There are many definitions of leadership. Primary among them is leadership through service. In this New Leadership Discussion, Allison Fisher, Principal - WCS Online High School, and Matt Hollowell, LMS Specialist, both from Williamson County Schools in Tennessee have done a great deal of thinking about how to move the pieces around to achieve the proper level of leadership through service. According to Matt Hollowell, “These are our rewords that we have talked about in planning this presentation and every single one of these will hit every one of you in a very specific way, Remaking, Reexamining, Rebuilding Reteaching, all of this has been very important to us this past year and a half. And I highlight the word Restart because Alison can talk about this later. She has restarted every year that I've known her, like from ground zero with her program. And I feel like that's what we've had to do is really revisit the standards. We work our curriculum, as we remember who we are and what we're supposed to be doing. These are the things that really matter to us, especially my piece of the department, instructional technology. So there's really a word that we focused on primarily this past year and that is Rethinking. And that really means rethinking everything from how we teach these kids that are now remote that used to be in a classroom? How do we rethink our 1:1 initiative, which was literally, let's do one grade level at one school and then that turned into all 40,000 students overnight, rethinking the standards and how we teach them and rebuild them?”
Allison Fisher also faced challenges in leading through service to her district. “We started an online program for just our high schools in 2018,” said Fisher. “And we knew at that time we had to take a proactive approach. We really wanted to be upstream about it. So we absolutely had an agreement at our district. It would be a slow growth process that we would really make sure we're working out the kinks before we move forward and grow it too big. So we started with 255 students in 496 seats. It was as small as we could have it, but really say we had enough to have to have a sampling that was worthy of saying, is this working or not for kids? And the next year we just took the cap off. We really didn't grow by that many courses. We went from 13 courses that we had offered that first year to 18 courses that second year. So it wasn't huge growth, but the number of students grew. And then the pandemic hit. And so we shut down schools in March. Everybody said, Hey, how are we going to make this work to do some online resources for our kids, Matt and Allison, can you go help put a plan together? So we tried to build that really quickly in July. We found out we're also going to be offering a fully online option for everybody paid pre-K through 12th in the district.”
“They just expanded my program to cover pre-K through 12,” said Fisher. “And we had 7,200 students that year. We also already had 2100 hybrid students in the high school level who were going to take our courses with us. So that left us with both options. And we ended up moving 681 teachers. About 300 of those were fully online. And the rest of those were supplemented. We might not have enough health science where we needed a full-time health science teacher, but that teacher would teach at their building and teach for us. Now you can see where this is leading. We ended up with teachers who were teaching remotely in-person with kids that were quarantined and teaching online, doing all the things and trying to learn an LMS in the same year. So last year was difficult as an understatement for our teachers and our students, but with the instructional technology restructuring, we started seeing that that progression really helped us in a more proactive sense this year. The state did come out with some new guidelines in April, where we ended up changing it. We actually became two schools, K-8 and high school.I am the principal for the high school that we've opened. So I can only talk specifically about those high school numbers, but we have 252 students that are fully enrolled with us and 3,200 hybrid students that are still attending their high schools and enrolled with them 78 part-time teachers that are building teachers for the most part, but either teach one or two sections with me and then 18 full-time. And that structure has really, really looked different for us.”
It is absolutely amazing to see how Matt and Allison moved the pieces around to rethink, redo and remake the educational structure through the pandemic and beyond. Their service to the district has been remarkable, and in that modern definition of leadership through service, Matt and Allison continue to serve as they lay it all out for you to see. There is a lot to learn here, and you’ll want to take it all in, then take it all home to use at your own school or district. It’s new leadership for a new age, and you’re sure to be a star back home as you help lead your staff into a better learning environment.
