Meet Our Principal
Brian J. Riddick
Principal
Butler College Prep
About Brian J. Riddick
Brian Riddick serves as the Principal at Butler College Prep, a campus of the Noble Network of Charter Schools. As a founding staff member at Butler, Riddick launched both the ninth grade ELA and reading department, and the college team. Additionally, Riddick graduated an advisory of 14 young men, functioned as an advisory lead for four consecutive years, and operated as Butler’s external affairs point person. As a lead teacher, Riddick’s classes achieved some of the highest academic growth in the network and Riddick was awarded Teach of the Year twice (by students and staff). Under Riddick’s leadership, the College Team achieved 100% college acceptance for three consecutive years and is on pace to achieve some of the network’s best percentages for college persistence. Additionally, Butler’s college department leads the network in students who apply to, attend, and persist at historically Black colleges and universities. Before being named Interim Principal, Riddick also completed both the Noble Accelerator and the Noble Fellowship which prepares midlevel leaders to be principals. Prior to coming to Noble in 2013, Mr. Riddick lived in Washington, D.C. and worked at first as a middle school Language Arts teacher on Capitol Hill and then at a K-12 therapeutic day school in Fairfax, Va. He also spent a summer living and working in Los Angeles, Ca. as a residential counselor with Summer Discovery at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA).
Riddick is an alumnus of North Carolina State University where he studied English with a concentration in journalism and minored in Spanish. At NC State, Riddick joined and led several organizations including the Collegiate 100 | 100 Black Men of America, Inc., and the university’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was through organizations like the NAACP that Riddick found his knack for mentoring and ultimately decided to devote his life’s work to advocating for equity in education and to closing the opportunity gap for students of color. To this end, Riddick collaborates with organizations like Chicago Scholars, Project One Ten, the Ezekiel Taylor Scholarship Foundation, and My Brother’s Keeper in service to Chicago and its youth.
