Is the Dream Over?

Before coming to Raleigh, I spent nearly ten years in Greensboro with SERVE, the federally-funded education R&D laboratory serving the southeastern states. After a decade of teaching high school band and eight years as a principal and assistant principal and earning my doctorate in Educational Leadership along the way, working at the Lab looked like a lot more fun than going to a district office. And so it was.

I began as a SERVE Senior Research Associate investigating reading programs across the southeast; after nine months, I was birthed into Director of the SERVE Leaders Institute, a two-year demonstration project building leadership for NC charter schools and innovative regular public schools; I ended my career as the first Director of the Program on Education Leadership where I had the opportunity to work across the United States on various teacher and principal leadership-development initiatives whose impacts remain. 

Early on in my stint at SERVE, something big happened, only I didn't know it at the time. I met Superintendent Joe Peel.  As part of my reading program research, I found Joe in an Elizabeth City, North Carolina elementary school where he was teaching teachers. That's right, the superintendent was teaching. 

Six years later, Joe asked me to consult with Wake Leadership Academy. What began as a once-a-month contract to work with Wake County principals and district leaders, four years later grew into an opportunity to build a regional academy serving five Triangle-area districts, a kind of co-op whose member districts were to partner to lift all boats in a rising tide of leadership for improved learning. What a great dream, I thought to myself. I want to be part of it.

To my astonishment the dream of business and educational leaders in the most educated, affluent and fastest growing area of North Carolina became real. Triangle Leadership Academy grew into something unique in the United States. Educators and corporate bigwigs from near and far visited us, wanted to learn from us. Most decided they couldn't emulate it. But for a five-county central North Carolina region, TLA became a low-cost, high-impact brand. But now it appears unaffordable.

Before surrendering to the reality of a temporary economic downturn, however, does it not behoove us to consider the cost of a dashed dream on the region and its educational leaders whose school children acheive more or less depending upon the very competencies we teach? Who among us has a creative idea? Is it TLA as it is or no TLA at all? What adaptations are possible? Is the dream over?