Director of School Design

Director of School Design - SY26

The Director of School Design is an embedded experienced leader who partners directly with a school’s Executive Director (ED),site leadership team, and Senior Director of Innovation to redesign the student, adult, and operational experience of the school. The Director leads a multi-year transformation plan aligned to Summit’s Future Ready School vision, ensuring that design decisions are community-rooted, evidence-informed, operationally feasible, and implemented with fidelity.

The Director of School Design owns deep, sustained design, piloting and implementation at one site. They report to the Senior Director of Innovation and serve as a cross-functional bridge between Marshall Innovation and the school-site team.

Who We Are

What if all students graduated high school with the knowledge, skills and habits they need to lead a fulfilled life? This is the question that guides our mission at Summit Public Schools.

To collectively prepare a diverse community of young people with the skills, knowledge, and habits to attain economic empowerment and success in a chosen concrete next step toward a fulfilled life. We operate 10 schools serving over 3,300 students in the Bay Area and Washington state. 100% of Summit graduates are college ready and Summit graduates complete college at double the national average.

We need exceptional, diverse, and mission-aligned teachers to join our team to help prepare our students for a fulfilled life. Join us!

What You’ll Do: School Redesign Leadership

• Co-lead, with the Senior Director of Innovation and the site ED, a multi-year redesign and turnaround strategy for the school in alignment to the Future Ready School Model.

• Diagnose root challenges and opportunities in culture, instruction, schedule/time, student supports, and operations; translate these into a sequenced transformation plan.

• Facilitate site-based design cycles with educators, students, families, and community partners.

• Ensure the school’s redesign remains coherent, realistic, and measurable and is integrated into day-to-day school leadership priorities.

• Model a “learn fast, build smart” mindset—keeping urgency high while maintaining trust and collaboration.

Community Engagement & Co-Design

• Engage a diverse set of stakeholders—students, families, educators, alumni, and community partners—to surface aspirations, concerns, and local context that must shape the redesign.

• Design and facilitate inclusive, well-run community learning sessions (listening tours, design charrettes, town halls, student focus groups, caregiver convenings) that build shared ownership for change.

• Translate community input into clear design requirements, tradeoffs, and priorities for the three-year turnaround plan.

• Build and sustain partnerships with local organizations and employers that can power real-world learning, internships, and community-anchored projects.

• Ensure engagement practices are culturally responsive, accessible, and transparent, with feedback loops that show stakeholders how their input influenced decisions.

Embedded Pilot Design & Implementation

• Design and run site-based pilots that test key components of Summit 3.0 within the school context (e.g., flexible time, AI-enabled tools, real-world learning structures, assessment/credit innovations).

• Define success metrics tied to student outcomes and school health; monitor progress and adapt quickly.

• Partner with teachers and school leadership to plan, launch, and refine pilots; remove barriers and provide hands-on implementation support.

• Produce mid-year and end-of-year learning summaries for the Studio and site leadership.

Change Management & Capacity Building

• Support adult learning and change management to ensure that new practices are understood, owned, and sustained by school staff.

• Build internal leadership capacity by coaching teacher leaders and administrators through redesign decisions and implementation.

• Support hiring, onboarding, and role realignment at the site as needed to enable the redesigned model.

• Help establish the school’s culture and operating rhythms required for long-term sustainability.

Cross-Functional Bridge to Marshall Innovation

• Serve as the primary conduit between the school site and the Marshall Innovation, ensuring tight alignment to the multi-year roadmap.

• Document design choices, promising practices, and implementation lessons.

• Communicate to capture site-level stories, artifacts, and evidence for internal/external learning.

• Inform network-wide codification and scaling with grounded insights from site implementation.

Who You Are Key Qualities & Skills

• Deep belief in Summit’s mission and in the need to transform public high schools for a future-ready world.

• Strong school-design and systems-thinking skillset: you can see the whole school as an interconnected system and redesign it accordingly.

• Expert at translating vision into practical implementation, with a bias toward action and iteration.

• Highly collaborative and comfortable leading without formal authority in a shared-power environment.

• Skilled facilitator who can bring diverse stakeholders into a coherent design and change process.

• Data-informed and research-literate; able to set metrics, read signals, and adjust course.

• Thrives in ambiguity and rapid learning cycles; nimble in the face of real-world school constraints.

• Excellent communicator, especially in writing clear plans, briefs, and artifacts.

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in school leadership as a Principal or Director, educational innovation, program design, or turnaround work.

• Demonstrated success leading complex change initiatives in schools or youth-serving systems.

• Track Record of Results

• Experience leading R & D to pilot and scaling new instructional, cultural, or operational models.

• Excitement and potential experience in integrated opportunities using Ai and other technologies to support learning outcomes, experience design and supporting students in postsecondary pathways

• Expertise and experience with continuous improvement, human-centered design, and research translation.

• Proficiency with Google Workspace and comfort with emerging technologies.

• Clear background check.

What You Get

In addition to joining a highly motivated team and engaging in meaningful work, you’ll have access to a comprehensive suite of benefits including a retirement plan, unlimited “take what you need” PTO policy, 11 paid holidays, and 3 weeks of organization-wide closures during the year. You and your dependents will have access to multiple health, dental, and vision plans at 25% cost (we cover the other 75%) and employee life and disability insurance at no cost. Our compensation policy strives to be equitable and transparent.

Summit is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion are directly intertwined with education. We are ALL better when we are able to bring our whole selves to work and honor each other’s voices across identities, cultural backgrounds, and life experiences. We welcome and encourage applications from individuals who are members of historically marginalized communities. Spanish language proficiency is a plus.

Compensation

The salary range for this position begins at $135,509 and goes up to $160,310, commensurate with experience and qualifications.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Summit Public Schools is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team. We strongly encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds and lived experiences.