Brenau Academy has new headmaster

GAINESVILLE - Veteran private school executive Timothy A. Daniel has assumed his new duties as head of Brenau Academy, the Gainesville-based all-female preparatory boarding school on the campus at Brenau University.

Daniel, 50, previously served as head of a similarly sized institution, the 75-student Leelanau School in Glen Arbor, Mich. He moves to Brenau from Faribault, Minn., where he was director of external relations at the much larger, coeducational Shattuck-St. Mary´s School. From 2000 to 2004, he was in charge of advancement at University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich., where he was responsible for a capital campaign that raised $25.5 million for the school.

"Tim Daniel is the perfect choice to head Brenau Academy," said Ed Schrader, president of Brenau University. "Almost all his life he has been involved with the kind of nurturing educational experience Brenau Academy offers young women."

Daniel replaced Frank Booth, the headmaster at Brenau Academy for 24 years who recently was named to special assistant to the president on Schrader´s staff. Booth, Schrader added, "made Brenau Academy what it is today - a great place for students to set out on individual paths to extraordinary lives."

Brenau Academy, which will enroll about 70 students in grades nine through 12 this fall, is one of four educational components of the 129-year-old university. With more than 2,500 students overall, Brenau University also offers a residential women´s college in the historic center of the north Georgia city, a full coeducational evening and weekend program with satellite campuses in several Georgia locations, and a fully accredited, degree-granting graduate and undergraduate online program. Brenau established Brenau Academy in 1928.

"Brenau Academy is unique among institutions of its type," said Daniel. "It´s small enough that each student can receive individual attention, yet it´s affiliation with the university and close proximity to all campus facilities provides very broad learning experiences."

An Akron, Ohio, native, Daniel got his first exposure to private boarding school education as a student at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He earned an undergraduate degree in English at Northwestern University and a master´s degree in modern letters at the University of Tulsa. While at Northwestern working for the student newspaper, he says he aspired to be a newspaper sportswriter. Shortly after his graduation, however, he began teaching English and coaching soccer and softball at the Grand River Academy in Austinburg, Ohio.

Daniel and his wife, Deborah, a graduate of Randolph Macon Woman´s College in Lynchburg, Va., have three children: Allen, 18, Robert, 16, and Emma, 7.