S. E. Gross Middle School in Brookfield will have a new principal next year.
Thursday night the Brookfield-LaGrange Park District 95 Board of Education accepted the resignation of Kevin Nicholson as principal of S.E. Gross, effective June 30.
Nicholson, who lives in Lake Zurich, is resigning because he wants to work closer to home; one of his children has a health issue.
“My son has a medical condition, and I do need to be much closer to home,” Nicholson said on Friday.
“I’m a father first and foremost.”
Nicholson said he has interviewed for other principal positions and is in the running for some jobs, but he has not been hired anywhere else yet.
“I’ve had a few interviews and, hopefully, I’ll go on to the next round in some of these,” Nicholson said. “It’s that time of year. Things are starting to open up, which is nice, up by me.”
Nicholson is in his second year as the principal of Gross. Before coming to Gross he was an assistant principal at Magee Middle School in Round Lake.
District 95 Superintendent Mark Kuzniewski is sorry to see Nicholson move on. Kuzniewski said Nicholson helped implement changes to the curriculum that were needed as the district began to adjust to the new expectations of the Common Core curriculum, which schools across Illinois are adopting.
“He did extremely well in keeping us moving in the right direction,” Kuzniewski said. “We are a district that typically is a place where people begin their careers, and we’re hopeful that the next principal will be able to bring the same type of leadership qualities that Kevin did.”
Kuzniewski has known for a while that Nicholson needed to work closer to home so, he has already begun the search for a new principal.
“We’re in the process of developing an interview pool,” Kuzniewski said. “Our hope is that we will do some screening interviews by the end of February into March and that we will have at least one finalist identified to bring to the board by April 3.”
Nicholson said that it will not be easy to leave District 95.
“It’s a great community,” Nicholson said. “The people down here have been nothing but wonderful, and everybody from the kindergarteners all the way up to the parents in the town have been really nice and welcoming, so it was a really tough call to leave this area. It’s a great area.”
