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Kristy Hebert talks about School Leadership http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49jfzpN-_ow
Effective leadership really looks like effective teaching. Running an organization that’s
successful means using the tenants of our program distributive leadership, social entrepreneurialship,
accountability, coupled with autonomy. An effective leadership takes those four things,
puts them together and makes sure that he or she serves the customers that he or she
has. So, if I’m the leader of a 7th grade English classroom, I’m going to make sure
that my customers are getting what they bought – what they signed up to buy. If I’m a
leader of a middle school that runs from grades five to eight, I’m going to do the same
thing for my teachers and I’m going to do the same thing for my students. In fact, I’m
going to make sure that all of the stakeholders in my organization are happy and if they’re
not happy, I’m changing to make them happy because if I’m not successful, I’m not
an effective leader.
No one can become a principal without being certified by the State Department of Louisiana.
We are one of three private providers in Louisiana and what makes us unique is that we customize
for districts or schools, and we individualize for our candidates. We do things differently
every year. We do things based on data that we have gotten from our – from each cohort
that comes through. We get – we have a really focus on data driven instruction so we teach
our principals that and how to do that in their own schools, so we like to model that.
In Louisiana right now about 75% of the people who are principals are at retirement age.
Also there are many schools that are growing. As you probably know in New Orleans we have
the most number of charter schools. Charter school principals have to be trained and also
in Louisiana while they are not required to be certified at this point, they probably
soon will be and the preference is that they are.
School leadership is – looks like leadership that’s needed to run successful non-profit.
A school is a non-profit and a good – and good school leadership really needs to understand
not only the instructional side that has traditionally been – been taught in training school leaders
but also really needs to understand the finance side – the resource side. Because if you
don’t understand the resources that you need to gather in order to – in order to
make the instructional piece work, then your organization is going to fall apart. And that’s
really been a problem with parochial programs in the past that have trained leaders. They
teach them to be great instructors, but they don’t necessarily teach them to – to be
mindful of the resources that are necessary. For instance, if you give them a budget and
you say you need to balance a budget, normally most school – school leader have said we
need to make cuts. But what we do is teach them that there are two ways to balance a
budget – increase revenue or increase resources and also make cuts where necessary but to
do those always very strategically and with the mission of the organization in mind. We
do this and we’re very successful at it because are design was created with the Louisiana
State University College of Business who works with us to deliver our summer experience and
then are year-long training during our certification piece.