ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how one rural eastern Kentucky school district strove to meet its school leadership staffing issues as well as pressures for refocusing school leaders’ work on student learning. It presents the contextual circumstances that influenced the program’s design and implementation, program design, the evaluation design and pertinent results and policy issues and the potential for long-term sustainability. The monetary support launched the Principals Excellence Program (PEP). The increasing pressures of national and state accountability policies amplify rural schools’ need for school leaders who understand and focus on learners and the conditions of learning. A cohort peer who had completed his second year as a high school immediately responded that he believed being a school manager is a prerequisite to being a school leader. PEP emerged from a high-need rural district’s attempt to reframe the principalship into a contemporary model of school leadership focused on teaching and learning.
