Robert Hildum, the interim director of the city’s troubled Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services agency, has announced he will resign from the post. Hildum’s resignation will go into effect on December 17. Hildum was the third person to take the job at the helm of the troubled city agency in 2010 — and he never actually got named to the position on a permanent basis, maintaining the interim title which he received after Marc Schindler was fired by Mayor Adrian Fenty in July. (Vinny Schiraldi, who was the head of the organization at the beginning of the year, resigned in January to take a job in New York.) Hildum will go back to working for the Office of the Attorney General, where he used to work in the public safety unit before taking the job at DYRS.

The Examiner’s Freeman Klopott reports that Hildum’s resignation is related to the upcoming administration change — Attorney General Peter Nickles told Klopott that Hildum “didn’t get an emphatic endorsement from the incoming [Vince Gray] administrations.”

It’s been an incredibly trying year for those in charge of the District’s juvenile justice system; dozens of DYRS wards have been implicated in high-profile crimes or killed, and there is a seemingly outright public distrust of the agency’s ability to wrangle in the problem. Hildum also recently made the news when he wondered, in an email to his staff, whether it was even worth DYRS’ time and effort to try and chase after youth who abscond from the DYRS system. Hildum’s farewell memo to his staff admitted that his term was a rocky one.