As a middle or high school student, you are bombarded with opportunities to get involved and grow as a leader. Football, track, band, cheerleading, math team, student council, theatre, yearbook-there are so many options, it’s hard to name them all.
But as you get older, the opportunities to be coached, to learn a new skill or to just expand your horizons start to become more difficult (sometimes even impossible) to find.
Enter the Leadership Pipeline, an innovative program created through a cooperative effort between Hamilton County Department of Education and the Public Education Foundation under the tagline: “75 Jobs Will Change Chattanooga.”
“The tagline came out of sitting around towards the end of developing the Leadership Pipeline, because what was happening was that all our current leaders were getting into the principalship and there was no professional development or support for them, and this year we have 26 first- and second-year principals. That’s huge. That’s 1/3 of our principals,” says Christa Payne, vice president of external affairs at PEF. “Superintendent Rick Smith all of a sudden looked up from the table and said, ‘Y’all, 75 jobs could change Chattanooga,’ meaning if these 75 principals got the support they needed and were able to be trained in how to coach their teachers, run their school buildings in the most effective way possible, be ferocious advocates for every student in their building, then that in turn would get every kid college and career ready and it really could change Chattanooga. We really wanted to shock people and say that these jobs really could change Chattanooga and these people are already in existence and they are already running our schools. What can we do to support them?”
Thanks to a year-long planning grant from the McKenzie Foundation along with support from several other local donors, HCDE and PEF worked to develop a plan for a comprehensive Leadership Pipeline to recruit, identify, support and evaluate principals in Hamilton County-in hopes that by changing these 75 jobs over the course of five years, those instructional leaders will inspire 3,000 teachers who in turn transform the future of 42,000 students, with a potential $620 million impact to the economy. It’s a big job, but businesses, foundations, executive leaders and others have wholeheartedly banded together for this effort, says Payne.