11 Who Are Christian Education Leaders?

Michelle hadn’t expected to receive a call from her child’s Christian school principal over the small matter involving her child. The cause for the call was that Michelle had misunderstood a teacher’s communication. Confronting the teacher at a conference, Michelle learned her error and promptly apologized, chagrined and embarrassed. Rather than responding with anger or righteousness, though, the teacher had instead also apologized, even though Michelle could see that only she, and no other parent, had made the same error. The teacher’s communication had been perfectly sound, reasonable, and appropriate. Yet Michelle nonetheless received a prompt call the next morning from the school’s principal, in which the principal had also apologized, without any need to do so. To Michelle’s further surprise and satisfaction, the principal’s call led to discussion of additional opportunities at the school for her child. The matter left Michelle with a deeper appreciation than ever for the school and its leadership.

Leaders

Organizations of all kinds depend on sound, stable, visionary, strategic, and committed leaders. Leadership with those and other qualities is no less important for private Christian K-12 schools. Schools are remarkably complex organizations. With all their special responsibilities to students, not to mention to parents, alumni, donors, accreditors, education agencies, law enforcement, and local government, schools can be more like small villages rather than mere workplaces. Christian schools, though, are even more sensitive in their mission and complex in their functions and roles than public schools and private secular academies. With only a little exaggeration, Christian school leaders need the faith of theologians, passion of apostles, conviction of saints, and courage of lions. They also need the financial skills of accountants, legal knowledge of lawyers, social skills of hospitality managers, and soul discernment of psychologists, among a plethora of other high-level skills. Appreciate the leaders of your child’s Christian school. They are likely to be highly skilled, committed, and faithful individuals, worthy of respect and emulation.

Qualifications

The prior introductory paragraph gives a broad view of Christian school leader qualifications. The primary qualification to lead a Christian school is, of course, deep and abiding faith. Even better, though, if the leader has the skills of a pastor in expressing that faith. Christian school leaders may need to lead prayer, participate in worship, and teach or even preach, at school assemblies, staff meetings, and other school, church, and community forums. Christian school principals generally also have teacher education, certification, and experience. Christian school principals also need or greatly benefit from strong administrative skills over the school’s students, staff, schedule, curriculum, accreditation, programs, budget, finances, fundraising, and facilities. Christian school leaders also need governance, strategic, public relations, and professional development skills. Yet the greatest skill that a Christian school principal may need is to lead, guide, and develop the school’s teaching staff, while reassuring parents of the skill, effectiveness, faith, and devotion of that staff. Respect, trust, and value your child’s Christian school leaders for possessing these qualifications.

Commitments

Christian school leaders need more than qualifications. They also need specific commitments to deploy those qualifications for the benefit of the school and its students, parents, staff, alumni, and other constituents. Christian school leaders must exhibit strong commitment, first of all, to their own faith and the spiritual instruction of the school’s students. Christian school leaders must also exhibit strong commitment to academic excellence. Christian school leaders must also exhibit the strongest commitment to the safety and security of the school’s children and to every other member of the school community. Christian school leaders must also exhibit a strong commitment to ensuring orderly operations and finances, minimizing the risk of interruptions, distractions, deficiencies, and loss. Christian school leaders must also exhibit a strong commitment to stewarding the tuition revenue, donations, endowment funds, and other gifts of goods and services that the school receives, to ensure the continued trust, generosity, respect, and confidence of parents, donors, and others blessing the school with their resources. Respect, trust, and value your child’s Christian school leaders for exhibiting these and other necessary or valuable commitments.

Responsibilities

To carry out their commitments, leaders in all organizations have multiple responsibilities. Leaders supply the energy, set the tone, influence the culture, articulate the vision, discern the strategy, procure the resources, guide operations, and represent the organization to the public, among other key functions. School leaders, though, add academic responsibilities around teacher qualifications, supervision, and support, school curriculum and accreditation, and student academic progress and assessment. Christian school leaders have the same corporate responsibilities as other organizations and academic responsibilities as other schools. Yet Christian school leaders have other responsibilities unusual or unique to their peculiar position. They lead an entity that is all at once a corporation, school, and church or equivalently committed Christian faith organization. And so, Christian school leaders add faith roles to their other corporate and academic responsibilities. A Christian school leader’s faith roles can include ensuring adherence to the school’s Christian doctrine and tradition, shepherding students and staff in their expression of Christian faith, and acting in a pastoral role in supporting, guiding, and comforting all members of the school community, in earnest Christian witness. Again, value and respect your child’s Christian school leaders for their fulfillment of multiple responsibilities, from the significant all the way to the profound.

Relationships

Christian school leaders also have multiple important relationships to maintain. Christian school leaders need to ensure board approval, parent confidence, student engagement, staff morale, administrator respect, donor commitment, accreditor satisfaction, law enforcement attention, government official trust, contractor supply, and church support. Christian school leaders need to know what competitor’s programs are doing, feeder programs expect, and partner or affiliate programs need from their own school programs. Christian school leaders also need to communicate their school’s mission, needs, and successes to the public, to maintain public recognition and respect. Christian school leaders have important constituents to serve in every direction, internally and externally, up and down organizational hierarchy, and laterally, making their responsibilities all the more fluid, nuanced, and complex. Appreciate your child’s Christian school leaders for their constant attention to multiple responsibilities.

