UC Davis

Students in county-run schools have endured exceptional degrees of trauma and are, from an equity lens, amongst the most deserving of resources and services. School- and system-level leaders are uniquely positioned to provide students with resources to meet their needs and to take a whole child/person approach to create a school climate of warmth, respect, and student-centered learning. This qualitative study examined how leaders and student-serving staff work together to advance educational equity for students within a county-run school. For the purpose of this study, I defined educational equity as seeing and knowing each student as an individual, with specific assets and needs and determining and offering whatever is necessary for every student to thrive socially and emotionally and to meet their goals (Villani, 2020). I used a conceptual framework for equity-centered leadership to examine how leaders think, what they do, and where they focus their efforts to create the conditions for all student-serving staff to center equity in their daily work. This study demonstrated that leaders who center equity focus first and foremost on positive, values-driven relationships, which create a culture of trust and respect. In so doing, leaders in this study created the conditions for student-serving staff to build strong relationships with students and empower students to have agency over their own learning. The study also illuminated the ways that leaders who center equity use continuous improvement approaches that honor relationships with staff. Last, this study demonstrated that leading a county-run school by centering relationships and putting students’ needs first poses unique challenges for leaders. Keywords: educational equity, leadership, continuous improvement, whole child/person.