[2024 - 2025] KIPP Durham Middle Principal ($35,000 salary boost, 5+ years of instructional leadership experience)

Company Description

Organizational Overview

Leading a school is one of the absolute hardest professions in the world. 

Leading a school turnaround is a whole other level of hard. The reality of too many of our country’s schools—especially those serving low-income and other marginalized communities coming out of a global health crisis and with a century of systemic under-investment—is that the academic achievement of their students doesn’t match their students' brilliance, and their student culture does not create an environment where each and every student is seen, valued, and loved. 

KIPP Durham Middle School on the east side of Durham, North Carolina, has been one such school. Every 6-8-Grade student in our classrooms today is brilliant, but our efforts over the past decade have not successfully harnessed that collective brainpower to get exceptional results on North Carolina’s state middle school exams in reading, math, and science, the benchmarks that ensure they are on track towards being academically prepared to lead the choice-filled lives they envision for themselves.

KIPP North Carolina, in partnership with the leaders and national resources of the KIPP Foundation, is seeking to change that reality. 

For the 2024-25 school year (and for the next two school years after that), we are assembling a dream team of 18 exceptional professionals—master teachers, instructional leaders, operational leaders, special education experts, and other supporters of learning—who are eager to “re-found” our Durham middle school to create a dynamic and engaging middle school learning environment that maximizes our 160 students’ limitless potentials. 

The Principal we are seeking to join (and help lead) our team will be an individual who can inspire students, put excellence ahead of easy, and project urgency about providing our middle school students with college and career access throughout their time with us and after they leave our care. Our Principal will make decisions, conduct difficult conversations, and build highly collaborative teams, all while shaping a vibrant school culture at Durham Middle. This individual will nurture a learning community that is simultaneously academically rigorous and joyful. Self-reflective and humble, our Principal will be open to feedback and committed to continuously improving. 

This individual will be responsible for ensuring that our students’ learning experiences are exciting and rigorous. They, alongside the Assistant Principal, will prioritize excellent teaching in every single classroom, while simultaneously juggling the multitude of responsibilities and tasks that come with leading a turnaround school dedicated to outstanding student achievement results from Year One on. 

While we founded the school in 2015, we are treating 2024-25 as a re-founding school year, an endeavor that requires a staff with a founder’s mentality around doing what it takes, making it happen, sweating the small stuff, and creating a reimagined reality for our students.

Job Description

CRUCIAL COMPETENCIES

Our Principal will blow the following four crucial competencies* out of the water:

Driving for Results: Our Principal will have a strong desire to achieve outstanding student learning results and the task-oriented actions required for success. Our Principal will set high goals for themselves and all students, making persistent, well-planned efforts to achieve these goals despite barriers and resistance; holding others accountable for doing their part to achieve results; and putting in all the extra effort necessary to ensure success. 

Influencing for Results: Our Principal will motivate others—students, staff, families, other stakeholders—and influence their thinking and behavior to obtain outstanding student learning results. Our Principal will understand that they cannot accomplish change alone, but instead must influence the work of others. They will use a variety of influencing moves—inspiring students, nurturing ridiculously joyful AND rigorous classroom and schoolwide cultures, grasping and responding to unspoken student needs and motivations, and simultaneously supporting and prodding colleagues to collaborate on the path to schoolwide success—as the situation requires. The relationships they will form are for the purpose of influencing others to enhance student learning, not just for the purpose of personal bonding. 

Problem-Solving: Our Principal will be LASER FOCUSED on planning, organizing, and delivering high quality supports for our teachers, staff, students, and families, AND they will continually analyze data to determine student learning needs and next steps for intervention blocks during the day, on select weeken