Our History

Before 1972, Washington’s principals belonged to one of three groups — elementary, junior high, and high school — inside the Washington Education Association, which then represented every employee of education except central office administrators. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, teachers in both the NEA and WEA began reimagining their organizations: more militant, more insistent on shaping the direction of education, and especially more focused on their own welfare.

It was also an era of public position statements, and many of the positions WEA adopted ran against the values most principals held. A group of principals from each level drafted an amendment to WEA’s constitution that would let a minority position be presented alongside an official one. It went to the Statewide Representative Assembly in April 1972. The amendment was voted down — and a rule was established that anyone publicly expressing a view contrary to a position statement would be purged from membership.

The message landed. WEA’s focus was moving to teachers, and principals were being left behind. While Don McLean sang “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie” at the top of the charts, the leadership among the principals started singing bye-bye to WEA. On April 24, 1972, fifteen principal leaders representing all three levels met in Yakima ahead of the statewide conference to weigh forming a three-component umbrella organization outside WEA — one that would represent principals in supporting the education of all students. The proposal went to the conference, and the decision was made to poll every WEA principal. Five hundred sixty-six ballots came back by the deadline: 313 to withdraw, 253 to remain.

A Tri-Level Committee took on the hard work of building a principals’ association from the ground up — preparing a budget, drafting a constitution, and settling on a name: the Association of Washington School Principals. In the fall of 1972, speaking teams fanned out across the state, deliberately pairing principals from different levels for each regional meeting. Turnout was enthusiastic in many parts of Washington. Some principals stayed reluctant to leave WEA, but AWSP’s membership grew through that first year. Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” took over the #1 spot from “American Pie” in February 1972 — an accidental anthem for a young association still convincing people to join it.

Highline School District provided a temporary office for the fledgling organization, and Louis Bruno was hired on January 15, 1973, as Executive Secretary. From the beginning, the three-component umbrella structure drew national attention. Louis Bruno, Ted Gary, and Frank Kelly presented on the association at the NAESP Annual Conference in Anaheim, California, in April 1974. By then AWSP had left any infancy period behind.

Principals had benefits inside WEA that made them hesitant to leave. One of the founders’ first jobs was securing payroll deduction for principals’ dues, and they succeeded in most Washington districts.

Another perk of WEA membership was access to the Washington Teachers’ Credit Union and PEMCO Insurance. WEA pressured both companies to deny service to non-members. After negotiations, Stan McNaughton — CEO of both — assured the founders that AWSP members could keep their credit union membership and that their PEMCO policies would stand as written. The credit union had already broadened its name to the Washington School Employees Credit Union.

Membership began to climb. Chicago released “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day” that year — an apt line for AWSP in 1973.

Instructional Theory Into Practice (ITIP) was a synthesis of learning research assembled by Dr. Madeline Hunter at UCLA. Many consider it the launching point for the instructional frameworks in use today. Hunter distilled psychological research on learning into strategies teachers could actually apply.

ITIP trainings for teachers came paired with Clinical Supervision trainings built specifically for principals — teaching them how to work with teachers to improve student learning. One of 1976’s biggest hits was “All by Myself,” and that is close to how many principals felt before ITIP when they walked into a classroom to observe. The what-to-look-fors were ambiguous and varied wildly from one observer to the next.

ITIP gave principals and teachers a common vocabulary and started conversations between principals about what they were actually seeing. Hunter’s work fed the literature on instructional leadership that followed, permanently reshaping the principal’s role.

The new Olympia office opened in April 1981, and AWSP had come a long way to get there. At the very beginning, a loaned office in the Highline School District central office was enough. Less than a year later came a private office on 153rd Street in Burien, then rented space in two Olympia locations — one on Union Avenue, then a larger suite on 4th Avenue. It had become clear that Olympia needed to be home.

As membership and member services grew, so did the staff. In 1980 a site selection committee went looking for a permanent, principal-owned office. Property came available at the corner of 8th and Eastside, and the decision was made to build. Staff and a number of principals traded their suits for tool belts and contributed real labor to the construction.

Listen carefully on a still night around the office and you can still hear the spirit of Larry Norwood singing Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” — which had topped the charts the year before the doors opened.

Cispus Learning Center reopened in 1981 under AWSP’s direction, and the path there was not a straight line. In the late 1930s the site was established as a camp for the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Depression-era creations. It operated until 1941 and the start of World War II, then sat closed until 1965, when it became a Job Corps training center. That closed too, on June 30, 1969, along with many other Job Corps centers.

