Leadership Stretched Over School and Community for Refugee Newcomers

Abstract

This case study explores how multiple leaders of an elementary school, which unexpectedly received 25 Hmong refugee students, addressed the needs of the students and families by cooperating with a community organization. FAST (Families and Schools Together), an after-school program created to increase parent involvement to help their children succeed in school, became one of the components of the leadership practice for the newcomers. Leaders from the school, the Hmong ethnic community, and the local social work organization collaborated to recruit staff and parents, to customize the program for the particular needs of the refugee families who had arrived to settle in the United States. With the perspective of distributed leadership, the analysis presents how leadership practice was socially and situationally distributed among multiple leaders, followers, and the program. In the analysis section, the author discusses (a) the three types of social distribution: collaborated, collective, and coordinated distribution, and (b) how the program constrains and enables the conditions of leadership practice.