Principaling in a Rural School (Gerald Carter, Larry Lee, and Owen Sweatt)
With all of the focus on principal leadership, attrition, and staying power, here’s a picture of an administrator who had an unlikely career path to the principalship and has stayed the course while becoming integral to the school and community. Richard Bryant performs all three core roles of the job (instructional, managerial, and political) and, according to those who are in the town and who have watched him in action, he does them well.
This post is an excerpt from “Lessons Learned from Rural Schools,” May, 2009. The full report is at:LessonsLearnedRuralSchools2009-1
When Richard Bryant got his diploma from Camden Academy High School in 1971, he had one thing on his mind: heading to Arizona. But there was one problem. “I didn’t have any money,” he laughs.
So that fall he began working as a teacher’s aide and in 1973 became both an aide
