A Message to School Leaders Everywhere

Cycles of Vitriol:  School board meetings that devolve into shouting matches. Those supporting or opposed to Critical Race Theory.  Those supporting or opposed to masks or vaccines. That the world is an exquisitely contentious place is a familiar refrain amongst artists, and now-- school leaders. 

Let’s face it, the world at this moment, is a dangerous place to live in. 

I think about school leaders these days, defaulted into crisis managers for a second year of COVID, and the exacting toll it takes. I think about them during these first weeks of school. I was one of them, for many decades, but more acutely, over the past 18 months. I am grateful not to be waking before dawn with an alarm clock in the pit of my stomach anticipating a new crisis. 

I think about school leaders and teachers, in general, while listening to my local radio station offering the latest autopsies of school closures, partial closures, rising infection rates amongst staff, and now impending dismissals of teachers who refuse vaccinations. A colleague of mine in Kentucky described the climate in her school district as a burning barge. While another, in the northeast, a school administrator, was driving the school bus last week because the supply chain of bus drivers, like substitutes, is out of whack.

Key terms here: the supply chain, burning barges, and out of whack.

Dear school and district and classroom leaders—what I would like to know, what I believe we all need to learn from each other is:  how to lead in times of dysfunction. Where is your north star? How do you sustain it? How do you stay alive and out of the range of toxic noise? How do you hew to staying ethically resolute with wisdom, perspective and always the strength of humor? How do you adhere to the beginner’s mindset, the one that holds the door open for people, and dances to Stevie Wonder in the mirror at night-- when the next morning you have a Facebook mob of middle school parents to disarm who object to the way history is being taught? 

Accusatory. Angry. Afraid. These are also key terms in the present landscape we live in, where wildfires continue to scorch the civic and public parts of our lives.

My dear colleagues, how do you stay true to your ideals when doing the hard and courageous work? I am not suggesting we bury our collective heads in the sand. But author and activist Toni Morrison offers us a way through this passage with several suggestions. 

The first, is that we become disciplined and intentional in identifying “the things that we love…in order to care for and husband them.” How riveting and un-jargonized a concept. That’s the work, isn’t it? Identifying the things we love collectively, the things that matter, so we can cultivate and develop them in our children and ourselves. Where schooling becomes educating,  and the miraculous development of human beings who will instill this land and earth with promise and healing again.

The second is “honoring the nurturing structures of [y]our community…by knowing the aspects of your [school’s] culture that are worth preserving.” Which is the work of leadership and protecting the soul of a school, of personalizing learning for all learners, starting with our teachers, so we can unleash all the generosity, kindness, possibility, hope and civility that the moment requires.

Dear Colleagues, now is not a time to put our heads in the sand because of the abrasive culture that pervades America. How we make our day’s matter in school is dependent on the ways we honor learning for children and teachers, and amplify the potential for human development. 

How are you balancing the onerous emotional toll brought by the pandemic with learning? 

In other words, instead of defaulting to “coverage” and the rabbit hole of “learning loss” are you strengthening and prioritizing wellness. Are you doubling down on morning meetings, circle times, advisories, coaching, restorative circles, community gatherings--? Are you seeking to provide multiple ways to support children and adults in developing emotional fluency and capacity for living with uncertainty and change? Or to use a yoga term— How are you yoking life back together in your school when all stakeholders have experienced trauma, including the system itself?

Call it appreciative inquiry, personalized, deep learning. Call it competency-based, authentic, project-based learning. Why not make your school the kind of place where everyone knows everyone’s name; where school is a kind of sanctuary; a home, a site of joy, where communicating and multiple forms of expression and inquiry (culture making) circulates and flourishes like air. 

Your colleague,

David