Grey Young of Fort Mill is the Fort Mill district’s new superintendent. TRACY KIMBALL tkimball@heraldonline.com
Grey Young was going to be a basketball player in the NBA. That was the plan before his height leveled off anyway.
Then, somewhere around middle school, plan B came into focus. Maybe he could follow his parents’ footsteps instead.
His mom and dad came home from work every day with smiles. Both were beloved Fort Mill educators who seemed to know everybody and whose impact would later be immortalized in the school district hall of fame.
Young wanted to have meaningful community connections, too.
After graduating from Fort Mill High School in 1996, he came back to substitute teach and do other jobs while pursuing his degree, including maintenance and coaching. He started as a full-time teacher straight out of college.
He helped open schools as an assistant principal and, later, principal. He took administrative roles in the district office. He became a parent and enrolled his two children.
“I believe in this school system, and I believe in it enough to raise my family here,” Young said. “It’s been my whole life, really.”
The school board in May unanimously selected Young to be the next superintendent, taking the mantle from outgoing superintendent Chuck Epps in the first leadership transition since 2010. Young starts July 1.
“He’s done all of it,” said Chari Young, his mom. She watched from the edge of her seat as the board voted for her son to be its next leader. She’s rewatched that moment several times since. “He has seen every aspect of the Fort Mill School District, and I’m very proud of him for that.”
‘Everybody helping everybody’: Preserving Fort Mill culture
Young was just 7 years old when the school community stepped up in the wake of an unexpected tragedy and taught him what Fort Mill culture was all about.
A drunk driver struck his parents’ vehicle while they were heading back from a Clemson football game. His father wouldn’t return home from the hospital for weeks, his mother for months.
His mom’s students — including current school board chairperson Kristy Spears — took turns volunteering to do household chores and babysit the three Young boys.
Susan Moore, Young’s second grade teacher, had breakfast ready for him each morning because she didn’t know if he was eating at home. Anne Ledford, a family friend and his mom’s coworker, moved in to care for the boys while their parents recovered. She did her best to keep them in good spirits.
“We had craft time. We made little turkey magnets and put them on the refrigerators, and then we did stocking magnets, and we did ornaments,” said Ledford, who still teaches at Fort Mill High School. “I knew Chari would do the same thing for me.”
Fort Mill is hardly the same town today. The district has added 17 schools and well over 10,000 kids since Young last walked the halls as a student, but Ledford said the culture remains the same.
Young intends to keep it that way.
“We still value that, everybody helping everybody,” Young said. “It still feels like a small town to us.”
COVID and Silfab: Lessons in transparency
Young started in the district office in July 2020, just a few months after the world shut down in response to the pandemic. He spent his first day developing COVID-19 protocols such as masking and sending students home if they’ve been in close contact with a COVID-positive person.
“I was having to have a lot of difficult conversations during that time,” Young said. “I was on the phone constantly, so I really learned that we all have to communicate well, we have to listen and we have to be as transparent as we can.”
The pandemic was the single biggest challenge Young faced in his career, he said. His boss thought he handled it masterfully.
“Grey’s a doer. Grey’s a finisher. Grey’s a problem solver,” Epps said. “He’s handled all the tough issues since he’s been over here, and he’s completely the person to pull it off.”
His promotion comes as families express deep frustration over how the district responded to the Silfab Solar controversy. Silfab is a solar panel manufacturing company slated to open a plant next door to two new schools.
Fort Mill initially stayed quiet on the subject, but that changed this spring when the district hired an environmental health and safety firm to do a comprehensive risk assessment. Young said he will be as transparent as he can with families and work to get information from experts to ensure campuses are safe.
“I take it very seriously. It’s something that’s close to my heart,” Young said. “We’ll make decisions that are best for our students, their health and well-being.”
Building on Fort Mill’s success
Fort Mill is consistently the top-performing school district in South Carolina, but some groups of students lag behind.
About half of district students living in poverty perform below expectations on state standardized tests. Filling that achievement gap is among Young’s top priorities, he said.
And Fort Mill has one of the highest on-time graduation rates in the state, but 4% of students still aren’t graduating.
“If we’re not perfect, if we don’t have everybody meeting the state standards, if we don’t have everybody graduating, then there’s a gap there. We’ve got to find that gap, and we’ve got to put some interventions in and target those students,” Young said.
He wants to continue work already underway to beef up the district’s education program for 4-year-olds. He touted the upcoming Paradise Early Childhood Education Center, which is set to open in 2027, as a potential game-changer in setting kids up for success.
Young also wants to provide more academic opportunities, including dual credit, advanced placement and other high-level classes. He recently visited early colleges across the country to see what Fort Mill might be able to implement. For example, some schools give students the opportunity to earn associate’s degrees before they even graduate high school.
As Young prepares to tackle his list of ambitious goals, Epps offered a word of advice: “We can’t rest on our laurels.”
“I think he’s perfectly capable of taking us to the next level. He’s creative, he’s innovative, he’s not going to sit back and just accept what we’ve done as the end-all, be-all,” Epps said. “He knows our culture, and he knows how high the expectations are here for our parents and our staff, and I think he’ll continue the upward trajectory.”