Clay Elementary to become a ‘Leader in Me’ school

By Crystal McGough

For The Tribune

When students returned to Clay Elementary School on Jan. 8 after Christmas break, they were met by an unexpected surprise. The teachers and administrative staff welcomed their students back with loud, upbeat music playing outside at the car drop-off.

“That was one of the things the teachers agreed on that would be great,” Principal Dr. Sharon Gallant said, in reference to a workshop the teachers had attended the previous Friday.

The workshop, Creating Culture, was one of several that the Clay Elementary staff has gone through this school year as beginning steps toward implementing The Leader In Me, a framework based on Stephen R. Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Pictured (L-R) Davin Galvin, Dr. Sharon Gallant, Muriel Summers, Jacqnaii Finkley.
Photo credit Davin Galvin

Roughly 29 years ago, Covey’s book was published and has since gone on to sell millions of copies. Several follow-up books have been written, applying Covey’s seven habits to families, teens and other areas.

One such adaptation is a book that was a collaborative effort between Covey and an elementary school principal from North Carolina, Muriel Summers. The book, The Leader In Me, became a tool for teachers to bring the seven habits into elementary schools and teach them to young children in a way that the children could understand and apply to their lives.

According to Summers, there are now over 3,500 schools across the world that are teaching students Covey’s seven habits through The Leader In Me and similar programs.

Now, Clay Elementary is among the most recent schools to adopt this tool.

“Last year I took my teachers through the book study,” Gallant said. “It’s (Summers’) story of how they developed it at their school. It’s kind of an evolving thing as the school personnel see something different they can do, so it’s not like a program that gets stale.”

Gallant has gone through training on the seven habits three different times during her years as an educator. While brainstorming ways to improve the school, the presentations she had been to came back to her, and she realized that it was a potential answer.

After presenting the idea to the teachers and providing them with The Leader In Me books, she began thinking about how the school would come up with the funding to fully launch the program. That is where the City of Clay stepped in and made it possible for the Clay Elementary staff to go through The Leader In Me training.

“The City of Clay has been very gracious, and they have basically funded what it takes for us to have these private trainings with a certified facilitator,” Gallant said. “We are very appreciative to them.”

The Clay Elementary staff started with a training session on the seven habits at the beginning of the school year, before the students’ first day. Next, they went through a one-day training in October, called Launching Leadership, to familiarize the staff with launching the program in the school and presenting it to the students.

On Jan. 5, Dr. Gallant and her staff went through their latest training, Creating Culture. Due to a scheduling conflict with the FranklinCovey facilitator, who had been working with Clay Elementary during the previous trainings, Summers came to oversee the Creating Culture training.

“If you ask me, God works in mysterious ways,” Gallant said. “Our facilitator, just by the way it was meant to work out, was Ms. Summers’ daughter. So Ms. Summers, herself, the lady that wrote the book and developed the program, she came to actually deliver the workshop information and everything to us. It was a pretty big deal. She’s not normally a facilitator. She is a school principal in North Carolina, and she has her typical commitments. So it was a pretty big deal for Ms. Summers, herself, to come and train us.”

During the Creating Culture workshop, the teachers sat around a table brainstorming ideas of things they could all work on simultaneously to make the school better.

In addition to the musical back-to-school welcome, all of the teachers, from kindergarten through fifth grade, agreed that they would stand at their doors at the beginning of each class to personally greet each of their students.

“That’s just one little thing that the teachers decided as a large group we are all going to start doing,” Gallant said. “We’re going to be there for our kids, and they are going to expect that we are going to give them a personal greeting every morning when they come in.”

Gallant said that the ideas for bettering the school came straight from the teachers, not from herself or Vice Principal Jacqnaii Finkley.

“There were three or four things that we all agreed on, and it wasn’t coming from me,” she said. “This was coming from the teachers, because any leader knows if it’s all you and your idea, and its just the way I want it, that commitment’s not built from within, teachers don’t have ownership. So those things did not come from me. I purposefully kind of kept my mouth shut, where they didn’t feel like it was a ‘me’ thing. Mr. Finkley, our assistant principal, did basically the same way.”

Some of the teachers have already begun teaching Covey’s seven habits to their students, but Gallant said that there is not a lot of visible evidence of the program in the school at the moment.

“This year, we’re getting our feet wet,” she said. “We are learning the information that we need to know, and we’re trying to practice it and get good at it before we launch a full-scale program. We have been told by other schools that have done this, and we’ve even been told by the FranklinCovey people, themselves, be a Crock-Pot, don’t be a microwave. In other words, don’t try to bite off so much that you overwhelm yourselves. Go slow and bring this to the students on a timeline that your school agrees is doable without burdening the teachers with just one more thing.”

From August until now, Gallant has put together a “Lighthouse Team” of teachers who have volunteered to meet after school and at extra times to make decisions on their next steps.

The goal is for these steps to eventually lead to students taking responsibility for several things at the school that adults are currently taking responsibility for.

