The School District Where Principals Also Teach
July 28, 2017
By: Denisa R. Superville
Source: Education Week
The common lament is that principals have extraordinarily demanding and near impossible jobs.
Setting class schedules. Evaluating teachers. Drafting school budgets. Overseeing school bus drop-off and pick-up.
But Dana McCauley, a principal in the Garrett County school system in western Maryland, does all of that—and more.
For the past 15 years, McCauley has been the principal and a teacher at Crellin Elementary School, in the small town of Oakland, where she dedicates at least three hours a day to the classroom. Her primary subject is math, but in the last year she taught reading and the school’s agriculture and environmental science curriculum.
And McCauley is not the only teaching principal. In the district of 3,700 students, four of the eight elementary principals are pulling double-duty. They’ve been doing so for more than 20 years, according to Barbara Baker, Garrett County’s superintendent.
Baker, who has been with the district for nearly 30 years and was also a teaching principal early in her administrative career, said…