Superintendent

Lebanon School Corporation
Lebanon, IN

Ralph Walker, principal of Clinton Central Junior-Senior High School in Michigantown, has made it a personal commitment to spearhead a school-wide literacy campaign. Working with the school librarian, Mr. Walker developed a program that promotes daily reading for pleasure and involves all students at the school. In the last five years, this program, coupled with a vocabulary-building exercise, has played a significant role in improving students' literacy, reading habits and reading preferences. When Mr. Walker took on the leadership of his school, he instituted the seventh-grade program to address the 55% rate of seventh-graders failing in one or more of their subject areas. Seventh-graders were assigned to a core team of four teachers who have used team-teaching, a thematically integrated interdisciplinary curriculum, and who encouraged parent involvement to increase the rate of passing grades to 93%.