High School Principal

Are you excited and ready to make an impact in a collaborative, engaging, diverse, and high energy environment? We are seeking a talented and experienced principal to lead our new and growing high school. We want a culturally, instructionally and operationally proficient leader who is passionate about equity, furthering student achievement and providing a safe space for students to learn and grow. Our principal will bring the following skills & attributes to the role:

Visionary Leadership

Vision: Build and act on the vision for Veritas Prep High School that has been informed, continually refined and strengthened through student and family input, student data, best practice research, and community input.

Reflection & Feedback: Reflect on their leadership behaviors and practice, seek feedback and demonstrate a willingness to hear and apply it and continuously improve.

Communications: Establish consistent, reliable, and clear communications and engagement opportunities with multiple stakeholders to reinforce the “why” behind the vision, and reflect how new initiatives and any shifts are connected to it. The school leader adapts their own messages and actions to speak to and resonate with each audience, addressing their unique questions or needs.

Prioritization of Equity: Set clear priorities that advance racial equity, think critically, and seek input in decision-making through deliberate processes that elevate the voices of the most marginalized and of those who will be most impacted by the decision.

Thoughtful Decision-Making: Stay calm and level-headed under pressure; take well-thought out, often non-traditional, decisive action to achieve desired results for students that are tangible and measurable.

Operational Excellence: Able to set and work against a budget, adhere to state and federal laws and regulations, manage staff, and establish systems and a schedule that best serve students and enable staff to work effectively.

Instructional Leadership

We seek a principal with the knowledge and experience to build, support and empower our high school staff to create healthy and sustaining learning environments and consistently deliver excellent and equitable instruction with an eye toward college readiness.

High-Quality Instructional Materials: Support and advocate for the adoption and implementation of high quality, culturally responsive and standards aligned instructional materials. 

Professional Development: Support the development of professional learning that is timely and relevant and equips teachers to effectively provide high quality and effective instruction. 

Instructional Excellence: Monitor and ensure high quality, culturally responsive instructional practices among teachers and staff to advance learning for every student. 

Use of Data: Consistently examine and use disaggregated data to support calls for change in practice or instructional approach, paying close attention to inequities and gaps for historically marginalized students.

Leadership in Equity

Our principal believes deeply in the potential for every student to succeed, and work tirelessly each day to create an anti-racist school environment that is built around high expectations, an inclusive and welcoming culture, and an expectation of excellence for all.

Passion for Students: Require all educators in the school to maintain and model a similar asset-based perspective of students and families and commitment to student learning, growth, and opportunity. Our school leaders maintain and continue to model this confidence in every student even when the students demonstrate that they struggle to believe in themselves.

Family Partnerships: Able to build authentic relationships with students, families and communities to enable learning partnerships. Support educators in establishing genuine partnership with families, intentionally learn from families, and encourage family involvement in classrooms and school. Ensure proactive and positive outreach to families and partners so that they may engage meaningfully with school in traditional and non-traditional ways.

Culture: Embrace all student cultures and native languages, and engage and lead others in creating opportunities for the full community to celebrate and learn from them through linguistic and culture-sustaining experiences

Awareness: Ensures regular opportunities for educators to build awareness of their own cultural identities, lenses and biases through text-based dialogue and activities that enable educators to identify, confront and disrupt biases and racism.

Confronting Racism: Actively confronts racism, stereotypes and biases and empowers the school community - educators, students, families and partners - to do the same.

Team Building

Our principal will purposefully recruit, select, and support an experienced and diverse team who can work together to ensure the success of all students in the building.

Staffing: Ensure practices that yield and retain staff that have an asset-based mindset and fervent belief in the students and families served by the school. Place staff in roles that play to their strengths and enable them to have the greatest impact on students.

Growth: Facilitate the growth of individuals through ongoing, actionable feedback and evaluation; creates and empowers educators to seek out stretch opportunities; and coaches and mentors teachers to achieve the school mission and grow together.

Collaboration: Provide space for staff to engage in collaborative work to meet their immediate needs and build their longer-term capacity through common planning, coaching, mentoring, and other opportunities for growth and collaboration.

Feedback: Provide and support others to provide real-time personalized, actionable feedback and opportunities so staff can celebrate their wins, and identify areas where they need to improve. Hold staff members accountable to changes in their practice to best serve students.

Distributed Leadership: Practice, model, and encourage distributed and shared leadership. Provide coaching and clear pathways for others to grow into leadership roles.

Culture & Community Building

Our principal creates and maintains a safe, supportive and sustaining school community and an environment for learning in which all students and their families feel welcome.

Collaborative Culture: Demonstrates an ethic of care. Create and sustain a school culture of “we” vs. “I”, with partnership and collaboration for all of the adults across the building, including teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, custodial staff, families and partners.

Engagement: Value and harness the strengths of families through a demonstrated commitment to frequent, meaningful and authentic communication and partnership/engagement opportunities.

Diversity: Creates and supports the development of inclusive efforts to celebrate student culture and diversity.

Safe Space: Create a psychologically safe space for all students, families and staff, where they feel consistently heard, seen, valued and respected. Understands federal, state, and local laws and regulations including laws on disability, civil rights and responsibilities, issues of liabilities, and requirements of due process.

Qualifications - Required:

• Masters in Education Leadership or similar field of study
• Possession of a valid Massachusetts School Principal License or proof of successful completion of MA-PAL.
• Minimum 5 years experience as a school leader, preferably as principal
• Current authorization to work in the United States – a candidate must have such authorization by his or her first day of employment

Qualifications - Preferred:

• Teaching and leadership experience in an urban public school, ideally in Springfield
• School start up or restructuring experience
• High School leadership experience

Veritas Prep Charter School offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package that includes health, vision, and dental insurance; enrollment in the Massachusetts Teachers Retirement System (MTRS); short- and long-term disability insurance paid in full by the school, Employee Assistance Program, paid family leave, health reimbursement account (HRA), flexible spending account (FSA), and more.

About Veritas Prep

Veritas Prep is a public, tuition-free school in Springfield that prepares students in grades 5 through 12 to compete, achieve, and succeed in college and beyond. Veritas Prep accelerates every student’s path to college and career by helping them set a strong academic foundation in middle school and guaranteeing access to college classes and college prep support in our wall-to-wall early-college high school.

At Veritas Prep, we are not only breaking down barriers to college access but also providing the tools students need to persist through college and prepare for a successful career. Our middle school program has been serving students in Springfield since 2012 and is one of the top middle schools in Springfield. Our scholars are supported by skilled, dedicated, and diverse teachers and are challenged to achieve at high levels academically, socially, and emotionally, setting them up for success as they enter our high school.

Our early-college high school program, in partnership with STCC and Worcester State University, prepares students to earn high-impact college degrees, saving students up to two years’ time in college and thousands of dollars. Students can earn up to an associate degree for free, and the general studies associate degree from STCC means students enter as JUNIORS at any Massachusetts public college or university after high school graduation.

Students at Veritas Prep benefit from high academic standards and robust support, an exceptional learning environment, a diverse staff of high-quality educators, a strong commitment to social/emotional and practical skill development, and an inclusive, anti-racist community that values the identities and backgrounds of all students.