Chapter 1: Developing and Sustaining School–University–Community Collaborative Partnerships to Develop School Leaders in Rural Areas

Strengthening partnerships among schools, universities, and community agencies has been identified as crucial to school improvement, particularly in hard-to-staff schools in rural communities. In this chapter, we describe the development of one such collaborative partnership which produced a radically different approach to school leadership preparation. We detail the development of a home-grown model to recruit local educators, train them using rigorous, research-based best practices, and then place these high-quality servant leaders in their communities’ hard-to-staff and historically low-performing schools. We go through the steps or phases in the process, including the idea initiation phase, partnering phase, policy formulation and implementation phases, and sustainability. We conclude with lessons learned in the process of developing and sustaining school–university–community collaborative partnerships.