An ethnographic study of problems related to the principalship of a combined French immersion and French minority-language kindergarten to grade five school

The aim of the present study is to uncover an idiographic knowledge of the problems related to the principalship of a combined French immersion and French minority-language school. Problems associated with the principalship of the French immersion program involved lack of support services in French, keeping abreast of changes in the English program, adapting to the special needs of the program's changing clientele and coping with parents' high expectations and frequent demands. For the French minority-language program, the problems revolved around conflicting expectations of parents, parents' demands for control and management, difficulties of providing a culture base in an anglophone society, linguistic heterogeneity of students, demands of instruction in multigrade classrooms, and low enrolments in the program. Problems associated with having the two programs housed in one school are associated with an increase in workload for the principal and the need to foster communication and cooperative relations between parents of the two different programs. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)