The Forest Service saw potential in the site as a place for young people to learn about the environment, but needed someone to run it. They turned to Louis Bruno, then State Superintendent of Public Instruction. After visiting, Bruno agreed it was ideal — while recognizing that running an educational program directly was not something a state agency typically did. He tried without success to get school districts and universities to operate the facility, then took the lead to have OSPI direct it himself. A tremendous amount of organizational work through the 1969–70 school year got the center staffed, and it opened to school districts on June 22, 1970. In its first year it hosted 6,701 users representing 27,080 user days. Legislative support continued through the decade, but not without challenges. In 1972, Dr. Frank “Buster” Brouillet was elected state superintendent; he felt directing Cispus was not OSPI’s job and transferred the responsibility to ESD 113.

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted above the Cispus Learning Center, coating the site with a thin dusting of ash. The center closed as schools cancelled their scheduled summer trips. Recovery through the following year was strong — and short-lived. In late May, the 1981–83 biennial state budget was adopted with no provision for Cispus. Dr. Brouillet ordered ESD 113 to close the center on June 30 and return it to the Forest Service, its legal owner, for a determination on future use.

AWSP Executive Director Joe Lassoie and Associate Executive Director Harold Smith, both staunch environmental education proponents, went to work immediately. They brought together users, universities, and ESDs looking for any solution that would keep the doors open. Time was critical — student leadership camps, music camps, and environmental education workshops were already scheduled for that summer. They finally convinced the AWSP Board, which had just opened its new Olympia office in May, to take a leap of faith and manage Cispus on a temporary use permit through October. That summer the hills around Cispus echoed with kids singing Kool & the Gang’s megahit, “Celebration.” In September, the board directed staff to negotiate terms for permanent oversight. The rest is history.

The first AWSP/WASA Summer Conference was held in Yakima in 1981. It was neither the first nor the last joint venture between the two associations, but it has lasted long enough to become a tradition.

Word spread quickly about the appeal of principals and superintendents learning side by side. Before long the conference had to move to the Spokane Convention Center, where it still convenes.

The Korgis — short on legs, long on melodies — had recorded “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” the year before. For principal and superintendent teams, the best time has turned out to be right after school gets out. Getting away as a leadership team to learn together and chart the course for the year ahead became an annual event for many districts.

VEBA Trust is a non-profit, multiple-employer Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association authorized under Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(9). It offers a funded health reimbursement arrangement plan available to public employers in Washington. Created in 1984, the trust is managed by a board of trustees appointed by its founding associations: the Association of Washington School Principals, the Washington Association of School Administrators, and the Washington Association of School Business Officials.

The mechanism that made VEBA matter arrived in 1991, when Governor Booth Gardner signed SHB 1358 on May 9. With that signature, districts could offer a medical expense reimbursement plan in lieu of annual sick leave cash-out — converting unused leave into tax-free medical benefits usable both before and after retirement.

That same year Paula Abdul released “Promise of a New Day,” which is close to how principals felt about their retirement with VEBA in place.

The Leadership in Educational Administrator Development (LEAD) Program launched in 1987. AWSP, in cooperation with WASA, received a federally funded grant to operate it.

The program was built to provide serious professional growth opportunities for aspiring administrators. AWSP’s leadership understood that the pipeline mattered — that getting the best and brightest teacher leaders excited about and prepared for the principalship was the association’s work too.

Between the joint summer conferences and ventures like LEAD, AWSP and WASA joining forces for the good of the profession was well summed up by the title of Prince’s hit that year, “Sign o’ the Times.”

The state-funded internship program began in 1994, the result of skilled lobbying by AWSP staff and principals. It set aside state funds to cover the cost of substitutes for principal interns’ teaching responsibilities, giving them the time to participate in leadership activities during the school day.

The lyric that captures the program best comes from Celine Dion’s “The Power of the Dream” — “teaching lessons we must learn, to bring us closer to the power of the dream.” That is the essence of it: giving future principals the chance to learn the skills and develop the talents to reach their own goals in school leadership.

The program has been successful enough to survive three decades of budget cycles. AWSP staff continue every year to shine legislative light on it so it does not get lost in the wrangling over state resources.

The Washington Assessment of Student Learning turned principals’ attention squarely on state test results in 1997. The WASL served as Washington’s primary assessment from spring 1997 through summer 2009.

Beginning in spring 2006 it also became a high school graduation requirement, raising the pressure on students and principals alike. Controversy swirled as both were judged on results covering reading, mathematics, science, and writing.

With a relentless focus on test results stacked on top of every other responsibility, many principals felt that Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road” described the job exactly.

Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, was the scene of a massacre on April 20, 1999. Twelve students and one teacher were killed and dozens were injured in the shooting and attempted bombing. It was the deadliest high school shooting at the time and the precursor to dozens more in the decades since. The word “Columbine” became a byword for school shootings.

The toll was still growing a quarter of a century later. Anne Marie Hochhalter, who was paralyzed in the shooting, died of sepsis on February 16, 2025, at the age of 43. In March 2025 the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office ruled her death a homicide, finding that complications of her 1999 gunshot wounds were a significant contributing factor — bringing the shooting’s recognized death toll to fourteen.

Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel,” released the fall before, has been sung at far too many funerals for students killed at school since 1999.

Columbine reshaped the lives of principals and what their communities expect of them. Strategies to secure buildings against outside intruders became standard, and “lockdown” found its way into the vocabulary of school safety drills. Counselors and School Resource Officers were added to school staffs. And still schools remain targets.

School safety now takes a prominent role in the AWSP Leadership Framework as one of the eight criteria on which principals are evaluated.

Chewelah Peak Learning Center opened to bring the same environmental and leadership learning available at Cispus in Randle to the east side of the state. Located across the road from the 49 Degrees North ski area, high above Chewelah in Stevens County, it marked a new era of expanded service for AWSP and the Association of Washington Student Leaders.

Years of site selection, lobbying the legislature for startup funding, and construction paid off. The buildings opened to real fanfare, with the Spokane Symphony playing the first of many concerts at the center.

U2’s “Beautiful Day” was everywhere that season — and it clearly was one for principals, teachers, and students in Eastern Washington.

The No Child Left Behind Act, the name given to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, took effect in 2002 and remained law until 2015. It applied to every K–12 public school in the country.

Unlike previous versions of ESEA, NCLB held schools accountable for how students learned and achieved as measured by state tests — including specific accountability for groups of disadvantaged students: students in poverty, students of color, students receiving special education services, and students with limited or no English proficiency.

The effect on the role and expectations of principals was significant. While principals agreed with shining a spotlight on these students, test scores came to dominate the conversation. In some states, schools were graded on test scores alone.

For many principals, a line from Avril Lavigne’s 2002 hit “Complicated” described the pressure well: “You’re watching your back like you can’t relax.” This was a turning point in American education.

The Washington State Leadership Academy was established in 2007 as a joint venture between AWSP and WASA, providing high-level professional development to district teams of principals and central office administrators. It was funded as a public/private partnership using state funds alongside startup money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The first cohort convened in September 2008.

The title of Rascal Flatts’ country hit of that era, “Me and My Gang,” captured what made the approach unusual: the superintendent had to participate and bring central office staff and principals along to the sessions.

The design followed the research. Strategies had a far greater chance of being sustained across a district when the superintendent sponsored and participated in the professional development. Each district also received a coach to support implementation. WSLA ran on that model for fifteen years, until a post-pandemic redesign reopened it to individual leaders as Next Level Leaders in 2023.

The AWSP Leadership Framework was adopted in 2012 as one of the state’s frameworks for evaluating principals, part of Washington’s bid to qualify for one of President Obama’s Race to the Top grants. Three instructional frameworks and two leadership frameworks were adopted, to demonstrate that the state had rigorous standards for evaluating both teachers and principals. Several districts were using the Marzano Leadership Framework at the outset of the TPEP pilot; two years later Marzano was dropped, the AWSP Framework having proved the more popular of the two.

The framework itself was the product of years of research and collaboration, begun in 2010 when AWSP’s leadership responsibilities became the foundation for a new set of principal evaluation criteria — the legislature adding an eighth, Closing the Gap. It synthesized the high-leverage responsibilities of the principalship into a single tool a principal could use to plan both school improvement and their own improvement. The intent was proactive: a structure for a principal’s own professional growth. The hope was that principals would credit the framework whenever they sang Tim McGraw’s hit of that year, “Better Than I Used to Be.”

Once the framework became the state’s evaluation tool, it was subject to the state’s mathematical formulas for rating principals. The intent that principals use it proactively was sometimes replaced by supervisors using it reflectively, simply to generate a rating. That tension has never fully resolved.

The framework is still in use, has been studied by other states considering adoption, and has been revised with input from principals in the field. A workgroup of principals, assistant principals, district leaders, and AWSP and OSPI staff proposed Student Growth Goal revisions in February 2026, with districts able to pilot in 2026-27 and statewide implementation expected in 2027-28.

For most of its life AWSP was represented by a green line drawing: a torch with three flame shapes rising from a cup, set inside an open circle, with the association’s name stacked beside it in four lines. It was a mark of its era — economical to print, legible at any size, and entirely dependent on outline rather than color.

