The Leadership in Action Network (LAN), coordinated through the Truman Pierce Institute (TPI), a research and outreach center in the College of Education at Auburn University, is a comprehensive initiative involving eight impoverished school districts in rural Alabama with a total student population of 26,867 students: Bullock County Schools, Dallas County Schools, Fayette County Schools, Hale County Schools, Lee County Schools (Loachapoka), Macon County Schools, Sumter County Schools, and Tallapoosa County Schools. These school districts were selected for participation in this program for three reasons: existence of an already established working relationship between TPI leadership and the administrators in each district, helping to ensure the success of programming; the high poverty levels exemplified by percentages of students on free/reduced lunch (75.2%) and the numbers of children living below the poverty level (36%); and all struggle to meet school improvement goals for student achievement (40% have a failure rate in at least one area). 

The purposes of the Leadership in Action Network are to:

• create a sustainable leadership capacity-building and action-research network aimed at improving instructional leadership through professional development and action research,
• take steps to increase student leadership capacity, and 
• investigate the effectiveness of these networks in solving issues common to the districts.

  Strategies for accomplishing these goals include the following:

• Further developing the capacity of local districts to identify and effectively network with local resources (people, businesses, local or other funding) and to form mutually beneficial partnerships with stakeholders.
• Identifying nontraditional student leaders, those young people with potential who have not made wise choices and/or have not performed to their potential, as well as traditional student leaders in grades 5-12 to participate in leadership capacity-building training so they may serve as active participants in the action research networks. Student involvement helps to develop greater self-efficacy, resulting in improved school success.
• Having students and teachers work collaboratively with administrators to identify and resolve educational concerns, allowing all parties to become empowered, gain new insights about long-standing issues, take responsibility for issue resolution and educational reforms, and achieve a greater sense of buy-in for changes.
• Using these approaches to create a system for fostering innovation and success through collective reflection, dialogue, and research-based action.

The Leadership in Action Network has been developed based on the lessons learned from our work with previous initiatives such as the West Alabama Learning Coalition, also supported by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, leadership academies such as the Instructional Improvement Institutes and Sustaining School Success programs, and from information obtained from needs assessments conducted in each of these school districts. Participants requested more networking opportunities, leadership and grant writing training, visitations to other districts, student leadership development, professional development, opportunities to collaborate, and local coordinators to facilitate communications; we have built these requests into programming through LAN.

The Leadership in Action Network (LAN) program appears to be successfully creating a sustainable leadership capacity-building and research network among eight school districts in rural Alabama. Selected quotes below illustrate the views of two participants:

What it has done for me is it helps me to focus on and remember the leadership capacity of the students, and how that is an untapped resource that we tend to ignore in education. (interview with an assistant principal)

I'd say this is a project with great potential. The reason I think it has great potential is because it is a project that has involved the students, and all levels of students. They have put together not only the obvious, normal, student leaders, but also the leaders who have the same type of leadership capability but are maybe involved in less popular groups or are actually discipline problems. They have leadership potential, but it is not focused. With that kind of group, you get a wide variety of views, and if we can make all those views work together we can get a pretty rich solution for some issues. (interview with an assistant principal)