New professional standards for CA principals approved
(Calif.) Setting a clear expectation that schools should be a place of safety and fairness, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing adopted Thursday new standards for school principals that embrace restorative justice practices.
The standards, adopted more than a decade ago as some of the first in the nation to set comprehensive goals for school leaders, are intended to serve as a basis for measuring competence throughout the career of today’s site principals, district administrators and county level managers.
Although a key element of the new standards is a series of non-binding example indicators, architects of the program said the detailed description of desired activity should prove valuable to school managers as well as parents and policy makers.
“We spent a lot of time discussing whether these should be sample indicators or required elements – we want to be clear, these are items that you could use to evaluate but there are others,” said Teri Burns, a senior policy director at the California School Boards Association and a member of the work group that designed the standards update.
“This is the kind of document that allows members of a school board to say this is what we expect from our folks in the field,” she said. “And the kind of document that will help us explain it to parents.”
Known as the California Professional Standards for Educational Leaders, the management protocols were originally adopted by the CTC in 2001, based largely on conduct goals developed
Model school district policy on suicide prevention offered
(N.Y.) Suicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. among middle and high school age-youth – yet many school districts do not have comprehensive policies and procedures in place to reduce risks of or respond to these tragic incidents.