Elementary School Principal - Inner City Foundation

Principal Job Description

Organization Background:

The Inner City Education Foundation, known as ICEF Public Schools, is a nonprofit charter school network serving communities in the South Los Angeles area for 25 years. ICEF Public Schools operates seven high-quality, tuition-free, public charter elementary, middle, and high schools serving over 2,000 kids from TK-12th grade. 

ICEF's mission is to educate and empower courageous leaders to pursue their full potential in college, career, and life by providing a community that honors each student's unique identity, fosters academic excellence, nurtures healthy minds, and inspires critical thinkers.

Position Description: 
The Principal, who reports directly to the Chief of Schools, serves as a critical agent to ensure ICEF’s vision is actualized: ICEF students are confident in their identity and have the skills and behaviors to reach their fullest potential as leaders in college, career, and life. 

The Principal will help set the vision and direction for the school in partnership with staff, students, and families and ICEF overall mission, vision for impact, and strategic goals. The Principal, supported by the Chief of Schools and VP of Organizational Learning, to drive towards school transformation and success. They will manage, coach, and develop instructional, operational, and support staff to ensure all students have access to a positive learning environment which focuses on an integrated, holistic view of social emotional and academic skills, with a unique emphasis on leadership, confidence in identity, and future preparedness. In collaboration with network-level leadership, the Principal will leverage systems, supports, and processes to ensure that student enrollment, school operations, finances, and talent are sound. 

This is an ideal opportunity for a dynamic and visionary organizational leader with significant experience leading schools (particularly in transformation settings) to improve and become a premier campus with deep ties to the unique community ICEF serves.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:  

1) Serve as an overall leader for school, establishing and fostering a positive, open, safe, and supportive school climate and culture for both students and staff, where stakeholders feel welcome and respected (~50% of time)

• Sets the vision for excellence for the school community and leads the school in an annual strategic planning cycle to sets annual priorities, goals, targets in collaboration with Chief of Schools and in alignment with ICEF strategic plan
• Manage and support direct reports to ensure they are effectively leading programs and systems related to positive student culture, student services, school climate and culture, effective operations, and parent engagement and community connectedness, and  student and staff recruitment, enrollment, and retention
• Ensure direct reports are receiving clear, consistent, integrated messages of how they should be spending their time, energy, and talent, as well as have opportunities to collaborate as a team and learn from each other.
• Models how to build strong, mutually respectful, relationships with students and families, and supports teachers and staff to do the same
• In collaboration with MD of Marketing and Communications and VP of Organizational Learning, solicit input from and communicates regularly with all parents and families in ways that are accessible and understandable
• Works closely with the community schools team and the MD of Marketing and Communications to promote the mission and vision of the school, with an eye towards building external partnerships for ICEF that will allow the organization to better serve its students and families, recruit new families to ICEF, and attract and retain high quality staff
• Craft a vision of excellence for the school in relation to student culture and sense of belonging to meet unique student population needs
• Implements a system for sustaining attendance improvement efforts by establishing an attendance team, implementing a tiered system of supports, ensuring buy-in from stakeholders and decreasing overall chronic absenteeism rates
• On a quarterly basis, set clear, actionable, data-informed goals, milestones, and targets with each direct report to guide subsequent efforts to support and coach, aligned with ICEF’s strategic direction 
• On a semi-annual basis, evaluate direct report’s progress against their goals and targets, as well as their overall achievements, and, as appropriate, recommend them for performance-based recognition and/or performance improvement plans; as needed, support the process for hiring/replacing team members 

2) Serve as the instructional leader of school, with strong eye towards integration of social emotional learning and college and career success (~40% of time)

• Manage and support direct reports, in collaboration with Chief of Schools, to ensure they are effectively leading programs and systems related to instructional leadership
• Ensure direct reports are receiving clear, consistent, integrated messages of how they should be spending their time, energy, and talent, as well as have opportunities to collaborate as a team and learn from each other
• With support of network-wide instructional leadership team, continuously monitors, tracks and analyzes student achievement data in order to identify needed supports and strategies and implements and oversees effective, high quality data analysis cycles with teachers/teacher teams to facilitate the analysis of data provided by ICEF Common Assessments, unit assessments, and formative assessments
• Identify, with the support of the network-wide instructional leadership team and Cabinet, where leaders and teachers need additional support, coaching, and professional development
• Lead school-site instruction internalization process, including but not limited to, reviewing network year at a glance and adjusting pacing based off unique needs of students, teachers, and the school (i.e., applies to year level planning, unit level, lessons, PD structures, etc.), in collaboration with network-wide instructional team
• In collaboration with network-wide instructional leadership team and Director of SPED, provides leadership in the area of curriculum, instruction and modifications/accommodations for students with diverse learning needs
• Implements and leads a robust Multi-Tiered Support System that provides timely academic and behavioral support to students with identified needs (i.e., RTI, SST, SPED), in collaboration with network-wide instructional team
• Ensures that the entire staff (certificated and classified) have a learning and growth mindset, are exploring and implementing best practices, and are being developed as strong leaders and managers 

