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…
… we cannot in the next two-and-a-half months of the school year pack nine months worth of life. We cannot live an entire year in this timeframe.
This week, we returned our entire student body to school, fully in person.
Everyone was back on campus yesterday. Everyone.
This moment followed intense conversation, analysis, prayer and consideration. It was arrived at with seriousness and trepidation It was arrived at with all the due diligence we could bring to the fore.
I am as confident that I can be that it was a good and right decision.
What happens next is anyone’s guess, but my strong belief is that we will remain together – managing quarantines and positive cases among our student body and staff – for the rest of the year.
But I am no epidemiologist.
Could it be that we are rounding the bend? Could it be that we are at the beginning of the end?
It surely feels that way.
In recent weeks in my regular communication with our faculty and staff, weekly newsletters and the like, I have been including snippets of information and quotes from last year’s missives, providing context and a sense of what we were doing last year in the early stages of this crisis. It has been an amazing exercise. If those days were the beginning, these must be the end.
Right?
There is massive excitement in our building right now.
What I have begun to note is that it is incumbent upon us as leaders apply the brakes a little bit. The utterly understandable desire for normalcy, for coming back to what we know and how we have done things is a powerful, powerful pull. Bracketing how much I do not know about public health and the progress of the virus and the timing of herd immunity, vaccinations and the like, I do know this: we cannot in the next two-and-a-half months of the school year pack nine months worth of life. We cannot live an entire year in this timeframe. We cannot give back to our community every experience they have lost.
Even if we want to.
We want excitement. We want wins. But this has to be a time to step on the brakes… a bit.
Quiet week last week… but it was Spring Break. We will see how things go moving forward… fingers are crossed.