The 2015 redesign kept the three flames and changed almost everything else about how they read. The outlines gave way to solid form, and the three shapes became braided ribbons in three distinct colors — Astronaut Blue, Faded Jade, and Fiery Orange — rising from a single Steel Gray cup. The open circle closed into a full ring for the seal version, which wrapped the association’s name around it, and the stacked four-line name became a horizontal wordmark.

What the redesign really did was make an old idea legible. Three flames had been in the mark for decades, but in a single color they read as decoration. Give each one its own color and the image starts making an argument — which happens to be the association’s founding argument. AWSP was built in 1972 on the conviction that elementary, junior high, and high school principals belonged under one umbrella: three components, one organization. Three flames, one torch.

The palette was revised again in 2026, this time for accessibility — deeper, more saturated versions of the same three colors, chosen so that text and interface elements clear WCAG contrast thresholds. The shapes stayed. Every deliverable in this set is built on that 2026 palette.

Where the Leadership Framework describes what a principal is accountable for, the School Leader Paradigm describes how a school leader develops. Its central premise is captured in three words — “Becoming While Doing” — the claim that a leader’s own growth and the organization’s advancement are not sequential tasks but simultaneous ones.

The Paradigm is the work of the School Leader Collaborative, a consortium of state principal associations representing roughly 50,000 school leaders across states including Alabama, Alaska, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Washington. AWSP is a partner in that work rather than its sole author, and the published volume incorporates NASSP’s Building Ranks. AWSP introduced it to Washington members through a feature in the Fall/Winter 2018–19 issue of its magazine.

Its structure is an infinity loop joining two halves. The Becoming side — the leader’s own development — runs on three intelligences, each with four attributes: Personal (wellness, growth mindset, self-management, innovation), Social (service, community building, capacity building, influence), and Systems (mission and vision, operations and management, teaching and learning, cultural responsiveness). The Doing side — the organization’s work — spans three domains: Culture, Systems, and Learning. Both halves operate inside four contexts — individual, school, community, and political — and are driven forward by a cycle of inquiry: plan, implement, assess, reflect.

Running alongside is a leadership continuum that names four career stages: Aspiring, Launching in years one and two, Building in years three through five, and Mastering beyond year five. That continuum became the spine of the statewide system AWSP would propose six years later.

The COVID pandemic reached America in the winter of 2020 and changed education dramatically, sending principals scrambling to meet students’ learning needs in wholly unconventional ways. Schools closed. Zoom was a poor substitute for in-person learning and became pervasive anyway. School activities were cancelled, and masks were required for gatherings. Washington’s schools remained closed the following year with Zoom classes attempting to fill the void.

It was a dark stretch in education. Students were discouraged, parents were discouraged, and teachers were discouraged. It seemed as if Thomas Rhett — along with Reba McEntire, Hillary Scott, Chris Tomlin, and Keith Urban — were singing their anthem “Be a Light” directly to principals.

It was up to the principals to be that light. As the pandemic receded, they had to reestablish school culture, ensure safety, and recreate the in-person learning that had worked so well before. It was start-over time, and principals rose to the challenge.

The Chewelah Peak Learning Center ceased operations in January 2021, ending two decades of environmental and leadership programming above Chewelah. The reasons had been accumulating for most of those two decades.

The site’s greatest asset was also its central problem. A learning center at the top of a mountain is a spectacular place to take students and a difficult place to run a business. Winter access was unreliable — school buses often simply could not get up there — which meant the center could never support genuine year-round programming. Without a full calendar it could not cover its costs, and it spent most of its life losing money.

The pandemic ended the argument. With programming suspended and no prospect of a season, the center could not be carried any further. AWSP held a lease on the land rather than owning it, and when that lease came up for renewal, the association let it go.

For twenty years the center did on the east side of the state what Cispus had done on the west — gave students a place where leadership and the outdoors were the same lesson. Its closure narrowed AWSP’s physical footprint to a single learning center, and the work of serving Eastern Washington students shifted to programming that traveled to them. By 2026, Cispus and the Association of Washington Student Leaders were marking a combined 125 years of impact.

“In March 2020, educational leaders across Washington entered a new dawn of leadership.” That is how the program’s own brochure opens, and it is the whole rationale in one line. The Washington State Leadership Academy had been built for a different decade. Jack Arend, AWSP’s deputy director, announced the successor in February 2023; it launched at that June’s AWSP/WASA Summer Conference; and the first cohort convened on July 31 and August 1, 2023, at the Yakima Convention Center. OSPI’s report to the legislature put it plainly: WSLA “evolved into Next Level Leaders.”

