Chapter 11: Developing and Sustaining the Gulf Coast Partnership: Possibilities, Successes, and Challenges in Preparing Leaders

Colleges of education and school districts are increasingly forging partnerships to become more effective in addressing the needs and harnessing the assets in diverse metropolitan schools, particularly those deemed to be low performing. In 2011, school district leaders and University of South Florida (USF) faculty joined forces to re-conceptualize preparation pathways for the next generation of school administrators for the Tampa Bay area. This collaboration began when district and university leaders came together to apply for Race to the Top federal funding aimed at improving school leadership development. Thus, the Gulf Coast Partnership (GCP) was born.

Historically, the state of Florida has used a two-tiered leadership preparation certification program for school principals. Institutes of higher education are entrusted to certify future assistant principals, while districts are charged with developing and operating programs that prepare assistant principals for their first principalships. Today, the GCP brings together six school districts in and around the Tampa Bay area, along with the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (ELPS) program, housed in the USF College of Education. The aims of our work have been to blend and streamline district and university mechanisms for assistant principal and principal preparation for diverse and often hard to staff lower performing schools, to increase the quality of candidates prepared, and to take ongoing professional development for veteran principals to the “next level.” The result is that GCP district and university stakeholders have redesigned and joined two job-embedded programs that once operated in isolation from one another, and added a third program for the development of master principals and district leaders. Today, these three programs form a comprehensive framework for meeting the differentiated needs of candidates and practitioners at various stages of school leadership preparation and ongoing professional development.