The Columbia County School District has recently highlighted a three-year-old initiative to educate, train and guide its educators and administrators to progress their careers.
“If you look at the leadership appointments over this last year, and even many years prior to that, you’ll see a lot of folks that are moving through the ranks,” said Associate Superintendent Michele Sherman to the school board at its March 22 work session meeting, referring to the district’s Leadership Development Program. “And so we’re capitalizing on that.”
The Columbia County School District Leadership Development Program is a project the school system launched in 2019 to “recruit, employ, develop and retain quality leaders” in the district, according to its overview document.
The overarching program consists of four separate pathway courses, two designed for teachers and two geared toward administrators.
The first is the Teacher Leader program, in which teachers who want to deepen their leadership skills participate are guided through various leadership topics, study data and participate in discussions and problem-solving activities.
“Teachers work collaboratively to identify opportunities that will influence change at the school level, and then develop an action plan to communicate and implement the improvement,” said Assistant Superintendent Steven Cummings to the school board.
The next tier is Aspiring Leader, designed to groom a selected pool of K-12 teachers, screened by an interview process with district officials, for assistant principal positions.
The Aspiring Principal and New Principal Induction programs are the courses made for administrators. The former preps assistant principals to become principals over two years, and the latter mentors new principals through their first year. Assistant Superintendent Kellye Bosch said that assistant principals must have been in their role for at least a year and receive a recommendation from their own principal before qualifying for the Aspiring Principal program.
“We use our experts within the district to create those lessons, to create the simulations using their own prior knowledge and experience as a as a principal,” said Assistant Superintendent Kellye Bosch, explaining to the school board how the curriculum is developed for the administrator courses.
Cummings noted that for the Aspiring Leader, district superintendents and directors speak to participants about issues in their departments or fields relevant to a principal’s job; and that the training for Teacher Leader is borne from cooperation between the teachers in the program.
“Typically, they generate those topics among themselves with some of the things that they want to discuss,” said Cummings about Teacher Leader. “They use that as a collaborative opportunity to share great things that may be happening in their schools, or things that they would like to see kind of happen within their schools, and so that kind of generates the curriculum for that particular program.”
School Board Chairman David Dekle observed that the Leadership Development Program would be apt to not only help teachers cultivate the skills to become administrators, but also help some decide the course of their educational career.
“We found that it also provides an opportunity for aspiring leaders to realize that maybe they want to stay in the classroom, and that maybe that’s not for them,” said Dekle.
According to the district, 51 Columbia County schoolteachers have completed the Teacher Leader program and 81 have gone through Aspiring Leaders, while 27 principals have participated in Aspiring Principals as of March 22.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering education in Columbia County and business-related topics for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
