The case study, The Family Learning Center Charter School: Leadership and Accountability at a Crossroads by James R. Detert and Natalie R. Detert (2001), brought to light many issues faced with opening a charter school. The goal of a charter school is to create an innovated learning experience in which students choose to attend. As with opening any new school, Jennings was faced with many challenges, the majority of which fell into one of three categories: finance, leadership, and instruction.
According to Glanz (2006), in Operational Leadership, mechanisms need to be established to ensure monies are allocated for their intended purposes (p. 52). While Jennings received start-up funds from the government, he did not have a specific plan in place to designate where the funds were going to be spent, or how to get additional funding. In opening a charter school, Jennings had the opportunity to be creative in directing resources directly to impact student learning. While he had the right mentality on investing time and money on teacher trainings, at the beginning of the school year, I believe he spent too much time on philosophy and not enough time on real teacher issues, such
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From the start, I believe that Jennings had not set his staff up for success. Jennings should have had better foresight for the instructional needs of his school. First of all, he had not acquisitioned funding for the entire school year which resulted in unnecessary stress and lack of raises for the staff. Secondly, he hired inexperienced teachers to teach a new, innovative model without any substantial professional development, curriculum, evaluation system, or leadership. The school was run by Jennings’ company from afar, and the teachers were to handle all of the daily operations. This meant there was no principal or lead teacher to assist, mentor, or provide