Project Change

A Partnership to Prepare Tomorrow's Leaders

The Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies has been awarded a School Leadership Grant by the United States Department of Education. Project Change: A Partnership to Prepare Tomorrow’s Leaders has been funded for up to three years. The grant is one of 24 awarded nation-wide, out of 155 proposals submitted. Debbie Leidner will serve as Project Manager and Principal Investigator, and ELPS Department Chair Rick Castallo will serve as Co-Principal Investigator.

The goal of this project is to strengthen the secondary schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District by producing educational leaders who will act as "change agents" to lead the organizational, instructional and operational challenges of school reform. California State University, Northridge's School of Education will team with the School of Business and Economics, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce in a collaboration to:

1. create a recruiting model that incorporates leadership practices from both education and business to build a diverse pool of secondary candidates;
2. prepare fifty new secondary candidates trained as "change agents" available for placement in urban schools;
3. train mentors to support and develop current and future administrators;
4. build the capacity current secondary administrators to lead school reform and increase the administrator retention rate with multiple-level support resources; and
5. train CSUN Educational Leadership faculty to sustain the new education- business-community model.

For additional information at CSUN, contact Dr. Deborah Leidner or Dr. Richard Castallo.