Supporting the Whole School

One of the state committees that I found myself on this year is the Whole Child Committee. It is a group built of mental and physical health professionals, school support coordinators, policy leaders and K-12 educators. The goal is to guide policy related to all of the non-instructional needs that students face today. If you're thinking that encompasses a lot of things, you'd be right. I had an opportunity to speak yesterday to the group about issues that I currently see related to this need. In Greene County we are more fortunate than most in this area despite our economic status and rural designation. Having access to physical and mental health providers on campus is a huge deal. But even with the access that we have, it somehow never seems like enough. So after bragging about all that we have, I reminded the panel that this is a tough time of year for several reasons. Students needing access to our health providers, specifically mental health providers, often don't have the same level of access due to all of the other students that are currently being treated. There simply are not enough resources to match the needs. So when students need to talk to someone, they often turn to teachers instead. They trust us as people that care about them, are willing to listen to them, and as someone that can provide advice for them. And while that is an amazing relationship to have, it also has it's limits. When students regularly disclose their mental health needs to teachers, the impact comes in the form of secondary trauma. We mentally and emotionally carry the burdens of children that disclose them to us. And because we would never turn a student away, those pile up on us on top of the regular stresses that come with the job. Too often in the time of negotiating policy and budgets, education people can only see direct impacts on themselves. But right now, I think that one of the best things that we can do to support teachers is to provide students with the mental and physical wellbeing that they need. Supposrting the whole child really means supporting the whole school, you and I included.

How Do I Know You're Good?

I'm literally neck-deep in projects right now. Between the various committees and advisory groups that I've been invited to join, all of them seem to be demanding some of my time at once. Oh and I'm supposed to be running a school. One of those projects involves developing a proposal for a new principal compensation plan. Principals are paid on performance and I am advocating that we need something more than test scores to tell that story. The problem is that isn't easy to determine what we should use. In my discussions this week, someone asked me a short, but difficult question. "How do I know that you're a good principal?" It's not very easy at all to sum that up and it becomes even harder to begin to apply it to all principals. A lot of what we do as educators can't be summed up into a test score. It isn't always easily quantified and the timelines of our effectiveness don't always fit into the school calendar year. Test scores aren't what students remember about us and if you ask the public, it's probably not the first thing they will mention. But it is still important. 

This is exactly why I did the exercise at the recent faculty meeting. The word cloud our staff created of what our next Teacher of the Year should be is just as complicated as the answer to my question. Take a look at the words below. How do I know if you are passionate? How about fun, adaptive, or reliable? In fact, I think I could argue that not a single one of the words that our staff list can be accurately determined in a test. Instead, you see them in day-to-day actions and their consistency is the key to success. So how do you know if a teacher displays there? You have to watch and you have to pay attention a lot. Unfortunately, our roles don't always give us the privilege of doing that as much as we should. So in the spirit of choosing the right person, I ask that we all take a little more time to watch over the next few weeks. Test scores and student performance can only tell us a piece of the story, but you have to look for the people that are caring, positive and adaptive.  

What Gives You Hope?

I'll be the first to admit that having the POY title has opened a few doors for me and given me the opportunity to meet some fascinating people. With the State Board meeting taking place this week in Raleigh, I had the chance to attend a book talk on Meredith College's campus that was sold out. Ibram X. Kendi and Nic Stone collaborated to release a book entitled, How to Be a (Young) Antiracist. It's a follow-up to Kendi's book with the help of Stone, who is more well-known for her young adult fiction. The talk involved both authors and quickly leveraged the importance of talking to young people today about past and current social justice issues. The authors reached way back into our history but also talked about current events, more specifically, the death of Tyre Nichols. I was reminded of the incident involving Rodney King when I was a student and how a teacher took the time to help us understand the social implications of the event and the trial that followed. (Teaching social justice isn't really a new thing.) It was hard to understand back then and I know that it's at least as hard for kids to grapple with today given their increased access to opinions on the topic. 

My connection to the book talk came through NC's Beginning Teacher of the Year, Xavier Adams. One of his high school students was invited to ask a few questions as a guest moderator. Aside from her, everyone else on stage was in their late thirties or older. She followed deep discussions on the history of racism, the intersection of politics, and the terrifying examples of our past. The table set before her was not easy, but she handled it with such grace that I started to consider how differently students today might think of things than I did at her age. Then came her final question. And despite the wealth of information given in that two hours, the most powerful thing that I left with was the last question that she posed to both authors, "What gives you hope, despite everything you have discussed tonight, that things are getting better?" The nearly two-hour event had discussed dark events and topics that solicited feelings of anger, contempt, or disagreement, but in that one sentence, the mood instantly changed. This is why we have to talk to young adults differently. She saw progress, whereas we saw the problem. 

It's a powerful lesson that we can learn a lot from to grapple with any ongoing problem. We have plenty of those in education or just in working with each other. We organize whole committees with the goal of finding and trying to solve problems. Maybe we should also take a minute to consider what gives us hope that things are getting better, even if they aren't what we envision just yet.