Rocky Ridge Elementary Principal Dil Uswatte joining staff at Birmingham charter school

Dil Uswatte, the principal at Rocky Ridge Elementary School, is leaving Hoover City Schools to take on the role of chief academic officer at a public charter school in Birmingham.

Uswatte has been named the chief academic officer at the i3 Academy, which serves kindergarten through seventh grade on two campuses in Birmingham’s Woodlawn community.

She has been the principal at Rocky Ridge Elementary for 10 years and served as an assistant principal at Rocky Ridge for four years before that and math teacher at Berry Middle School for eight years. Uswatte has 27 total years in education.

In 2020, she was named a National Distinguished Principal, and in 2019 she won the Alabama Education Leader of the Year Award. In 2022, Uswatte was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Education as the elementary principal representative on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees and sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “The Nation’s Report Card.”

She was inducted into the Jacksonville State University Teacher Hall of Fame in 2008 and in 2009 received the National Milken Educator Award.

She’ll remain at Rocky Ridge until the end of this school year.