3) Collaborate with ICEF Cabinet (senior leadership team) and Board (~10% of time)

• Serve as a thought partner to the senior leadership team at ICEF.
• Partner with Chief of Schools and the CEO annually to establish each school’s budget, manage finance and human resources to that budget, and report to the Board on outcomes
• Help lead and participate in data-informed strategic decision-making and planning processes, network-wide
• Work with Cabinet and Board to set school-level annual goals, milestones, and targets
• Support organization-wide strategies and systems for talent forecasting, recruitment, retention strategies, and succession planning 
• Collaborate with Cabinet on developing and strengthening strong organization-wide systems to support learning, planning and budgeting, operations, goal-setting and progress monitoring, and data collection and analysis

Note: Measures in bold below are included in ICEF’s organizational dashboard, included in the June 2023 strategic plan. All measures on the dashboard are included in some form of primary or collaborative shared measures of success across Cabinet

PRIMARY MEASURES OF SUCCESS (e.g. this position and her direct/indirect reports are primarilyand directly held responsible for the decision-making and outcomes for these measures): 

• Superior results in student achievement and growth (including SEL): 
  • Integration of social-emotional and academic learning
  • State Academic Standard expectations and performance on SBAC, relative to schools with similar demographics (ensuring 95% participation)
  • Verified data assessments for charter renewal (ensuring 95% participation)
  • Data-informed instruction and implementation (e.g. weekly data meetings)
  • Closing achievement and opportunity gaps, with special focus on specific populations requiring student services and individualized IEPs
  • Teachers are engaged, continually learning, and effective 
    • Students achieve progressive academic success e.g. reading/math on grade level or making progress across the network
    • Students believe teachers have high expectations of them across the network
• Students demonstrate growth in SEL competencies 
• Positive school culture and environment across the network
  • Students feel psychologically and physically safe at school 
  • Students are supported, and have an adult they can trust
  • Students are engaged, inside and outside the classroom
  • Low Suspension & Chronic Absenteeism rates
• Students understand future pathways, and how to get there across K-12, network-wide
  • Ensure every child graduates college and career-ready

COLLABORATIVE MEASURES OF SUCCESS (e.g. highly collaborative measures of success that involve the network-level leadership and other Principals):

• High levels of trust between community, families, teachers, and staff across the network
• Ensuring that ICEF is making progress on its vision for impact which integrates social and academic learning across the network
  • Students are confident in their identity, and believe ICEF has helped them get there 
  • Students have the academic and socio-emotional skills needed for future success 
• High quality teacher, employee, leader retention across the network
• Student retention, especially in key transition years 
• Strategic use of resources to make/improve outcomes across the network

Primary Attributes:

• Believer: Demonstrates an unwavering belief that all students can achieve at high levels, and a strong sense of urgency around closing opportunity and achievement gaps
• Hopeful: Seeks to develop others’ capacity in a productive and creative ways, with unwaveringly high expectations for performance from self, colleagues, teachers, principals, and students alike
• Planner: Ability to break down complex projects into actionable goals, targets, and milestones, and can manage self and others to these
• Learner: Desire to make meaning out of observations, experiences, and data to generate insights that answer critically important questions and  lead to decisions in the face of uncertainty; understands how to use multiple sources of data to inform daily decisions and instills this practice in others; is the first to use mistakes and missteps as learning opportunities for self and team
• Listener: Humble, can step back and observe, listen, and learn, when that is required so that others may grow and learn; can take – and give – effective feedback
• Relentless: Won’t give up seeking new ways to support the success of students and support ICEF as a whole; strong sense of agency & urgency
• Strategic: Can see – and help create – the long-term, big picture vision

Experience and Education: 

• Deep experience in managing and running charter schools, direct experience in instruction or school-level leadership preferred
• Bi-lingual (Spanish and English) strongly preferred, not required
• Master’s Degree
• A valid CA Clear Single Subject or Multiple Subject teaching credential or PPS credential in School Counseling (or an equivalent out-of-state credential which is transferrable to California).
• A valid CA Administrative Services Credential (or an equivalent out-of-state credential which is transferable to California), or are in the process of obtaining one.
• A minimum of 5 years of teaching or counseling experience at the K-12 level, with a history of improving student achievement.
• Prior experience as an Assistant Principal, as well as other leadership roles (mentor teacher, department chair, etc.)
• Possess proven management and leadership capabilities, as well as team-building skills.
• Proven experience managing budgets, creating and implementing policies and demonstrated ability in creating and managing systems.
• Skilled in Google suite and Microsoft Office products

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