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 need to begin to shake the dust of this year from my sandals.
A full week into April, it is hard to deny that the end of the academic year is approaching. Rapidly.
I am fairly certain that I have never anticipated an end to a year with more joy than I am anticipating the end to this one. While we have passed all the 12 month anniversary markers of the start of the pandemic, are firmly into the second year with growing hope daily that the end is coming, the reality is we are still dealing with this thing. It still demands the majority of my time even today.
The management of quarantines and the mountain of emails they create is significant. Answering questions about duration of time away from school (“Is that 10 days or 14 days? Do I get to test on the 3rd day or the 5th day? Do you need to see my negative result or can you just trust me?”) is a time chewer. Continuing to defend long made decisions about our schedule and approach is an ongoing struggle. Hearing from some faculty and staff that I have listened too much to parents and that “this whole year has been about the students; when we will focus on the teachers?” drains energy. Each new circumstance – and there are so, so many – that spins out of the pandemic forces new engagement, new strategies and a new opportunity to, like Sisyphus, push the rock back up the hill.
Again.
I have been conducting End of Year Conversations with each member of the teaching and support staff at the school. In most of them, my colleagues have shared with me a variation on the “this has been a year unlike any other” theme and I would do well to remember that. This has been a year unlike any other and, while there has been good in it and we would do well to learn from it, some of it ought to be left behind.
The end of the year is coming and while I have been cautioned by my mentor many times to resist living for the end when we are still in the middle, I am going to give myself some license to dream of the end of this particular year. I need to begin to shake the dust of this year from my sandals. If I do not, it is going to be difficult to reach the year’s end with anything resembling positivity.
The end is coming and that, in-and-of-itself, is an immense comfort.
Quarantines continue. Students and staff alike are reporting exposures outside of school and those exposures take them out of classes. We are doing a great job managing these and our teachers are doing a great job responding to the needs of the students, but man if they aren’t trying.