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The Conditions for Change

How Global Leaders Created Conditions for School Transformation at Grandview Middle School

What one North Carolina middle school’s results reveal about how school improvement happens and why discipline, enrollment, academic performance, and teacher retention improved in the same year.

Bar chart showing Grandview Middle School's office referrals dropped from 941 to 561 and lost classroom days from 717 to 493 between 2023-24 and 2024-25

Grandview Middle School in Hickory, North Carolina carried a low-performing designation and had watched enrollment fall for years. In 2024–25, office referrals dropped by 40%, enrollment grew by 10.6%, and the school exited its low-performing designation, ranking first in growth among all middle schools in Hickory City and Catawba County.

 

What produced these results was a set of conditions, built deliberately, that aligned with decades of school improvement research and that allowed discipline, instruction, leadership, and community trust to shift at the same time.

White paper cover for "The Conditions for Change: How Global Leaders Created Conditions for School Transformation at Grandview Middle School," Participate Learning, 2026

Inside, you’ll find:

  • A close look at the discipline, enrollment, and academic data: what changed, by how much, and what drove it
  • How Global Leaders provided the structure for the work and what Principal Greene and Grandview’s teachers did with it
  • How each condition connects to what the research on sustained school improvement tells us
  • Practical implications for district leaders thinking about culture, teacher retention, and family trust


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This evidence brief was produced by Participate Learning. Global Leaders is a school-wide career-readiness framework for culture, leadership, and real-world learning serving schools across the United States.