By Michelle Key
Editor
During last week’s school board meeting for the Lee County School system, board members and attendees heard presentations from the Early Leaders Institute. These presentations, called a LEAP (Leadership Engagement and Action Plan), were created by fellows in the ELI program. The LEAPs were designed to highlight problematic issues within a school system and to offer real solutions to the problems.
In other business, the board:
• approved the annual membership dues to the Alabama Association of School Boards in the amount of $14, 500.
• approved of the 2019-2020 school calendar
• approved Policy # 5.30.1 Corporal Punishment
• approved Policy #8.83 Employee Salary Schedules
• approved a resolution authorizing the issuance of a $23,000,000 Lee County Board of Education Subordinated Capital Outlay Anticipation Warrant, Series 2018 Dated the Date of its delivery
• approved an overnight, out-of-state field trip for the Smiths Station High School Football team to Hamilton, Georgia for a 7 on 7 Camp
• awarded bids to Quality Produce, Flowers Bakery, Barber’s (Milk) and the Ice Cream Warehouse
• reviewed the presentation of the financial report for the month of May 2018 from Ken Roberts. Roberts reported that LCS have reecived 69.5 percent of anticipated revenue with total expenditures being only 64.3 percent which is slightly less than what would be expected at the two-third mark in the fiscal year.
• held an executive session to discuss several human resources recommendations
What is the Early Leadership Institute?
The Early Leadership Institue is an NEA affiliate-based program designed for early career Fellows to strengthen their professional connections across the association, develop new skills and formalize an action pathway toward increased association engagement and leadership.
In order to become an ELI Fellow, teachers must be 35 years of age or younger and have no more than five total years of teaching experience. ELI is overseen by Lee County Education Association President, Pam Gregory and is coached by Vivian Martin, a teacher at Smiths Station High School.
Gregory, Martin and Teresa Ratliff, District 19 Uniserve director, travelled to Chicago to attend the 2018 national Leadership Summit, in order to train on recruitment, informing, empowering and motivating educators toward leadership excellence.
The first group of fellows met for monthly meetings from January to May and one of the requirements for the program was to create and engage with a sounding board of other early career educators as well as with veteran teachers. The goal of this sounding board was to highlight issues deemed important by other early career educators. This information became the foundation for the LEAPs (Leadership Engagement and Action Plan) that were presented at the recent meeting of the Lee County School Board. The LEAP is not designed to be fully implemented at this time but is the starting point of of learning to identify an actual problem or policy or practice and make it applicable at the local level, as well as presenting potential solutions to these problems.