Join the #GivingTuesday Movement - Support New Leaders
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a team of leaders in every school ready to lead students to success?
What if these leaders already exist–and they need your support?
I hope you will join me in supporting New Leaders, a national non-profit where I am proud to serve as Director of Development for the Greater New Orleans region. We at New Leaders recruit outstanding educators and develop them into transformational principals and leaders for students in high-poverty schools.
One such leader is Sabrina Pence of FirstLine Schools. When she arrived as a principal in training in 2008, Arthur Ashe Charter School was the lowest-performing school in the city’s Recovery School District. Working under the leadership of New Leader Principal Aqua Stovall, Ms. Pence helped transform the culture and student achievement at Arthur Ashe. The school has averaged gains of more than 22 percentage points for the past five years. Ms. Pence became principal in 2011, and in 2013, the Arthur Ashe eighth graders posted the highest English scores in the district; the previous year, they outperformed all district schools in math. This past summer, Ms. Pence was named the first Chief Academic Officer of FirstLine Schools, a network which manages Arthur Ashe Charter School and four others, where she works with leaders of five schools to advance the kind of outcomes she drove at Arthur Ashe.
Every student deserves a leader like Ms. Pence in his or her school. In Greater New Orleans alone, New Leaders has trained more than 70 Aspiring Principals and Emerging Leaders who are serving more than 12,000 students in the city’s poorest schools and working with more than 400 teachers. By 2020, New Leaders will develop 3,000 leaders to prepare 1 million students for success in college, careers, and citizenship, and we plan to more than double our impact in Louisiana’s highest-need schools.
Our New Leaders need your support. This holiday season, I hope you will support New Leaders by investing in training more leaders like Sabrina.
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. And with our new Leadership Practice Improvement program, we train current school principals and their leadership teams in best practices to raise student achievement.
Tell Tori why you this cause!