Rock Hill’s YPA charter school leader gets four-year contract

After four different managing directors in its first four years, York Preparatory Academy has hired a new school leader with a four-year contract.

Brian Myrup, 39, will become managing director of the Rock Hill-area charter school in June, the YPA board announced this week. Myrup comes to YPA from Reagan Academy in Springville, Utah, a charter school where he has been principal for eight years and assistant principal for two.

Myrup said Tuesday while visiting the school off Eastview Road that he hopes to bring consistent leadership. “You can’t build a continuous cycle of success if you’re starting over every year,” he said.

Craig Craze, YPA board chairman, said Myrup was hired with a four-year contract and an annual salary of $169,000. He said previous contracts for YPA directors have been up to two years.

YPA, with about 1,500 students in kindergarten through high school and 140 employees, opened in August 2010.

Craze said the seven-member board conducted a 14-month search for a proven charter school leader. He said they brought 13 candidates to campus for interviews and screened around 50 people by phone.

During that time, Craze said he believes the YPA board has worked to address some of the issues that led to leadership turnover, including clarifying the role of board members.

Craze acknowledged that he and other board members were too active in running the school. He also said parts of the school charter “were leading board members in co-managing the school.”

The school has been without a permanent managing director since Clay Eaton resigned in August 2014. The school has had four managing directors since it opened, all serving for a year or less.

Brian Carpenter, a national consultant for charter schools who has served as interim head of the school since June 2015, worked with the board to clean up the charter, Craze said.

Carpenter also trained board members to understand what their role should be, Craze said.

Craze said the school operated the 2014-15 academic year without a managing director, but with principals in each of its school buildings.

Myrup has worked as a consultant with YPA since July, helping the school learn how to use student test data to design its instruction. He said the school board recruited him last fall.

Myrup said he decided to join the school because of “the caliber of the staff and teachers that are already in place. I feel like the groundwork has already been laid.”

He said frequent leadership turnover is not unusual in public charter schools, especially in their early years. “It’s a national struggle that charter schools when they start face,” he said.

Myrup said he taught fourth and fifth grade at a Colorado public district school for four years before moving into an administrative role at the Utah school.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education at Utah Valley University and a master’s in educational leadership at Walden University in Minneapolis.

He said he will be moving his family to the Rock Hill area, including his wife, Cristi, and their five children, ages 6, 9, 12, 14 and 16.

This story was originally published January 12, 2016 at 4:48 PM with the headline "Rock Hill’s YPA charter school leader gets four-year contract."