Dive Brief:
- The Tennessee Department of Education has chosen 52 principals to be the first cohort of the Tennessee Rural Principals Network. The participants will receive funding to attend five professional learning events during the 2018-19 school year, notes The Chattanoogan.
- The network is part of Gov. Bill Haslam’s Transforming School Leadership Initiative, designed to attract and keep well-trained principals throughout the state, especially in rural areas.
- The department is also funding professional development scholarships for up to 200 additional rural principals.
Dive Insight:
Principals in rural schools, in Tennessee and other states, face unique hurdles. They are often unable to take advantage of leadership development opportunities due to the expense of registering for programs and the logistics and costs of traveling to them. But they have few networking opportunities to learn from their peers on a regular basis in their area.
While there are notable efforts to prepare
urban school leaders, there are fewer programs available for rural principals?
The top challenges that rural principals grapple with include access to reliable broadband internet, lower funding resulting from a smaller tax base, and difficulty recruiting young, qualified educators. On the positive side, however, is the fact that the small size of their schools and communities allows them to be more flexible and take greater ownership over what happens in their schools. Rural principals tend to have extensive community involvement and, once educators do take teaching jobs, these schools can have more success in retaining those who embrace a small-town lifestyle.
Sometimes, though, principals at rural schools see students just drifting through, without much connection to teachers. One principal, of a high school of fewer than 400 students in a community where the average annual income was $20,000, helped to solve that by reducing the number of class periods to four. With the low number of overall number of students, this was possible without exceeding class size maximums. Students and faculty came to know one another better, there was more time for in-depth exploration of ideas and concepts, and discipline problems reduced dramatically.