[2024 - 2025] KIPP Durham Middle Dean of Students ($25,000 salary boost, 3+ years of teaching experience)

Company Description

Organizational Overview

Leading a school is one of the absolute hardest professions in the world. Full stop. No contest. Next question. 

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 Dean of Students we are seeking to join our team will be instrumental in ensuring and maintaining a safe and nurturing learning environment for students and staff. The Dean of Students will oversee and lead the development and growth of a positive, structured, and achievement-oriented school and student culture. They will support teachers to effectively develop a strong classroom culture and model for student behavior management. They will work with students and families to improve student behavior in order to ensure success in the classroom. 

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 Dean of Students will blow the following four crucial competencies* out of the water:

Driving for Results: Our Dean of Students will have a strong desire to help create and nourish the environment that supports outstanding student learning results and the task-oriented actions required for success. Our Dean of Students will set high goals for themselves and their 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 Dean of Students will motivate others—students, staff colleagues, and families—and influence their thinking and behavior to obtain outstanding student learning results. Our Dean of Students 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 schoolwide culture, 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 Dean of Students will be LASER FOCUSED on planning, organizing, and delivering high quality supports for the school and the specific students in their care. They will work through any challenge and overcome any obstacles to ensure that all students demonstrate dramatic student achievement gains and develop their social-emotional skills.

Personal Effectiveness: Our Dean of Students will exhibit flexibility and optimism when faced with stressful, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar situations; maintain confidence in themselves and a willingness to keep improving despite the many challenges of their role; actively embrace the constant changes needed to ensure student learning in high-challenge s