Learning at the Heart

100 Posts in 100 Days

Back in Post 79:  Warm Welcomes, I started to tell the story of walking into a school building as the new principal two weeks before school was starting only to find it essentially deserted.  As I wrote that post, it occurred to me that this is a story full of leadership and learning.  There are so many parts to this story, so it slowly unfolding.  Next up:  “Get Them Here, Get Them Fed, Get Them Home” is about how our faculty rallied and had a great first day of school.  

“Get Them Here, Get Them Fed, Get Them Home”

At this point in my story, I’ve applied for and earned a job that I wasn’t actively looking for only to arrive on the first day to discover I didn’t have any educational staff working and our office wasn’t open to the public as expected.  I’ve shown up on the doorstep of several departments in our central office to gather information, garner resources, and quite frankly, plead for help.

I once worked for a principal that had told our staff our goal for the first days of school were to “Get them here, get them fed, and get them home.”  What parents want most of all is to know their children are safe and happy.  This motto is all about ensuring student safety, welcoming them with open arms and open hearts, caring for them in the best possible way, and sending them off with stories of learning and positive experiences.  This idea guided me in the days and weeks between entering the desolate building and starting school.

Get Them Here:  Faculty Edition

Knowing I had budget to start bringing people back, contact information from my faculty, and identified teacher leaders, I started “getting them here.”  Little by little, I gathered the people needed for the various tasks that needed to be accomplished and we got to work:

• Our office staff worked on those stacks of class lists, organizing the information,  enrolling new students, and creating our “First Day of School” informational packets to be sent to all families.  
• I assembled interview teams and we began screening and hiring teachers for our open positions.  
• The teacher leaders began planning and organizing district-required sessions and content for the teacher training days.  

 

Get Them Here:  Family Edition

In addition to what the school faculty and staff were working on, our PTA was also organizing.  They were making arrangements for a “Popsicle Social” when students and families could come to school to find out and meet their teacher, enjoy a popsicle, hang out on the playground, and meet the “new principal”.  They were also arranging parent volunteers to come to school and assist teachers as they set up their classrooms for the new school year.   

 

Get Them Here, Get Them Fed, Get Them Home:  Student Edition

All of those things were helpful and laid the groundwork for the days our faculty would spend together learning and preparing for the new year.  What I did on those days may be the “thing” that helped us the most.

The first day began like most first days back-to-school and with a new principal.  I introduced myself, why I chose to join this particular school, and a bit about my vision.  We also did some activities to help the staff reconnect with one another.  

And then I said something like this:

“I once had a principal who told us that our jobs in the first days of school are to get the students here, get them fed, and get them home.  We want them to be safe, to have fun, and share great stories of their experience.  None of us wants to be here late on the first day of school trying to find a child who took the wrong bus or got off on the wrong stop.  We want to be organized and ready and take care of our students.

We open school in just a few days and we have our Popsicle Social before then.  It will not be any fun for students and families to come to the Popsicle Social and not know who their teacher will be because we don’t have finalized class lists and because we haven’t finished hiring.  

We will never get our students fed if we don’t have a master schedule and right now, we don’t have a master schedule.  The schedule used in the previous years will not accommodate all of our students for lunch, so we need to make 3 lunches and figure out how that works for both schedule and supervision.  Recess times and specialist classes will likely need to be adjusted.  You cannot create your daily class schedule until we have these things settled.

According to the agreement between the district and your teacher’s association,  we are supposed to conduct all of our training on these first couple of days and then the final day is uninterrupted time for you to work in your classrooms, preparing.  I do not know enough to work on the things we need as a building to save them all for the last day.  The teams and people who do know enough to work on these things also cannot wait until the last day.  And if we did save them until the last day, well, then many of you would not have uninterrupted time in your classrooms. 

So, I propose that we do all of the work that we are required to do and that is called for in your teacher contract.  But we need to organize our time differently.  I suggest we meet as a full faculty each morning.  In that time, we engage in the various trainings we need to complete and we provide the latest information for the opening of school.  After a couple of hours, we dismiss and the teams can get to work.  Interview teams can interview, the scheduling team can plan and design, the class lists can be finalized, and you can have time each day to work in your classroom.  In the end, you will have the same number of hours (or more) to prepare your classrooms and you will have time each day.  I think that if we do this, we can “get them here, get them fed, and get them home.””  And I presented a schedule to them.

There it was:  My first act with my full faculty was to publicly suggest that we behave in a manner inconsistent with their teacher association contract.  As the new person, and new leader, in the building, it felt a little bit risky, even though I knew my rationale was sound and we would ultimately achieve the same outcomes if we adhered perfectly to the guidelines.  As I finished my spiel and looked around the library where we were meeting, I was thankfully greeted with a lot of head nods and looks of understanding.  We reorganized our time and we got to work.  Every morning, there were new iterations of class lists, schedules, and opening day details.  We shared them and got feedback.  We spent the time in the afternoons improving the plans.  Teachers had time every day to work in their classrooms.  By the end of the scheduled days, we had class lists, we had a schedule, we had strong student supervision plans, and we had almost all of our hiring complete.  

We had a successful Popsicle Social with students and families on our playground.

And we opened school on the first day.  Every child made it to school and to their classroom.  Every child had lunch, recess, and class time.  Every child made it home safely on time.  No teachers were called at the end of the day to ask where a student had gone or who had picked them up.  We got them there, we got them fed, we got them home.  We survived.

Our story and our team work taught us so much that we continued to refer back to in the years I was at that school.  It was as if we had proved something to ourselves.  We often referenced the value of a common goal, a shared and understood plan, flexibility to adjust the process while maintaining the outcome, the delegation of work, and a specific timeline for completing the work.  It was hard, the days ended up long, but we did it.  It was both a model of ways we should continue to operate and a point of pride.  I was so proud of those teachers and staff members then and I remain proud of them and their work today.