teacher of the year and was being groomed for an administrative position

In June 2009 Gobble was appointed interim assistant principal when Tim Scanlon was named interim principal.

Earlier this year Gobble was a finalist for the job of principal at RB, but was passed over when the school board accepted the recommendation of Interim Superintendent David Bonnette to hire Pamela Bylsma, an assistant principal at Hinsdale Central High School.

Once Bylsma takes the reins as principal on July 1 Scanlon will return to his previous position as assistant principal. That would have bumped Gobble back to his old job as science department chair and physics teacher.

The Landmark has learned that there were efforts to create an administrative role at RB for Gobble in an attempt to keep him. But those efforts apparently did not win majority support from the school board. Some board members are unhappy that those efforts were not pursued harder.

“He is without a doubt one of the finest teachers we have in this school and one of the best educators,” said school board member Larry Herbst, a former president of the school board. “I think it’s a shame that we couldn’t think outside the box and find some way to hold on to Troy through other avenues. … I think it would have been time well spent to keep someone like Troy in the district.”

Herbst said that Gobble was the logical successor to Scanlon when Scanlon retires in 2014. He said that Gobble would have been an ideal complement to Bylsma, whose background is in student services.

“They would have made a fantastic one, two punch, but we’ll never know now,” Herbst said. “I’m very frustrated about it. I can’t believe we couldn’t have found some way if we had tried hard enough.”

School board president Jim Marciniak refused to comment when asked about how he felt about Gobble leaving RB or about efforts to keep Gobble at RB.

“I don’t have a comment about that issue,” Marciniak said.

-Bob Skolnik