Head of Middle School — Inspire & Community

Heathwood Hall Episcopal School cultivates creative and critical thinking, develops leadership and social skills, and promotes service to others over the pursuit of self-interest through a rich academic and extracurricular program in a supportive community of talented educators and engaged students. Guided by our Core Values, these principles shape not only what we teach, but how we live and learn together.

Just minutes from downtown Columbia, Heathwood Hall Episcopal School occupies 122 acres of wooded wetlands bordered on the west by the Congaree River. Founded in 1951 by the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina, Heathwood is Columbia's oldest independent school - college-preparatory, co-educational, and grounded in its Episcopal identity and Core Values - enrolling 950 students from age two through twelfth grade.

It is accredited by the Southern Association of Independent Schools (SAIS) and has been recognized three times as an "Exemplary" school by the U.S. Department of Education through its Blue Ribbon Schools Program. The 2026-27 school year marks Heathwood's 75th anniversary. Heathwood, buoyed by a healthy (46%) increase in enrollment during the last decade, has invested heavily in itself in recent years.

Under Head of School Chris Hinchey, who has led the School since 2015, the Student Experience Campaign committed more than $25 million between 2021 and 2025 to athletics, the arts, the chapel, play space, and PEAK, the School's outdoor leadership program. Recent construction includes a 12,000-square-foot expansion of the Athletic Center and a dedicated golf practice facility. The School is currently renovating "the Pods," four buildings dating from the School’s 1973 move to the South Beltline Blvd.

campus that contain 27 classrooms, 16 restrooms, and 3 office complexes and support over 500 students daily.

The next Head of Middle School will lead a division of 285 students in grades 5 through 8. The four-year configuration is deliberate:
Heathwood begins the Middle School a year early so students have an extra year to transition, with support scaffolded and independence introduced gradually - changing classes, keeping an agenda, learning to advocate for themselves - before the demands of adolescence arrive in full. Daily advisory, grade-level teaching teams, semester-long related arts rotations, and content-area specialists support that arc; every student takes PEAK classes in outdoor education and leadership on the School's own ropes course, tower, and trails, and each grade travels together annually, with eighth graders traveling to Washington, D.C., on a trip that anchors their Middle School experience.

Much of the division's student development work sits under one framework, Mindful in the Hall, which spans instruction in posture, breath, and body awareness, explicit teaching of executive function and growth mindset, daily advisory, digital citizenship through a partnership with The Social Institute, and health and wellness instruction - and it extends to faculty and parents, so the community shares a vocabulary.

The next Head of Middle School will inherit a healthy division and the room to be ambitious with it - real scope to shape program, culture, and people across grades 5 through 8, supported by the two Middle School Deans and an experienced senior leadership team.

Championing the Middle School Experience. The community wants a leader who understands adolescence deeply - the energy, unpredictability, emotions, mistakes, and growth that characterize these years - and who will advocate for the Middle School within the larger institution. Faculty, parents, and students alike asked for a…