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 $105,800-$124,200, and placement is based on prior school leadership experience. 

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’s Voyager Middle School (part of the Valor Collegiate Academies network) 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.

The Principal serves as the leader of our campus leadership team, directly managing other school-based leaders - AP of Culture, AP of Academics, and Director of Operations - to achieve exceptional outcomes for all students. 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 Voyager team 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.

Core Responsibilities: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 Voyager’s campus.
• Main point of contact for student interactions/responsibilities and with primary caregivers.
• Hiring manager for school leadership, teacher, and paraprofessional positions at Voyager. 
• 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 Assistant Principal - Culture, Assistant Principal - Academics, and Director of Operations.
• 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 staff).
• Work with school leadership team members to create and manage employee support and improvement plans. 

Academic Programming & Operations

• Partner with Valor’s CAO, school leaders, and instructional coaches in the development and implementation of strong middle school curriculum grades 5-8
• Collaborate with the operations leaders on matters related to academic operations (i.e. benchmark testing, testing schedules and coordination)
• Support school academic data analysis alongside the school leadership team to identify gaps in scholar 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 
• 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

School-Based Duties

• Lead weekly State of School meetings and morning staff huddles 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/or attend faculty Circle one hour per week; present 2-3 pieces of Badge Work every school year in faculty Circles 

Key Experiences and Qualifications:At Valor, we believe our diversity makes us strong and we are committed to building a team of educators with diverse experiences, backgrounds, and expertise. We actively seek applications from people of all backgrounds to strengthen our community and encourage you to apply if you: 

• Have direct experience in coaching instructional coaches, setting an academic and/or culture vision for a school, organization, or network, and coaching teachers
• Have a Bachelor’s in Education or subject area of interest (master’s degree preferred but not required)
• Have a track record of success in previous school leadership and/or teacher-leader role 
• Have a proven track record of high achievement in a high school classroom or in previous leadership positions
• Have a relentless drive to develop your leadership practice and to sharpen your skills as a leader in education
• Are self-aware and reflective with a strong desire to continuously grow professionally and personally
• Have a growth mindset and are quick to incorporate feedback into your daily practice 
• Have the ability to set and reach ambitious goals, and can handle the intensity required to thrive in a high-performing school environment
• Thrive on data. You can analyze qualitative and quantitative data to inform instructional decisions
• Have the passion and commitment to serve an ethnically & economically diverse student body
• Value and enjoy cultivating deep relationships with students, families, and faculty to create a positive school environment
• Value the importance of modeling and reinforcing the school’s core values, norms, and policies

Interview Process:Here is what you can expect in the process for this role

1. Resume Cover Letter Review
2. Phone Interview
3. Performance Task
4. Interview with Leaders (1st Round: Virtual Interview, 2nd Round: Onsite Interview)
5. Reference Checks
6. Offer extension

Compensation & Benefits

• Full comprehensive health and retirement benefits
• Annualized salary of $105,800-$124,200
• Free access to an on-site strength & conditioning facility, Vanderbilt Health Clinic, retirement counseling, and mental health support and resources
• Employee laptops and unlimited supplies
• Full-time employees wishing to enroll their student at Valor in grades 5-12 will be placed at the top of the new student waitlist 

Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
Valor believes in the importance of being a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization that enables students and staff to thrive. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We actively seek applications from people of all backgrounds to strengthen our community and the perspectives needed to thrive in a diverse world. 

Pending any additional guidance from the CDC, or any legal guidance from the courts, we strongly encourage all faculty members to get vaccinated in the spirit of keeping ourselves and others safe.