What are some tough times as a school leader?

This isn’t imagining the worst. It’s not horror stories that have just been passed around. Most aren’t horrific, they’re just really hard. It’s just the stuff that has come my way in 23 years of leading schools, and just a tiny bit of the total at that. Some is recent; much is from years ago. It all still feels pretty close.

Is it whining? I hope not. Many of you have had to deal with much, much worse. But sharing some of it can maybe be an encouragement of sorts to someone else.

You aren’t in it alone. Many of you know God’s there with you. Even with that, it’s nice to know He’s brought someone else alongside who might understand. Be encouraged. You’re making a difference.

You’re on your third report in three months to Child Protective Services of a student who you have good reason to believe is being abused at home or by a close family member.

You’re running the cash flow longer term hoping for a turn, but also two weeks at a time because each of those payrolls have to be covered and the outside economy just keeps getting worse. Your margin of reserve is non-existent because you knew you came to a turnaround situation; you just didn’t know it was a 20% of operating budget accumulated deficit (instead of the expected 5%), three year enrollment and revenue downtrend, and the cutoff of external credit which had floated another 15% of operating for three months of every year. 

In addition to far-reaching program and operating cuts, you have to begin cutting 20% of faculty and staff to stay afloat and open for next year. It’s time to start meeting with those folks you care about but who probably won’t be feeling much care in these decisions.

Two similar schools per year for the last five years have closed in town – 10 schools like you. You’re working and praying not to be next.

You’re speaking to a meeting of parents about school plans and know the Booster Club head has been lying about you to recruit for his way. He won’t admit it, and he’ll be there speaking, too. You’re pretty sure it’s pretty personal, and he wouldn’t shed a tear if you just dropped dead.

You’re called up to school on a Saturday because they’ve found a break-in with vandalism from a former student you allowed to withdraw rather than expel because it wasn’t drugs or violence.

You have to release a teacher who has shown erratic behavior but also with great cunning about the law and her ability to hoodwink others while serving her own interests.

You have to talk to another teacher about not renewing her contract because she keeps blowing up teams and alienating a third of the parents and students in her room while continuing to build raving relationships with another third and do creative, inspired teaching with the rest. This is the 5th year running when the same decision has been on your plate. You can count on losing two of your largest donors when you don’t bring her back.

You have to release a young teacher who showed and shows great intelligence and passion, while also being drawn to being the cool hero to kids by tearing down authority and breaking all the rules except the few which have kept him just within the boundary of not being asked to leave immediately. It’s time to show him the boundary is a bit nearer than he thought.

In-service starts tomorrow and school starts next week, and you still need to fill an advanced math position and a key special ed role. 

You’ve raised – by the gracious involvement of many families – half of what is needed for the building effort to go forward, and the timetable for needed construction for school year completion called for groundbreaking two weeks ago. Enrollment growth continues but the clock keeps ticking on the capital needed to provide facilities for that growth.

You’ve struggled for three years to build basic health benefits into the budget, have it finally planned for next year with reasonable certainty, but the insurance quotes have come in 30% higher than what you and your business advisers thought was a conservatively high estimate.

Your board, with whom your relationship has been strong for five years, has turned over 40% in one year and their recent stream of requests to you are in direct conflict with foundational elements of your leadership responsibility to your teachers, with respectful disciplinary dealing with students and their families, and with the integrity of your curriculum.

You need to be the out front leader on three major initiatives, are the best in-house expert on two other important new projects, have two uncommon in your life and deeply troubling issues at home, you have a new health challenge that leaves you at about ¾ speed, and you just about can’t face each day’s demands.

For the fifth year running, you’re dealing with the re-registration snowball departures and rumors of departures at your transition from lower to middle school and middle to high school. Two years later, you will have waiting pools for each of those transition grades, but today feels like the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back.

You have to grow time-tested teaching technique into contemporary research-grounded excellence, but you have several on your faculty with longevity and long-standing relationships and little intention to change. You have several others who have time and relationships and excitement about ways these changes can help them do better what they’ve always tried to do.

Your winning and, you know this unreservedly, caring coach of one and a half years has a tough manner so different than the parent and child affirming way of previous coaches. You’re hearing very forcefully from parents of some of the students who have been your best athletes. You know the coach is rock solid with your student philosophies, but you know also that he shows it very differently than your previously mediocre program has been used to.  

You have factions new to your school because of an influential pastor-father and his friends. Teachers who never feared power plays behind their backs are experiencing parents who don’t believe they should have to talk to the teacher first to get their way.

You and your Board have decided – mutually but not pleasantly -- this will be your last year there. Your next position is nowhere yet in view. Your retirement fund can help the timing and transition some, but this was nowhere in your college planning for your own kids.

You’ve worked and worked with a student and his parents on discipline issues, seeking real heart change and restoration again and again. The student has been somewhat responsive – enough to keep you hoping – and the parents are always very involved and supportive. One more time, similar bad choices win out in the student’s heart and mind, not grossly worse than the others but clearly showing an increasingly troubling direction. You and your leadership team are agreed that you’re not going to see the needed changes in this young man at your school. It’s time to call a meeting with parents and child with a different outcome than you’ve had three times before in the last two years.

In your shopping center build-out, with the Chinese restaurant upstairs, you see the slow but increasing wet rivulets down the wall you’ve seen twice before. Soon, the ceiling will start raining on your books in your office and school will close early for drying out and drain repairs. It’s still two years – and a timetable that you don’t currently know – until you get to move out onto new school-purchased land and the beginning of a constructed campus.

You’re mad at yourself, you’re mad at your wife, and your wife’s mad at you having the same talk yet again about how school is taking most of your time and all of your energy and attention.

You wouldn’t be here if this was all it was. You get to see lives change, if not every day, then many, many times every year. But the hard doesn’t go away.