New Leaders Memphis : Giving Tuesday
What if every child attended a great public school?
What if there were a team of leaders in each school with the skills to support academic excellence for ALL students?
What if these leaders already exist–and they need your support?
This holiday season, I hope you will join me in supporting New Leaders, a national non-profit where I am a proud staff member, as part of Giving Tuesday, a national movement beginning December 3rd encourage people to give back during the holidays.
We at New Leaders recruit outstanding educators from across the country and develop them into transformational principals and leaders for students in high-poverty schools.
One such leader is LaWanda Hill of Caldwell Guthrie Elementary School. When LaWanda arrived as principal in 2010, it was to a school that was the result of a merger of two struggling schools and to a community that didn’t think the new school would work. The school was threatened with closure. But LaWanda had one request for the district: “Give me a year to turn it around.”
LaWanda focused on raising the academic bar for all students, supporting teachers in using data to assess student progress and adjusting their lessons to meet every student’s needs. LaWanda also formed a partnership with the Germantown United Methodist Church, which sends over 100 members of its congregation weekly to serve as volunteer reading tutors with Caldwell Guthrie students. The reading program was so successful that Memphis City Schools is now implementing it across the district. In just three years, Caldwell Guthrie went from being in the bottom 5% of schools statewide to being named a Tennessee Reward School, a distinction reserved for the top 5% of schools in the state.
Every student in Memphis deserves a LaWanda in his or her school. The great news is that we have dozens more just like her: we are currently training 28 more school leaders like LaWanda right here in Memphis, with the same grit and determination to see their students succeed no matter what. And they need your support.
I hope you will support New Leaders this holiday season by investing in training more leaders like LaWanda. Any amount will make a difference. I believe that supporting education is the most important thing we can do for our children and for our country–and that making sure every school has a great leader is the best way to start.
I deeply appreciate any contribution you can make to support New Leaders and help change the lives of kids here in Memphis and across the nation!
Help fund the training, development, and support of transformational school leaders
New Leaders trains tomorrow’s principals. The people who join this program share a deep belief that all students can achieve at high levels – that demography is not destiny for children in low-income communities. Your gift will support New leaders so they can more adeptly transform underperforming public schools and make a real difference in the lives of students from low-income communities.
About New Leaders
New Leaders seeks to ensure high academic achievement for all children—especially students in poverty and students of color—by developing transformational school leaders and advancing the policies and practices that allow great leaders to succeed.
Why focus on great leaders? School principals are the driving force behind school improvement. One outstanding teacher isn’t enough; students require multiple years of effective teachers to reach academic excellence, especially if they have fallen behind. Strong principals have the skills to support their existing staff to become outstanding teachers and to keep the strongest educators in their schools.
New Leaders’ leadership training begins with our Emerging Leaders Program, which builds a pipeline of promising future school leaders by growing the abilities of talented educators over the course of a year to lead other adults in raising student achievement.
Many Emerging Leaders go on to join our signature Aspiring Principals Program, a rigorous, one-year residency through which we train highly motivated, results-oriented individuals to strengthen our most struggling schools. To ensure that we get the best leaders into schools, we also identify promising talent through a national admissions process.
After their residency, we support our leaders in their critical first years on the job through the Principal Institute, which employs professional learning communities and strategic one-on-one coaching for one or two years to ensure our new principals—and their students—are set up for success.
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