Rob Bradley works with Mary Brown during a session at the Tech Cafe in the fall of 2015.
Bradley is the new principal at Helper Middle School.
Carbon School District Press Release
Robert Bradley is familiar with Helper Middle School. He taught there for eight years before going to Carbon High about four years ago.
Now, he is going “home” as he views it. On Thursday, Bradley was named the new principal of the Helper institution, replacing Mika Salas who started working in administration at the Carbon School District central office on July 1.
“I am really excited because I have so much familiarity with what is going on at the school,” said Bradley. “I just want to keep doing the good things that they are doing there.”
Bradley has long been known for his work with kids and other teachers, particularly on technology. Now, he gets to go back and head up a faculty that he worked with, and one that introduced the concept of each student having their own Chromebook about five years ago when he was instructing on the campus.
Bradley is not a life-long educator, but instead came from a different industry a number of years ago.
Bradley was a military kid with his father being in the Air Force. He was born in Texas but ended up in his teenage years in Layton and graduated from Layton High School. He then went to work in the IT industry. However, when Y2K and 9-11 came along, IT people were not needed as much. At that point, he went to Weber State University and got a Bachelors degree with the intention of becoming a science teacher. And that he did.
“Kristen Taylor (who was a teacher at the time in the district and is now on the Carbon Board of Education) was at a recruiting fair I went to at the University of Utah,” he said. “She suggested that I come down to see what was going on. Carbon actually has an excellent offering for new teachers; they are quite competitive with other districts in the state. And the county is very affordable, especially for someone who is starting out later in their career and has a family.”
That was in 2007 and he went to work at Helper.
He later got his administrative certificate in 2015 from Western Governors University, the same year he moved to teach science at Carbon High School. It was during that final year at Helper that the district experimented with one-on-one devices with students. Bradley was a part of that. The Chromebook policy has changed some since that time but now the program has expanded through all the secondary schools and down into the elementary grades.
“That whole thing also actually morphed into the creation of the Tech Cafe,” he said of a program that is set up where teachers can attend a session two evenings a week at the district’s technology center to learn about the recent developments and get ongoing training. “In the beginning of that program, we trained a lot of the students as well as parents too. It has allowed us to keep the district’s teachers up to date on what the possibilities are and how they can be applied.”
He said the Tech Cafe has been instrumental in helping teachers use technology so it would fit in with the essential standards that schools have for students as opposed to giving teachers “a toolbox of technology and letting them pick what they want.”
“It’s certainly better that we target what teachers need and fit the tools to the actual needs they have in the classroom,” he stated.
When he was asked what he looked forward to most about taking the new job, he said “to be back in Helper.”
“I have loved that community since we moved there,” he explained. “I was on the city council for awhile (2009-15) and I loved that. We were able to do a lot of the things that laid the ground work for what is going on there today. I will love serving that community directly again.”
He was involved in the movement to fix the city’s infrastructure problems, something that had been part of what was keeping businesses from coming into town and opening up.
He did say, however, that he will miss teaching science to students.
“That has been one of my loves for a long time,” he said. “So, that direct impact is going to be gone. But as an administrator, you get to have a little bit more of a bigger picture. You get to make sure that every kid is served with what they need.”
Bradley has worked as a backup to Bruce Bean (principal) and Robyn Hussey (assistant principal) at Carbon High, along with previously serving as the back up principal at Helper for many years before that, so he said he has a bit of an idea of what it will take to head up a school. But he also realizes that he has a lot to learn and will face many new challenges.
But for now, it is all good.
“I have pondered this for awhile and right now I think I am just kind of in that honeymoon phase where I’m full of excitement and I am soaking that in,” he concluded.