An effective school leader has the skills to create, implement, evaluate, improve, and share a staff development plan. I met with Ben Rhodes, principal of Sandy Creek Middle School, to interview him about specific elements of his annual staff development plan. We began with the design process by focusing on district and school goals. The district's goals include improving literacy in all content areas in reading and writing and the Guaranteed Vital Curriculum (GVC). Guaranteed Vital Technology (GVT) and Closing the Achievement Gap (Equity in Excellence). Using a variety of assessments to focus on specific needs, Ben Rhodes and Mary Sonya, our pupil achievement specialist, examined CSAP, Explore, MAP and RAD data. They use the Colorado Growth Model to help them determine whether students have made adequate yearly progress. Together, they created the plan that included the district goals mentioned above, as well as continuing to include new technology skills, information about changes in special education with Response to Intervention (RTI), maintaining current staff implementation of the goals of literacy and a new goal of increasing mathematics achievement. In deciding how to meet the skill needs of teaching staff, Ben starts with the hiring process. Knowing what the goals of our School Improvement Plan are, your interview questions include specific skills and knowledge that will help Falcon Creek students reach these achievement goals. Mr Rhodes is very clear about his high expectations of teaching staff. She currently attends the University of Denver's PHD program in Educational Leadership and uses her knowledge of best practices research. Its assessments of staff learning needs are gathered from a variety of sources that include feedbac... middle of paper......the district trains staff with new technology tools that will include netbooks, mounted projectors, peripheral technologies , new student achievement reporting system (also known as RAD and DAS systems running on Brio software), new access points, which centralizes the management console, so students and staff can connect to the CCSD wireless network at all school sites. Training will also be provided to refine the RTI process using district and school goals, assessing needs using the right data, planning specific content and processes to teach best instructional practices, providing resources to ensure success, measuring success, and providing frequent feedback, adapting practices as needed to ensure success. implementing, evaluating and improving the strategies and then sharing the plan with the community were key to ensuring maximum student performance.