The purpose of this study was to assess the practices and challenge of participatory leadership in secondaryrnschools of Nifas Silk Lafto Sub City and to identify how participatory leadership is being practices, to investigaternwhat efforts are underway in making the school level leadership participatory, to identify how do stakeholdersrnperceive their involvement in the school level leadership and the challenges during the process of making schoolrnlevel leadership participatory in the secondary schools of Nifas Silk Lafto Sub city. To carry out this study,rndescriptive survey design was employed. Participants of the study were 114 teachers, 5 principals, 15 vicernprincipals and 5 sub city education officials were involved in the study and respondents were selected also byrnusing simple random sampling and purposive sampling method. The data were collected by using questionnaire,rnand interview. Mixed data analysis method was employed in order to reach the results. Data obtained throughrnquestionnaire were analyzed and summarized using statistical tools (SPSS Version 20.0). Statistical measuresrnwere performed on quantitative data gathered from the respondents. Frequency, percentage, mean and standardrndeviation were calculated. The study deals with examining the practices and challenges participatory leadershiprnin secondary schools. The Findings of the study revealed that the current practices in the school regarding howrnprincipals involve the stakeholders in formulating and implementing in the school level policy as well as schoolrnactivates, most of the principals were medium. Their linkages between stakeholders were below medium andschool principals lack necessary leadership skill, knowledge, qualification and attitude to draw stakeholdersrntoward participating at the school level. On the other hand, school principals gave more emphasis to lowrnsupportive and high directive behavior and transfer decision according to the situation were medium. The studyrnalso indicated that problem of budgeting time to each activity, shortage of adequate guidance support from higherrnofficial and training on educational leadership were the main challenges of the principals. Accordingly, it isrnconcluded that the behavior of the principals was show to be low supportive and high directive these stylernnegatively influenced academic achievement. Finally, it is recommended that school leaders should vary theirrnapproach based on the people they are leading, and the circumstances that surround the task at hand and thernresponsible body to fill skill gap on the area of participatory leadership style as well as how to handle thernchallenges at the school level