| This qualitative case study investigated the leaders' concepts of the youth leadership development program at an urban public high school and the structures that support it, as manifest in the alignment of the principals' vision of leadership with their strategies to communicate this vision to young people. It examined how the school/community-based organization partnership structured youth leadership offerings. The data indicate that the youth leadership program is in a process of transition as the high school and community organization adjust to school leadership changes and rigorous national accountability measures. The findings reveal that the three principals' youth leadership development conceptions align to differing degrees with the program's goals, as do the structures, process, and methods they use to foster the program's goals---largely in response to school performance pressures. The results also reveal that the principal's program goals differ in the degree of their alignment with students' experiences of the program. Both graduates of the school and current students experienced rich experiential learning opportunities implemented by the founding principal, gaining global awareness and skills to lead in the crafting of solutions to local and global problems. The data indicate that the school programming has bifurcated---a more narrow youth leadership development program structure versus the community organization's broader constructivist, technology-embedded approach. Despite a distancing between the current principal and the community organization, the data reveal that avenues for renewed cooperation are currently opening up, potentially enabling the school to recreate the model for school-community partnership vis-a-vis youth leadership development. |
