The Daily Catch

Kyle Roddey, Both A Politician and An Educator, Named Red Hook High School’s Next Principal



Kyle Roddey, shown here in a 2018 photograph, was appointed Wednesday night to be the next principal of Red Hook High School (photo from Goshen Central School District).

Kyle Roddey, a former mayor of Goshen who is currently the principal of Fallsburg Junior Senior High School in Sullivan County, has been named the next principal of Red Hook High School.

Roddey, who is 37 and the father of three children, is expected to begin the new role in February, Superintendent Janet Warden announced at Wednesday’s Board of Education meeting, the first of the calendar year.

The principal position has been vacant since Nov. 16, when Robert McKiernan abruptly resigned under pressure following a snafu with the administration of the October Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT). (Read our story). Warden said at the time that the district hoped to name a replacement for McKiernan by February. The high school has since primarily been managed under the leadership of Kitty Summers, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum, learning, and staff development.

After running through a brief history of Roddey’s career in education, Warden tonight said she is excited to recommend him for the job. “He is going to be a wonderful fit to our school district, so congratulations to Kyle,” she said. The board voted unanimously to appoint him.

Roddey, accompanied to the meeting by his wife, then spoke briefly. “There’s a lot of wonderful things already happening in this district as evidenced tonight by those amazing proposals that sound delicious and engaging at the same time… I’m just so excited,” Roddey said. 

Earlier in the meeting, the board approved two new courses, one called “Word to Table” that will focus on literature and food of world cultures, and the other an advanced placement computer science course.

Roddey’s salary at Red Hook High was not immediately available, but McKiernan earned $166,171 in 2021, according to govsalaries.com.

Warden said Thursday that Roddey currently lives in Hurley, which is about a 20-minute drive from Red Hook in Ulster County.

A graduate of Goshen High School, Roddey earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Binghamton before earning a master’s in teaching from Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh in 2008 and a master’s in educational administration from the College of St. Rose in Albany in 2018. He is currently working on a PhD from Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., according to his LinkedIn profile.

Roddey has had active careers both in education and in politics. He served from 2009 to 2011 as a trustee for the Village of Goshen before becoming the youngest mayor of that village, at the age of 25, in 2011, according to Internet records and his LinkedIn profile.

Roddey served four consecutive two-year terms as mayor. In 2012, he waged an unsuccessful run for New York State Assembly of the 99th district, running as a Republican against Democrat James Skoufis, now a state senator. Roddey resigned in the final months of his second mayoral term to become an assistant principal at Goshen Central High School.

During his time as mayor, a part-time position, Roddey also worked as an educator. From 2013 to 2018, he worked as a full-time social studies teacher at Twin Towers Middle School in the Middletown School District in Orange County, where he currently lives. At Twin Towers, he was also the acting dean of students during an administrative internship, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Then, in 2018, Roddey took a job as assistant principal at Goshen Central High School, working to push computer science and other curriculum efforts around STEAM, an acronym for Science-Technology-Engineering-and-Mathematics, his LinkedIn profile says. He left in the middle of the school year, February 2021, to become principal of Fallsburg Junior Senior High School, a position he will have held for two years. Fallsburg is a school for students in grades 7 through 12 and enrolls 600 students, according to the Fallsburg Central School District website. Red Hook High School is roughly the same size.

Among his initiatives at Fallsburg, Roddey worked on a program, in cooperation with SUNY Sullivan, for upperclassmen to receive an associate’s degree. This program gave students the ability to take credit, college-level courses while in high school. 


Corrections: This version of the story has been updated to reflect that Roddey lives in Hurley, about 15 miles from Red Hook, not in a location 60 miles away, as originally reported. Also, Roddey served four, two-year terms as Goshen mayor, not two, four-year terms, according to Superintendent Janet Warden.

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