A Brief History of the
National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS)

The University of South Carolina began co-sponsoring a PDS National Conference in March 2000. That initial event, held in Columbia, South Carolina, attracted approximately six hundred educators and was such a success that the university continued co-sponsoring similar conferences on an annual basis for the next five years.

In 2002 the conference moved from South Carolina to Orlando, Florida, and by 2005 had begun to attract close to eight hundred PDS educators from nearly every state in the nation. Individuals who attended the conferences repeatedly expressed appreciation for the hands-on and practical nature of the conference presentations and pointed out time and again two aspects which they believed were unique to the event: (1) a near-equal balance of university and preK-12 educators and (2) an exclusive focus on issues relevant to Professional Development Schools. Nowhere else, participants noted, had they found the opportunity to share ideas with such a wide breadth of P-20 educators and been able to focus solely on PDS concerns unencumbered by other admittedly important, yet non-PDS specific, educational issues.

The desire to discuss PDS-specific concerns with other educators who shared an interest in and passion for PDS work led to a conversation at the 2003 National Conference about the feasibility of creating a professional association which would encourage year-round PDS dialogue. The seventy-five individuals who participated in that conversation immediately agreed that such an association was much needed, and so a handful of volunteers met in Columbia, South Carolina, in November 2003, to begin the process of making the association a reality. They shared their initial efforts with participants at the March 2004 National Conference and encouraged others to join them in the planning process. That call produced a Founding Organizational Committee, eventually consisting of eighteen educators from eleven states, which met throughout the next year to revise a mission statement drafted at the first meeting and to design both a constitutional structure and a list of goals for the association. As they did so, they kept in mind that the primary goal was to create a professional association that, in the words of one of the group members, would enhance the capacity of PDS educators to do their work. With that overall goal in mind, the group agreed to: (1) establish a leadership structure which would represent a balance across the educational continuum; (2) develop a website to allow members access to resources and a venue for on-going dialogue; (3) circulate a newsletter to disseminate best practices, pertinent news, and PDS-related announcements; (4) produce a periodic journal to circulate evaluative research, successful programmatic models, and naturalistic inquiry in the PDS community; and (5) join with the University of South Carolina in co-sponsoring the annual PDS National Conference and, in doing so, continue the commitment to balanced participation and focused presentations.

By the time of the March 2005 PDS National Conference, the association planners had appointed an Interim Executive Council which worked throughout 2004 and early 2005 to put into place the nuts and bolts of a working association. That group obtained start-up funds from individual and institutional founders and benefactors and, through the respective generosity of Towson University and the University of Missouri, began work on the inaugural newsletter and the creation of an association website. The Council decided that the initial membership of the association would be comprised of those individuals who attended the 2005 Conference, and so it drafted Association By-Laws which were subsequently approved by that membership at an NAPDS Celebration on the afternoon of Friday, March 18, 2005. The membership at that time also approved the removal of the “interim” label from the Executive Council, approved a Fall 2005 election process for new officers to be installed at the 2006 National Conference, and in taking these actions officially launched an association which had been two years in the making.

Now approaching its third anniversary, membership in the NAPDS has grown to over one thousand educators from forty-plus states and five different countries – and it is growing.  The NAPDS has garnered the support of other national education organizations, including the NNER and AACTE, and worked with individuals from these and other groups in drafting the association’s first position paper titled “What It Means to Be a Professional Development School.”

In addition to fine-tuning the association’s website (now housed at the University of South Carolina) and its newsletter (now produced and edited at Cleveland State University), the NAPDS has taken two other significant steps to support the association’s impact on the nationwide PDS initiative:  (1) the January 2007 hiring of an association administrator to orchestrate the day-to-day and year-to-year operations of the NAPDS and (2) the Spring 2007 release, with the able assistance of Rowman & Littlefield and the University of South Florida, of the first issue of School-University Partnerships, the first-ever blind-refereed journal dedicated exclusively to the work of Professional Development Schools.