Roles

Christian school leaders occupy several roles, each described further in the following paragraphs. Christian school leaders often begin in a teaching role and may spend years on the teaching staff of the school that they eventually lead. Those years of teaching service help them build relationships, gain experience, earn recognition, and burnish reputation across the school community, all helpful to subsequently lead the school. A Christian school teacher may take on various administrative roles, such as athletic director or curriculum director, while also teaching full time or part time, before becoming the school’s principal or assistant principal. Some schools have several principals, assistant principals, or chief administrators below a head of school. Together, they form a school leadership team that the head of school supervises. While the school’s leadership team manages school operations, the school’s volunteer board, often composed entirely of parents of students enrolled at the school, governs the overall school program. The school board typically does so with a chair or president, vice-chair or vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. The head of school, or if no head then the principal, reports and accounts to the board for all school operations. Thus, expect your child’s Christian school to have a skilled, knowledgeable, wise, integrated, and devoted leadership structure, thoroughly committed to the school’s success.

Principals

A Christian school principal, or head of school in a larger Christian school, is the point person for all significant school opportunities, challenges, and issues. When a Christian school’s condition or event has any significant prospect of affecting the school’s mission or interfering with operations, all members of the school community, from students and parents to staff, administrators, alumni, donors, and beyond into the broader community, should be directing the issue to the principal for consideration, investigation, and action. A Christian school principal may have regular duties to which to attend and plans to pursue each day. Yet the principal must remain ready to drop everything to respond to new developments, unusual events, and changing conditions. The principal may promptly assign the management of those issues to others, such as a retained accountant, lawyer, social worker, psychologist, or contractor, or refer the issues to law enforcement, government officials, or others. But the principal must manage the school for continuous safe, secure, and orderly operations. The principal may retain and supervise assistant principals, directors, and other administrators to assist. If you have a significant issue with your child’s Christian school that teachers are not equipped or authorized to handle, then you will deal with the principal or the principal’s administrative team. Value their skills, commitment, and service.

Superintendent

Some private Christian K-12 schools affiliate with other Christian K-12 schools in a private school district. If your child’s Christian school has sister school affiliates at the same level or an affiliated middle school or high school at the next level, then the affiliated schools may together have a superintendent, sometimes instead called a head of schools, leading the district. Depending on the number and size of the affiliated schools, the district may also employ a chief financial officer, chief operations officer, chief academic officer, development director, communications director, and other central administrators. You may not have any contact with school district officials relating to your child’s Christian school enrollment, unless the school’s principal lacks authority or resources to address and resolve your concerns over your child’s issues. Examples where you might have contact with district officials would include appeals of a principal’s decision affecting your child’s enrollment, concerns over a principal’s misconduct, or issues of safety or security that the school declines or is unable to address. Value superintendent and other district support, if your child’s Christian K-12 school has it.

Administrators

Your child’s private Christian K-12 school principal may retain one or more other administrators to help the principal manage school operations. You and your child may have periodic interactions with these administrators. Administrators may include an assistant principal for teacher support or student conduct, enrollment director, finance officer, communications director, facilities maintenance and repair director, and director of student disability services. The principal or one of the principal’s administrators may supervise additional school program staff members like an athletic director or STEM program director. The principal may also supervise support staff members like a social worker and student-support specialists, and operations staff members like a cafeteria director and building custodians. Administrators and staff members in an academic role are likely to meet the school’s Christian faith requirements for teaching staff. The school may not formally require administrators and staff members in operational roles to profess the school’s Christian faith tradition, but those leaders and personnel are likely to do so in any case, having chosen to work in a Christian school. Value the faith commitments, school leadership, and school service of your child’s Christian school administrators. Their roles are to serve you and your child, too.

Board

Private Christian K-12 schools also have private, volunteer school boards. As mentioned briefly above, the board members of your child’s Christian school are likely parents of students currently enrolled at the school. The bylaws of many Christian schools include that qualification or similar qualifications, such as school alumni or grandparents and guardians of students currently enrolled. Either the current board members or the parents of students currently enrolled generally elect new board members, often in rotating terms of two, three, or more years. The goal is to maintain a board of seven to eleven or so members. A nominating committee of the board tries to ensure that board members have an appropriate range of skills to govern the school. Accountants, lawyers, personnel managers, social workers, psychologists, contractors, business owners, fundraisers, grant writers, and others with experience relevant in some way to school operations can make strong board contributions. In a Christian school, so, too, can pastors. Board members, though, do not involve themselves directly in school operations, other than when requested or invited as volunteers, like other parents and grandparents. Board members instead contribute by choosing, supporting, guiding, and advising the school’s principal, while making necessary governing decisions on issues like the school budget, capital campaigns, building plans, program opening or closure, and other strategic plans. Value your child’s Christian school board members. Get to know them, and share with them any ideas, issues, or concerns over the school’s mission, vision, and strategic direction.

Reflection

Have you had any interaction with your child’s school principal, whether in public or private Christian school? Or have you had to rely significantly on various school administrators, to gain and maintain your child’s school enrollment? If so, what were your impressions of the school’s leader and administrative team? What qualities would you like to see in your child’s Christian school leader? Before reading the above chapter on Christian school leadership, how did you believe Christian schools governed and managed their programs? Did anything surprise you about the above leadership discussion? Do you appreciate the complexity of leading a private Christian school? Do you agree that Christian school leaders, like Christian school teachers, should profess the school’s Christian faith tradition? Would you be interested in serving as a volunteer board member of your child’s Christian school? What skills and experience do you have that you think the school’s board might appreciate and value? What skills and experience would you like to see on your child’s Christian school board?

Key Points

The faith and skill of Christian school leaders are key to school success.
Christian school leaders must qualify by faith, commitment, and skill.
Christian school leaders must fulfill several substantial commitments.
Christian school leaders may progress through several different roles.
Christian school leaders can have multiple complex responsibilities.
Christian school leaders have many critical relationships to maintain.
Christian school principals integrate functions and address issues.
Christian school districts have a superintendent and central staff.
Christian schools may have administrators supporting the principal.
Christian schools have private volunteer parent governing boards.

Read Chapter 12.