CRAVEN COUNTY SCHOOLS

PRINCIPAL

POSITION DESCRIPTION

Position: Principal

Reports to: Superintendent
Terms of Employment: 12-month; Full time

Pay Grade: State Salary Scale applicable local supplement

Pay Range: Commensurate with education, experience, and size of school

FLSA Status: Exempt

Nature of Work

Under the direction of the Superintendent, the Principal serves as the chief administrator of a school in developing, implementing, monitoring and continuously improving classroom learning systems to support the school improvement system. The school principal aligns policies, programs, curriculum activities, and budgets to the school improvement plan to promote the educational development of each student and the professional development of each staff member. The school principal serves as the lead learner in the school monitoring the instructional program and exhibiting the standards for North Carolina school executives.

Education and Experience

• Master’s degree in School Administration
• Successful assistant principal experience
• Five (5) years of successful teaching experience (preferred)
• Five (5) years supervisory/administrative experience required (Experience working with superintendents, executive cabinet leaders, school board members, government agencies or boards, non-profits, or community representatives strongly preferred)

Certification and Licensure Requirements (if applicable):

• Valid North Carolina Professional Educators Certificate in:
  • 0012: School Administrator: Principal
  • An area of teaching licensure

Essential Functions/Typical Tasks

• Leads the continuous improvement of learning through the implementation, monitoring, and improvement of classroom learning systems.
• Leads school improvement planning through the systematic implementation, monitoring, and continuous improvement of school goals, measures, and key strategies.
• Implements, monitors and continuously improves the direction and spirit of the North Carolina General Statutes related to school improvement planning.
• Implements the goals, measures, and key strategies of the Craven County School System through the school improvement
• Aligns school resources (financial, human, and material) to the goals, measures, and key strategies of the school improvement plan and district strategic
• Aligns professional learning communities to the goals, measures, and key strategies for learning
• Implements, monitors, and continuously improves the state’s and Craven County Schools’ evaluation system for educators, administrators, and support staff.
• Creates an aligned management system that enables the school to focus systematically and systemically on performance excellence and continuous improvement.
• Implements, monitors, and continuously improves processes to recruit, select and retain high quality, qualified, and diverse workforce to support the school goals for students
• Provides for new employee orientation on the campus of your
• From the North Carolina School Executive Evaluation Standards:
  • Strategic Leadership: Principals create conditions that result in strategically re- imaging the school’s vision, mission, and goals in the 21st 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: Principals set high standards for the professional practice of 21st century instruction and assessment that result in a no-nonsense, accountable The principal 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 on- going peer review of this work and the sharing of this work throughout the professional community.
  • Cultural Leadership: Principals understand and act on the understanding of the important role a school’s culture contributes to the exemplary performance of the Principals 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. Principals “reculture” the school if needed to align with school’s goals of improving student and adult learning and infuse the work of the adults and students with passion, meaning and purpose. Cultural leadership requires a principal to understand 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: Principals ensure that the school is a professional learning community. Principals ensure that processes and systems are in place that result in the recruitment, induction, support, evaluation, development, and retention of a high-performing The principal engages and empowers 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 principal engages teachers and other professional staff in conversations to plan their career paths and support district succession planning.
  • Managerial Leadership: Principals 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 principal monitors the school budget and the includes all teachers in the budget decisions so as to meet the 21st century needs of every

• 
  External Development Leadership: Principals design structures and processes that result in community engagement, support, and ownership. Acknowledging that schools no longer reflect, but in fact builds community, the principal proactively creates with staff opportunities for parents, community, and business representatives to participate as “stakeholders” in the school, such that continued investments of resources and good will are not left to chance.

• Micropolitical Leadership: The principal builds 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 principal creatively employs an awareness of staff members’ professional needs, issues, and interests to build social cohesion and to facilitate distributed governance and shared decision-making.

• Implements the policy of the Craven County Board of Education

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Ability to develop and use data systems and other sources of information to identify strengths and areas of improvement for students and
• Has read and understands the policy of the Craven County Board of Education.
• Ability to read a variety of correspondence, reports, forms, articles, proposals, contracts,
• Ability to prepare correspondence, reports, forms, evaluations, policies, using prescribed formants.
• Ability to research program documents and narrative materials, and to compile reports from
• Ability to review documents for accuracy of information, grammar, style, punctuation, and
• Ability to maintain complex schedules, records
• Ability to maintain confidential
• Ability to develop and modify work procedures, methods, and processes to improve student outcomes, effectiveness, and
• Ability to type accurately at a moderate rate of
• Ability to communicate effectively orally and in
• Ability to exercise considerable tact and courtesy in frequent contact with school officials, elected officials, and the general
• Ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships as necessitated by work
• Ability to build cooperative relationships with community groups/members, ability to interpret the school program for the
• Ability to maintain communication with community
• Knowledgeable and makes use of community
• Ability to engage with people beyond giving and receiving instructions.
• Adaptable to performing under stress and when confronted with emergency

Physical Requirements

This work requires the regular exertion of up to 10 pounds of force, frequent exertion of up to 25 pounds of force and occasional exertion of up to 50 pounds of force; work regularly requires standing, walking, sitting and speaking or hearing, frequently requires using hands to finger, handle or feel and repetitive motions and occasionally requires climbing or balancing, stooping, kneeling, crouching or crawling, reaching with hands and arms, pushing or pulling and lifting; work has standard vision requirements; vocal communication is required for expressing or exchanging ideas by means of the spoken word and conveying detailed or important instructions to others accurately, loudly or quickly; hearing is required to perceive information at normal spoken word levels and to receive detailed information through oral communications and/or to make fine distinctions in sound; work requires preparing and analyzing written or computer data, operating motor vehicles or equipment and observing general surroundings and activities; work has no exposure to environmental conditions; work is generally in a very quiet location or classroom (e.g. office).

Special Requirements

Valid driver’s license.

• In compliance with Federal Law, Craven County Schools administers all education programs, employment activites and admissions without discrimination against any person on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, national origin, age or disability.