School districts win money to groom leaders
A foundation will be giving two of Georgia’s big school districts a total of $3.5 million to improve leadership.
Under the premise that the principal is a key figure in a school’s performance, The Wallace Foundation is giving the DeKalb County School District a $3 million grant to improve coaching of principals by the administrators who oversee them. The foundation is also giving $520,000 to Gwinnett County Schools, which was awarded $12.5 million in 2011 to continue work on a “principal pipeline.”
DeKalb, Georgia’s third-largest school district, plans to change the workload of its five regional superintendents, who currently manage an average of 27 principals. They spend too much time on compliance and paperwork, said Linda Frazer, who coordinates the district’s leadership development. “The goal is to shift the role of the principal supervisors from overseeing compliance to helping principals with instructional leadership,” she said.
David Schutten, president of the Organization of DeKalb Educators, an employee advocacy group, said the regional superintendents are bombarded with complaints. “They deal with all kinds of issues between principals and teachers, parents and teachers and principals and parents,” he said. Allowing them to focus on coaching principals would be helpful, he said.
Over the next four years, DeKalb will put $1.5 million of its own money into the effort. The plan is to move some compliance responsibilities to other personnel while also increasing the number of regional superintendents so that they each oversee maybe a dozen principals each.
DeKalb Superintendent Michael Thurmond said he wants to make the change without increasing central office costs and that there is a “strong possibility” other administrative positions would be cut to fund the new positions.
Five other districts around the country are also receiving $3 million grants — in California, Iowa, Florida, Minnesota and Ohio. They were chosen because they “are among the nation’s most advanced districts in recognizing the importance of the principal supervisor position,” the foundation said in a statement on its website. The group is also increasing by $4 million its stake in a parallel initiative that has been helping a handful of other districts, including Gwinnett, which developed a program to groom and mentor principals.
Jody Spiro, director of educational leadership at the Wallace Foundation, said DeKalb has already partnered on other projects with its neighbor Gwinnett, the state’s largest district. With this focus on leadership development, she said, “the two districts will collaborate and produce work that can roll out across the state.”
About the Author
Ty Tagami is a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Since joining the newspaper in 2002, he has written about everything from hurricanes to homelessness. He has deep experience covering local government and education, and can often be found under the Gold Dome when lawmakers meet or in a school somewhere in the state.
