ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL

Assistant Principal

Reports to: Principal

Purpose: To assist in creating and maintaining a safe and nurturing school environment where every member of the faculty and staff, along with students and their families have a sense of belonging and are challenged to think critically about real world issues. To assist in ensuring that teachers provide students with the equal opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills necessary to pursue their life goals. To assist in establishing healthy and appropriate relationships with faculty, staff, students, parents, and the surrounding community in order to facilitate success for all stakeholders.

Qualifications: Masters Degree in Educational or School Leadership (Administration or Supervision); NC Principal's License; Successful teaching experience.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities: Each assistant principal should be well versed in identifying and researching varied instructional methods and practices to assist teachers in preparing students for life in the 21st century and beyond. An essential requirement is to demonstrate a disposition for leading in the continuous improvement mindset aligned to the RSS mission, vision, and directional focus. Every assistant principal is to embrace and model responsibility for inspiring innovative and engaging learning for all students. Assistant principals should be able to effectively monitor students and create a school environment conducive for all students to experience academic, social, and emotional success.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership: School executives will create conditions that result in strategically re-imaging the school's vision, mission, and goals in the 21st century. Understanding that schools ideally prepare students for an unseen but not altogether unpredictable future, the leader creates a climate of inquiry that challenges the school community to continually re-purpose itself by building on its core values and beliefs about its preferred future and then developing a pathway to reach it.

Instructional Leadership: School executives will set high standards for the professional practice of 21st century instruction and assessment that result in a no-nonsense, accountable environment. The school executive must be knowledgeable of best instructional and school practices and must use this knowledge to cause the creation of collaborative structures within the school for the design of highly engaging schoolwork for students, the ongoing peer review of this work and the sharing of this work throughout the professional community.

Cultural Leadership: School executives will understand and act on the understanding of the important role a school's culture contributes to the exemplary performance of the school. School executives must support and value the traditions, artifacts, symbols and positive values and norms of the school and community that result in a sense of identity and pride upon which to build a positive future. A school executive must be able to "reculture" the school if needed to align with school's goals of improving student and adult learning and to infuse the work of the adults and students with passion, meaning and purpose. Cultural leadership implies understanding the school as the people in it each day, how they came to their current state, and how to connect with their traditions in order to move them forward to support the school's efforts to achieve individual and collective goals.

Human Resource Leadership: School executives will ensure that the school is a professional learning community. School executives will ensure that processes and systems are in place that result in the recruitment, induction, support, evaluation, development and retention of a high-performing staff. The school executive must engage and empower accomplished teachers in a distributive leadership manner, including support of teachers in day-to-day decisions such as discipline, communication with parents, and protecting teachers from duties that interfere with teaching. They also must practice fair and consistent evaluation of teachers. The school executive must engage teachers and other professional staff in conversations to plan their career paths and support district succession planning.

Managerial Leadership: School executives will ensure that the school has processes and systems in place for budgeting, staffing, problem solving, communicating expectations and scheduling that result in organizing the work routines in the building. The school executive must be responsible for the monitoring of the school budget and the inclusion of all teachers in the budget decisions so as to meet the 21st century needs of every classroom. Effectively and efficiently managing the complexity of every day life is critical for staff to be able to focus its energy on improvement.

External Development Leadership: A school executive will design structures and processes that result in community engagement, support, and ownership. Acknowledging that schools no longer reflect but in fact build community, the leader proactively creates with staff opportunities for parents, community and business representatives to participate as "stockholders" in the school such that continued investments of resources and good will are not left to chance.

Micro-Political Leadership: The school executive will build systems and relationships that utilize the staff's diversity, encourage constructive ideological conflict in order to leverage staff expertise, power and influence to realize the school's vision for success. The executive will also creatively employ an awareness of staff members' professional needs, issues, and interests to build social cohesion and to facilitate distributed governance and shared decision-making.

Shift Type: Full-Time

Salary Range: Based on NCDPI scale for Assistant Principals

Salary Code: Per Year

Job Category: Administration

External Job Application: Licensed

Internal Job Application: Licensed

Location: Various