TEMPLE, Texas — The Temple Independent School District is starting a new program to help prepare and develop the next group of principals in the district. TISD kicked off its Principal Pipeline Leadership Development program on Monday (July 24)
Temple ISD’s principal pipeline leadership training is one of the initiatives to come out of district administration’s participation in the prestigious Holdsworth Leadership Collaborative, an 18-month leadership development program organized by the Holdsworth Center. The principal pipeline training targets high-achieving assistant principals in the district with training sessions designed to help prepare them to move into a lead principal role. There will be multiple leadership trainings over the course of the school year with Monday’s opening session focusing on the creation of principal development plans. After collaborating to help develop their plans, participants then presented them to district administrators for feedback.
“Great organizations have deliberate leadership and succession pipelines,” said Dr. Bobby Ott, superintendent of Temple schools. “TISD’s participation in the Holdsworth Leadership Academy the last 18 months has allowed us to develop a pipeline to develop future principals in Temple ISD. This will ensure that we have the best leaders supporting our teachers and students as well as having bench ready administrators to lead the future of TISD schools.”
There are four current TISD assistant principals participating in the program and represent the high school, middle school and elementary level. Ike Hernandez and Courtney Mitchell are both assistant principals at Temple High School, LaRon Slay is an assistant principal at Lamar Middle School and Dr. Jolene Bruce is the assistant principal at Jefferson Elementary School. The district benefits from the new program by developing a roster of potential principals and the participants are excited and humbled by the opportunity to be a part of the first cohort in the pipeline.
“It means everything. Growth, opportunity and availability to pour into us,” said Mitchell. “Not only is the district talking about it, they are being about it, and to see these actions put forth means everything. I hope to learn new things that I will encounter one day as a principal and to just be a sponge and take in everything as an opportunity for growth and to help grow others.”
“Any time you have an opportunity to sit in a room with other professionals that have been doing this job, they bring a different perspective, they bring different ideas, and they bring different strategies” Slay said. “I am really looking forward to learning from the other people in the room and seeing the direction the district is leading administrators with this new principal pipeline.”