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I’ll never forget the day a colleague shared this troubling story. Her school had just received its state rankings; it’d climbed ten spots. Yet that same week, three teachers resigned, citing burnout, and parent satisfaction surveys hit an all-time low.
I will never forget the moment a principal in a previous district contacted me. She informed me she had her resignation letter in her hand. She’d been named Principal of the Year just eighteen months earlier. “I can’t lead anymore,” she told me. “Every decision requires three approvals, two reports, and a justification memo. My teachers are frustrated. I’m frustrated. We’ve lost our spark.”
Every Principal and district leader knows the feeling: you’re preparing for a critical curriculum adoption meeting when a state legislator tweets about your district. Your phone erupts. District leaders or Principal Supervisors want answers. Parents demand responses. And somewhere in the chaos, you remember, students need you to lead well tomorrow morning.
As an Assistant Principal, I had the opportunity to participate in a state-sponsored school improvement program. I remember sitting in a principal’s office, watching her pull a thick binder from her shelf. “Here’s our school improvement plan,” she said, blowing dust off the cover. “Required it for our accreditation visit last year.” She opened it to reveal pages of detailed goals, action steps, and timelines; none of which her teachers could recall.
During my first year as a principal, I attended a conference where a teacher from one of our district’s elementary schools shared an innovative literacy intervention that had dramatically improved student outcomes. I was thrilled, until I realized that despite being in the same district, none of our middle school teachers had ever heard about it.
Several years ago, I had an opportunity to attend a leadership retreat for women in education. I’ll never forget the moment a superintendent confessed to me during the retreat: “Kim, we have a beautiful strategic plan sitting in a binder on my shelf. But if I asked ten principals what our district’s top priority is, I’d get ten different answers.”
While serving in my previous district, I visited a high school where AP enrollment had skyrocketed among historically underrepresented students. When I asked the principal what changed, she smiled and said, “We stopped waiting for students to find opportunities and started actively removing barriers.”
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