AWSP Blog

Principals carry this burden of school-wide hope, but if they are lucky, they are not alone. While principals set the tone for the entire school, there is another group who are quite often working on hope from a completely different angle—our assistant principals. These unsung heroes are a direct line of hope to some of our most hopeless students. Our assistant principals have the opportunity to reach many of our students who don’t feel loved (at school or at home), who don’t have any sense of belonging in their lives, and far too often lack any vision of life in the future, yet alone where they might get their next meal.

It’s a great time to honor the enormous contributions assistant principals make to student success. The many roles of the assistant, associate, and vice-principals have expanded and evolved as a result of a pandemic, remote learning, and all sorts of safety and health considerations most of us never even imagined. Through it all, our assistant principals have demonstrated unwavering leadership. At AWSP, we will continue to highlight the crucial role APs play, advocate for increased funding to provide more APs, and normalize making the assistant principal role not just a stepping stone on the way to the principalship, but a role worthy of respect, praise, and appreciation for those who find the role to be perfect for them.

AWSP is looking for an amazing elementary principal to be the National Association of Elementary School Principals’ (NAESP) National Outstanding Assistant Principal honoree from our state. This program promotes excellence in educational leadership and calls attention to the fundamental importance of the assistant principal.

If you think principaling was tough before COVID19, what about now? If we kill the will of our principals by not addressing the workload, stress and increasing demands, then our kids and schools will suffer the consequences through a constant turnover of school leaders. LPI's research highlights the obvious, principals are fighting to survive. But their research also recommends some action we can all take to breathe hope into the system for one of our most precious resources - principals and assistant principals.

One unforeseen consequence of a statewide closure has been the massive forced push for all of us to engage in the virtual meeting space. We might have dabbled before in Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Teams, but now we are all exceeding standard. AWSP is offering weekly Office Hours for members to engage with with the AWSP Executive Team and K-12 principals from all over the state. This is a wide open session of give and take, but more importantly, to hear our members (principals, assistant principals and other school leaders) share challenges, successes, and barriers they are facing as newly assigned digital leaders. It is so incredible to watch these natural and organic conversations take off each week that I find myself thinking, "Why didn't we do this sooner?"