“It’s really just trying to help every student find where their strength is, or in (FranklinCovey’s) words, find the greatness in themselves, because a lot of our kids are lacking that nowadays,” Gallant said. “Like, it could be the announcements in the morning over the intercom. There’s no reason that I can’t work with a group of students to be the announcers.

“There’s a school (where) the child has the classroom job of being the carpenter, but the carpenter is really the pencil sharpener for the day. So you’re bringing out career emphasis, too, when you’re doing that, and sometimes the kids, themselves, work with the teacher to come up with the job responsibility titles.”

Gallant told a story about a boy at Clay Elementary who, during the fall, saw her sweeping leaves out of the school’s foyer and offered to do the job for her. Since that day, the boy has taken the initiative to sweep the foyer every morning without being asked to, she said.

“I’m always looking for that child that really needs an area to shine in,” she said. “We’re going to have those natural born leaders anyway, and we do still want to uplift and support them, too, but everybody has that potential in them.”

One thing that Gallant said she is looking forward to next year is a student-led leadership day.

“The leadership programs that I have been to, there has not been one adult to speak at a leadership day,” she said. “It has, from beginning to end, been directed by students. From welcoming the adults and visitors, to coordinating what we would have for a little snack and drink for visitors, to the music…that would be the type of leadership day that I think we would aspire to, because it truly says, ‘Students can be leaders and they can be at an early age.”

Gallant’s long-term hope is that the program will not only change the culture of the school, but infiltrate the students’ families and the entire community, as well.

“For schools that have been doing this program for a few years, it’s gone out into the families of the community and into the community, itself,” she said. “That would just be icing on the cake if we could get to that point one day. It’s one of those things that you’re excited to see where it’s going to go and how it’s going to help our families in our community.”

The Leader In Me framework was developed as a result of the efforts of Summers, principal at A. B. Combs Magnet Elementary School, after her school district challenged her to create a model for their school that was unlike any other.

“Our school was in need of transformation,” Summers said. “We brought together key stakeholders, which were our parents, our children, our teachers. We had community leaders involved. We invited university staff and personnel to come in, and we posed a question: If you could create your ideal school, what would it look like, sound like and feel like?”

The feedback was abundant. Parents wanted to build relationships with the teachers, and wanted teachers who truly knew and loved their children. Teachers wanted kind, respectful children who were eager to learn.

“Our children wanted teachers who loved them and gave them challenging and fun work to do,” Summers said. “I remember that so vividly. But children also wanted to feel as if they were part of a class where they felt they belonged, and they had a voice.”

University professors and business owners alike wanted young adults to come to them prepared with “soft skills” such as honesty, integrity, time management, strong work ethic and loyalty.

After receiving this feedback, Summers heard Covey speak in Washington D. C.

“I asked him the question, ‘Could you teach these habits to little children?’ His response was, ‘I don’t know why not, and if you do anything with it, let me know.’ We started hammering away at Dr. Covey’s work and aligning it with children’s literature and the curricular that we were required to teach.”

After seeing results in several areas, Summers called Covey and told him they it was working, and that she believed it could make a difference at other schools, as well. The FranklinCovey organization began working with Summers to create the framework that would become The Leader In Me.

“(There was) improved student achievement, decrease in behavioral referrals,” Summers said. “Discipline as we had known it was no longer an issue for us because this work makes a difference in the culture of any organization, and we saw that immediately. Our test scores rose considerably, parent satisfaction was at an all-time high because we involved our parents in the training, as well. It was really a community effort to transform our school through the seven habits. Parents were loving it. Students were loving it. The results were there.”

When Summers’ daughter, Banks Summers, told her that she was not going to be able to do the Creating Culture training at Clay Elementary, Summers said she would be happy to step in and lead the workshop.

“I had heard about Clay, and what a wonderful little community school it is,” Summers said. “The moment I drove in their school parking lot, I felt that I was going to something special. I so enjoyed hearing the vision that they had for their school and for their community at large.”

Summers said that her primary job at the workshop was helping the staff see where they were in the process of building the framework, and what their next steps and timeline should be. It takes about a year for schools to truly infuse The Leader In Me and the seven habits into their school’s culture, she said.

“The commitment is certainly there, and they have all the right ingredients to make great things happen there,” Summers said. “I think they are well on their way to be one of the showcase schools for this work. But it does take time, and they have made the commitment. They have created a timeline of what they want to accomplish by when. They also have made a commitment to the non-negotiables, if you will, of what everyone has committed to doing at the school as a whole.”

Summers praised Clay Elementary, saying that of all the schools she’s seen, she would place Clay in her top 10 list.

“Clay is an amazing school with a staff that has a heart for making a difference,” she said. “I was blown away by the caliber of teachers and the commitment and passion of the school administrators there. You all are fortunate to have that school in your community. As a parent, I would have my child at Clay Elementary all day long, because what I saw was the heart and the love and the passion for why teachers go into education to begin with. What I felt there was that teaching was not an occupation for them, it was a calling.”