Location: Nashville, Tennessee

Employment Type: Full-time, in-person, 12-month school-based leadership role for the 2023-2024 school year. 

Salary: The salary range for this role is $116,380-$131,560

About Valor: Founded in 2014, Valor Collegiate Academies is a top-performing, public charter school network in Nashville, Tennessee, serving students in Grades 5-12 across three schools. Our mission is to create a community where students of all backgrounds have equitable access to an education that prepares them to live inspired and purposeful lives. This mission is made possible through an innovative school model that balances rigorous academics and whole-child education in an intentionally diverse environment. Learn more about Valor: https://valorcollegiate.org/our-model/

About the Role: Valor College Prep (part of Valor Collegiate Academies) is hiring an experienced school leader to become our next Principal in the 2023-2024 school year. We are looking for someone who is excited to share our mission of academic excellence and empowering scholars to live inspired and purposeful lives.

Our high school, Valor College Prep, was founded in the 2018-2019 school year. As we’ve added one grade level each school year, our founding class of students graduated in the 2021-2022 school year. The Principal serves as the leader of our campus leadership team, directly managing the other four individuals on that team to achieve exceptional outcomes for all students: Associate Principal - Academics, Associate Principal - Culture, Director of Operations, and Director of College Counseling. Additionally, this role also sits on our network’s overall leadership team, working alongside our C-Suite on all efforts to set and achieve our network vision and reporting to the Chief of Schools.

At the heart of the Principal role is to lead our staff of 80 from a place of kindness and curiosity, embracing Valor’s organizational commitments. Outside the traditional responsibilities one would expect of a principal, success in this role requires an incredible level of self-reflection, candor, authenticity, and vulnerability. In our diverse by design model, this includes a deep emphasis on one’s ongoing effort to acknowledge, excavate, and address one’s own biases, and how those biases impact one’s leadership of our intentionally diverse community.
Below is a list of responsibilities that provides an overview of the duties of the Principal:

Overall School Leadership

• Serve as the overall leader of every facet of the school: a visible, present, hands-on leader responsible for all academic and cultural systems and all student outcomes. 
• Collaborate and partner with Valor’s organizational leaders (CEO, Chief Culture Officer, Chief Academic Officer, Chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Chief of Schools, Chief Operating Officer, and Managing Director of Talent) to fully integrate Valor’s organizational anchors into VCP’s campus.
• Main point of contact for student interactions/responsibilities and with primary caregivers.
• Hiring manager for school leadership, teacher, and paraprofessional positions at VCP. 
• Oversee strategy around budget and its intersection with staffing, schedules, duties, etc.
• Oversee the academic/instructional calendar process.

Coaching and Management of the School Leadership Team

• Coach and lead the school’s leadership team including the Associate Principal - Culture, Associate Principal - Academics, Director of College Counseling, Director of Operations, and Associate Director of Student Support.
• Manage school leadership team members to drive academic and cultural results
• Manage attendance intervention plans and case management oversight
• Serve as a primary planner and leader in “Base Camp” (Valor’s summer professional development for all teachers).
• Work with school leadership team members to create and manage employee support plans. 

Academic Vision Setting

• Lead and manage the high school’s academic program
• Collaborate with the high school’s operations leaders on matters related to academic operations (i.e. benchmark testing, testing schedules and coordination, ACT prep, etc)
• Support school culture and academic data analysis alongside the school leadership team to identify gaps in data and effectively problem solve
• Design and lead ongoing network and school-based professional development sessions for teachers, instructional coaches, and other school-based faculty 
• Partner with Valor’s CAO, school leaders, and instructional coaches in the development and implementation of strong high school curriculum grades 9-12
• Keep current with standards, benchmarks, and indicators; develop standards-based instructional planning tools and resources
• Facilitate the creation and revision of network vertical and horizontal alignment maps for standards, skills, content, assessment types, writing and research, and student support
• Provide teachers and instructional coaches with support in intellectual preparation of their subject areas as well as high-quality, actionable data analysis

Culture Systems Vision Setting

• Lead staff, students, and their caregivers as a model of our community’s commitments, as well as have clear and kind conversations to hold all stakeholders, including oneself, accountable when they aren’t yet living out those commitments. 
• Lead the Assistant Principal in Culture to implement strong systems and routines in order to create a safe, productive, and joyful school environment, utilizing data systems for a data-driven response.
• Manage and oversee all student, family, and faculty culture outcomes via stakeholder survey input and campus and organization wide culture dashboards. This includes, but is not limited to, annual family surveys and bi-annual scholar and faculty surveys, positivity ratio, attendance data, discipline incidents, circle outcomes and more.
• Maintain active and strong relationships with students and families to support students in meeting academic goals or provide social-emotional support
• Support the Assistant Principal of Culture to align the vision and implementation of Valor’s Compass system, the school-wide positive behavioral intervention system
• Serve as a liaison between teachers, parents, leaders, and the community

Teacher Coaching 

• Coach a small cohort of teachers to improve their practice through individualized coaching, professional development series, modeling, and collaborative planning 
• Guide teachers’ understanding of, and model the Valor Core Teaching Framework to ensure consistent, high quality instruction
• Consistently analyze teacher practice through weekly classroom observations, data analysis, and examination of student work
• Create targeted, individualized coaching plans to empower teacher growth and development 
• Collaborate and lead specific grade level or content team meetings 
• Create and deliver professional learning sessions for teachers centered on effective teaching strategies and data analysis
• When needed, create and implement teacher development plans to support teachers with targeted growth and improvement areas

College Counseling & Postsecondary Success

• Lead the Director of Postsecondary Success in developing the College Counseling / Postsecondary Success Program to ensure the program supports and advises the best fit university and college for all scholars. 
• Collaborate with school-based and network leaders on school and network-wide initiatives, while addressing the short and long term goals within the college counseling program.
• Collaborate with theDirector of Postsecondary Success and network leaders to track student progress towards meeting graduation requirements and advise course selection accordingly.
• Support the Director of Postsecondary Success to coordinate and communicate information about important deadlines and tasks related to a student’s desired post-secondary pathway. 
• Support the Director of Postsecondary Success in successful engagement of family and community stakeholders through the college counseling process.

School-Based Duties

• Lead a weekly State of School to update staff on key progress towards priorities and metrics
• Manage communications to faculty and families via a weekly memo and principal update
• Enforce, uphold, and exhibit school’s values, student management policies, and culture
• Own an arrival duty, midday/lunch duty, and dismissal duty
• Attend family meetings, orientation, and other school events
• Lead and attend faculty Circle one hour per week