The Journal presents my weekly reflections on being a private, Catholic school principal during what promises to be a year filled with energy, excitement, challenges and possibilities…
I am a pandemic parent, too.
Today is my daughter’s birthday. She is the youngest of our three children and she turns 22 today which means all three of them are officially, officially, officially adults. She’s a wonderful young woman and you can read about her HERE if you wish!
21 has always struck me (especially as I get older) as still on the line, still a kid, still working it out. 22? Time to stop kidding myself. I am the parent of three adults.
These last months in my professional life – from March right up until today – have been as challenging as any I’ve ever experience and, as I have noted many times in this blog, those challenges have often been very direct from those who are unhappy with decisions we’ve made as a school or I have made as a principal. While I do my best to keep my reactions to these tamped down and appropriate, some get me more than others do.
I think the ones that get to me the most are those that suggest we are unaware as a school or I am unaware as an individual of what our students have lost. Many comments remind me that losing out on the trappings of the high school experience is hurting our kids, that the postponements and cancelations and alterations are painful. Some suggest that we don’t understand, that I don’t sympathize.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I get it. I get that people are upset by what’s happened and what’s happening. I understand that our students are losing things.
I am a pandemic parent, too. In the last months, here is what my kids (my adult kids) have lost:
- an undergraduate graduation (at which one of the kids was a student speaker),
- all the trappings of that graduation,
- saying goodbye to friends at college,
- a graduate school graduation – from Notre Dame,
- not one, not two, but three jobs (one of the kids lost three jobs!),
- travel with significant others,
- opportunities for closure they had been looking forward to and working for for years
- and so much more.
I don’t write this list to suggest that our experience as a family is more challenging than what any other families have had to face. In fact, I write this list knowing that we have made it through to this point, that the kids are employed, that they have homes and roofs over their heads, that they have done all they could during this time.
However, I have to note here and will begin to note in challenging correspondances I know the pain our kids are feeling. I more than sympathize. I empathize.
I am a pandemic parent, too.
The uptick in cases continues and our student body infection rate is rising. This just in: kids get the virus. And they get sick with it, too. The overwhelming majority of our students who are positive are symptomatic. We are in distance learning this week and have a decision to make about next, but districts around us are dropping like flies and moving remote through the calendar year…