Only 8 Georgia schools have earned this prestigious certification. One now is in Columbus.
The Muscogee County School District’s lighthouse symbol now has new meaning at Reese Road Leadership Academy.
During an assembly Wednesday in the school’s gym, students, faculty, staff and guests celebrated RRLA becoming the eighth school in Georgia to be certified as a Leader in Me Lighthouse School by FranklinCovey Education.
Less than 10 percent of the approximately 4,000 Leader in Me schools around the world have reached this status, said David Debs, the FranklinCovey client partner for Georgia. To be selected, schools must demonstrate the following:
▪ “The principal, school administration and staff engage in ongoing learning and develop as leaders, while championing leadership for the school.”
▪ “Leadership principles are effectively taught to all students through direct lessons, integrated approaches and staff modeling. Students are able to think critically about and apply leadership principles.”
▪ “Families and the school partner together in learning about the 7 Habits and leadership principles through effective communication and mutual respect.”
▪ “The school community is able to see leadership in the physical environment, hear leadership through the common language of the 7 Habits, and feel leadership through a culture of caring,relationships, and affirmation.”
▪ “Leadership is shared with students through a variety of leadership roles, and student voices lead to innovations within the school.”
▪ “School-wide, classroom, family and community leadership events provide authentic environments to celebrate leadership, build culture and allow students to practice leadership skills.”
▪ “The school utilizes the 4 Disciplines of Execution identify and track progress toward Wildly Important Goals for the school, classroom and staff.”
▪ “Students lead their own learning with the skills to assess their needs, set appropriate goals, and carry out action plans. They track progress toward goals in Leadership Notebooks and share these notebooks with adults in student-led conferences.”
▪ “Teacher planning and reflection, trusting relationships and student-led learning combine to create environments for highly engaged learning.”
Leader in Me schools infuse the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” into the curriculum, so students recite them and learn through them:
Habit 1 – Be proactive.
Habit 2 – Begin with the end in mind.
Habit 3 – Put first things first.
Habit 4 – Think win-win.
Habit 5 – Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Habit 6 – Synergize.
Habit 7 – Sharpen the saw.
Superintendent David Lewis told the students that the 7 Habits “benefit me every single day, and I know they will for you as well as you go forward.”
The 4 Disciplines of Execution are:
▪ Focus on the wildly important.
▪ Act on the lead measures.
▪ Keep a compelling scoreboard.
▪ Create a cadence of accountability.
Pat Hugley Green, the District 1 representative on the Muscogee County School Board, has children who attended RRLA. The leadership skills the students learn, Green told the assembly, “will take you further than you can ever, ever imagine. After you leave Reese Road Leadership Academy, it won’t just be a song; it won’t just be what you memorize. It will be what you embody and what you learn, and it’s going to help you make the best decisions and the best choices through middle school, through high school, college and whatever career that you pursue.”
Debs told the students, “You see the greatness in the work, in your friends, in your teachers. You see it, and you show it, and you respect it so, so much that they see it in themselves. You, by your actions every day and what you’re learning and how you’re behaving with your friends and your family, it’s such a strong message that other folks see it in themselves.”
Leader in Me Lighthouse Schools emphasize social and emotional learning as well as academics. All of which empowers students “with the same capacity to love as we do to learn,” Debs said.
And the folks at RRLA have taken the next step, Debs said.
“They’ve aligned their academic work to this,” he said. “When they do that, something magical starts to happen.”
RRLA principal Katrina Collier-Long said, “We have talent within these walls. All we have to do is tap into the talent and allow our children to show us what they can do.”
Long said she is “just overwhelmed and excited about the potential that we have going on here, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re just getting started.”
She presented retired RRLA principal Jeanella Pendleton with a miniature lighthouse and a bracelet, which the school’s leadership team members also received. The bracelet says, “She believed she could, so she did.”
“Mrs. Pendleton paved the way for our lighthouse status,” Long said.
Long and Pendleton unveiled the Leader in Me Lighthouse School banner as the audience cheered.
“This day was the culmination of a dream and a vision that the faculty and staff had (in 2009),” Pendleton told the Ledger-Enquirer after the ceremony. “This is the ultimate, and I’m overjoyed. I’m humbled to have been a part of it.”
RRLA assistant principal Cheryl Hampel became an educator not because she likes doing math problems or paperwork, she said.
“This is what I wanted,” she said, “to help lead the next generation in being global citizens.”
In interviews with the Ledger-Enquirer, three students and a teacher explained the Leader in Me impact at RRLA.
“It made us want to work more,” said Richards Middle School sixth-grader Brayden Willis, 11, who returned to RRLA for the ceremony. “Once we see that we can change the school, it makes us want to help change the school, so more and more people will join in and help.”
The 7 Habits have helped Brayden “to organize myself and organize how I go through my day,” he said. “It also helped me with my academics, so I can put my work first.”
RRLA fifth-grader Alyssa Holmes, 10, said, “More people are trying to work toward their goals and follow the 7 Habits. . . . I look at the 7 Habits every time I come to school. It helps me be a better person.”
RRLA fourth-grader Eli Brown, 9, who emceed the ceremony, said, “Every student has been looking up to those habits and wanting to achieve, becoming a leader.”
For example, Eli said, “When I get into a problem, I think about what habit I need to use to help me stay out of it.”
RRLA fifth-grade reading and social studies teacher Heather Bolin has taught for seven years at the school, including her student-teaching before graduating from Columbus State University. The Leader in Me paradigm motivates her students to “take more initiative,” she said. “They’re setting goals for themselves, and they see the accomplishment.”
The transformational model also has made her a better teacher, she said.
“It really has made me focus more on the whole child,” Bolin said. “. . . It just makes me feel good that I know I’ve made a difference in a child by teaching them leadership skills and how to lead through life.”
Long, in her 11th year as an educator, has been RRLA’s principal since January 2017. She has seen students apply the 7 Habits in their schoolwork and in their relationships.
“We are producing tomorrow’s leaders,” she told the L-E.
Those habits, Long said, also help her lead the school. Her favorite habit, she said, is “think win-win, because I want everybody to be successful.”
According to the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement’s latest data, the 481 students at RRLA in the spring of 2017 demonstrated academic growth that was better than the district average and better than 53 percent of the schools in Georgia. Although its overall performance is similar to the district’s average and better than only 44 percent of the schools in Georgia, RRLA improved its overall grade from a D in 2016 to a C in 2017 and is considered a “Beating the Odds” school, meaning it performs better than expected, based on schools with similar demographics (all students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch).
Mark Rice, 706-576-6272, @MarkRiceLE.