RESEARCH
Appointed Superintendent shared the following: A contributing factor to the success was the chemistry that made it work. I went to clubs and talked to them and went around and talked about what was going on. I told them what great character they had and they were hard working folks and we need to focus on the good things. Forty items had to be corrected. And I talked with the groups and they wanted to point and make someone accountable. They wanted blood. My answer was forty items and we know this to be fact – this is not complicated – so I suggested we set up a strategic plan. We would break it down into semi-goals with 10 for each year and hopefully after four years all of it will be done. (Interview, 2004)
The Logan County Board of Education was also considered to be critical to the overall success of the takeover. Getting the local board to work collaboratively and cooperatively during the takeover was essential to providing the training needed to maintain or sustain the improvements. According to the interviews conducted in this study, the structural aspect of change was in re-teaching the staff to follow state code and instructional operations without permitting political infiltration. One administrator provided the following as testimony to the structural aspect of change when asked about sustaining success:
When the state existed, I don’t think there were any procedures that changed. Like I said, we had been trained. and we had been drilled on how to do things correctly. And even though we had a new superintendent, that new superintendent was the assistant superintendent under the State-Appointed Superintendent so he still had some of that training. But during that time and this is really kind of ironic, too, the farther you get removed from the state takeover, the more things have reverted back. It was from doing things the correct way and as board members changed, those board members who weren’t involved in the state takeover didn’t know or that didn’t have that training background, and the reversion process was beginning to take place again. (Interview, 2004)
The interviewed subjects believed that there were two sub-characteristics of process: training and relationships. Training, defined as content area staff development and specialized instruction in state code and policy, was identified as an important component of the sustained success. Of the administrators interviewed, 29% identified training and staff development as essential. One administrator provided the following as evidence:
Money was not a major problem. They were in the red a little at the first board meeting, but it wasn’t a major concern. It wasn’t really in that bad of a shape. Textbooks were up to date. That wasn’t a problem. They also had the expertise, but they did need to be trained on how to use the expertise to make change and come up to the standards. As
Spring 2011 Vol. 8 No. 1 Virginia Educational Leadership 83
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