Blazing New Trails - Connexions

110 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SHARED LEADERSHIP
needs of the administrators who administered them. A more recent contribution to the state of
rural special education administration came from Bays (2001). He asserted that in rural school
districts, the supervision of instruction in special education classrooms was assigned to
principals who balanced competing priorities such as management and supervision,
monitoring for legal compliance and supervision of instruction for students with disabilities,
and evaluation of teachers and supervision of instruction. Bays (2001) suggested that this may
be placing compliance and management aspects of IDEA over actual instructional support.
The dearth of research about the role of rural school administrators and the
administration of special education programs limits the understanding about how special
education programs are administered in rural and often isolated schools in states such as
Montana, Wyoming and Alaska. Concurrently, we know little about who does the specific
tasks necessary in administering effective special education programs in rural schools. This
study was designed to establish a descriptive understanding about the tasks associated with
leadership in small rural school districts. From the preliminary descriptive data gathered in
this study, we were able to contribute to baseline information necessary to improve rural
education leadership and leadership preparation.
METHODOLOGY
The participants in this study included 30 small school district superintendents,
superintendent/principals, and principals whose districts were members of the Montana Rural
Education Association (MREA). The superintendents of the 150 MREA member districts
received a request to complete the special education functions survey. They were further
asked to forward the survey request to the principals in their districts. Of the 30 respondents
completing surveys, 19 were superintendents, three were superintendent/principals, and eight
were principals. More than 70% of the respondents had more than 7 years of experience and
only 7 % had less than 3 years of experience in their current position. More than half of those
sampled had more than 25 years of experience as educators.
Most (73.3%) of the respondents worked in K-12 school districts, and the remaining
respondents worked in K-8 school districts. The mean enrollment in the districts was 353
students with a range of 56 students to 1200 students.
This study piloted a survey created by the researchers. The 49 survey items listed in
Table 1 collectively described the administrative special education functions in schools that
the participants were asked to answer by indicating one of the following four forced-choice
responses:
1. Not Delegated = You address this task yourself.
2. Partially Delegated to Subordinate = You substantially address this task with some
delegation to a subordinate (a district employee) in your district or school.
3. Substantially Delegated to Subordinate = You delegate this task to someone else (a
district employee) in your district or school.
4. Substantially Delegated Outside District = This task is fully or substantially
addressed by someone (NOT a district employee) in a consortium, cooperative, or
some other entity acting on the district’s behalf.