The structural change is the story. WSLA had organized itself around district teams within specified Educational Service District regions: you came as a district or you did not come. Next Level Leaders kept a team option on the price list — five people for three thousand dollars — but in practice the cohorts filled with individuals at six hundred a year, a district sending two people more often than five. The brochure names who that means: principals, assistant principals, central office administrators, and superintendents, anyone with at least three years as an educational leader. OSPI calls them “role-agnostic” leaders. The published roster bears it out, with assistant principals and sitting superintendents in the same cohort.

The shape of it is a two-year model built from six learning terms — August to December, January to March, April to June — each building on the last. Every term carries one in-person event, and the calendar is deliberate: only one of the three falls inside the student school year. Cohort 1 met in Yakima that first summer, in the SeaTac area in February, and for a full day in Spokane the following June, the day before the Summer Conference. Online sessions are customized to fill the gaps between, regional collaboration is encouraged, and optional low-cost confidential one-to-one leadership coaching is available to anyone who wants it. Enrollment is capped at two hundred, with representation sought from every ESD region.

The numbers show what opening the door did, and they show how it was used. In WSLA’s final year the academy reached 13 districts and 97 educators — about seven and a half people per district, which is what a team model looks like. Next Level Leaders’ first year reached 60 districts and 132 educators: roughly two per district, which is what individuals look like. The second year reached 62 districts and 150. The legislative appropriation behind it never changed — the same $810,000 a year that had funded WSLA. What changed was who could walk through the door.

In October 2024 AWSP published the policy brief A Statewide System of Leadership Development, making an argument that had been building for years: Washington had many good programs for school leaders and no system connecting them.

The brief organizes the work along the four-stage continuum drawn from the School Leader Paradigm — Aspiring, Launching, Building, Mastering — and names the partners responsible at each stage: the ESDs, Washington’s eighteen principal preparation programs, PESB, WASA, and OSPI. It recommends adopting both the AWSP Leadership Framework and the School Leader Paradigm as the standards for principal preparation in the state.

The numbers behind it explain the urgency. Washington produces roughly 175 to 225 aspiring leaders and 200 to 300 new leaders annually, and the heaviest attrition falls in years two through five — exactly the Launching and Building stages. Principal turnover, as AWSP’s executive director had written in early 2022, was “an epidemic before the pandemic,” running at twice the rate in high-poverty schools.

The system was formally introduced at the January 2025 board meeting in SeaTac, organized around Grow, Support, and Sustain — later joined by Protect as AWSP’s fourth priority.

2025 was a year of building structures for connection. AWSP launched five leadership networks: Leaders of Color, Assistant Principals, Women in Leadership, Rural Schools, and Inclusionary Practices. The Leaders of Color Network arrived alongside the second annual iGrow WA Summit in March.

AWSP and AWSL introduced the inaugural Culture Kickoff Award, recognizing 34 schools, and named 42 Schools on the Rise. The School Leader Planning Guide was released, and the Empowering Excellence Series began offering customizable professional learning built on the School Leader Paradigm.

The association’s new quarterly publication, Bookends, won an NSPRA Award of Excellence in its first year. Representative Steve Bergquist received the Torch of Leadership Award. And the Association of Washington Student Leaders, founded in 1956, marked seventy years of work with Washington’s students.

In the legislature, AWSP’s focus was what staff called The Big Three: special education, materials and operating costs, and transportation.

In April 2026 the AWSP board approved alignment with the National Principals Association — NASSP’s rebrand into a unified PK–12 and beyond organization, effective that July. For an association born in 1972 out of the conviction that principals at every level belonged under one umbrella, a national organization arriving at the same conclusion fifty-four years later reads as vindication.

AWSP’s four priorities — Grow, Support, Sustain, Protect — became the organizing frame for the association’s work. New programming included a Chief Education Officer Network convening roughly fifty high school principals on postsecondary access, a Principal Mentoring program, a coaching partnership with BTS Spark, and Grow2Lead, a Pre-K–6 leadership and SEL curriculum. A new BASE membership category was piloted for administrative assistants.

In February, the Association of Washington Student Leaders held its first Educational Advocacy Summit on the Capitol campus in Olympia — students learning to speak to power in the building where it sits. The 2026 legislative session ended March 12 with maintenance-level K–12 funding preserved.

Fifty-four years after fifteen principals met in a room in Yakima to ask whether they could build something of their own, the answer is a statewide system, two generations of leaders, and a mountain full of kids who will remember the week they spent there.