Respect

Winning Principal of the Year comes with the daunting task of completing a portfolio with a list of your accomplishments and your thoughts on several different questions. As I started working on it, I took notes on those questions so that I could come back and turn those notes into paragraphs later. One of the questions stumped me and I moved on to the next one without any notes. The question reads: How does your school leadership foster an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect within the school? As I continued to work on the portfolio, I kept coming back to this question and it wasn't until yesterday that I could even start to articulate an answer. 

So why did I struggle with this one? It's because I don't think there is any schoolwide policy or agenda item on a Leadership Team meeting that can address it. Trust and mutual respect are a cultural phenomena, not something that can be decreed or set in policy. This is something that is much harder to define, but on Thursday afternoon, I had it. I got called over the radio because Mrs. Edwards heard two students running down the hallway using profanity loudly. I found out that they came from Ms. Best's room so I went to talk to her about it. We have tried several things to manage the two students over the past few weeks with marginal success and my patience with them was quickly running out. But despite the string of issues, Ms. Best (a first-year teacher) was calm, polite and so collected about it. She was still focused on the fact that they missed the directions for their next assignment. Her focus was teaching them. My focus was on trying to help her and the students should have been focused on doing their part. That's how you define mutual trust and respect. In a school, it means being willing to uphold your part in the agreement, even when another member may not uphold theirs. You respect the role that you play because it impacts others and the role that they play. We have boundaries, but we also give grace because students, teachers, and principals are all still learning every day. We trust and respect each other because we have a mission to grow young adults the very best that we can. Without that, it makes it harder for any of us to succeed. 

Now if they will just let me link a blog post in my application...