With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
BREAKING AWAY
FEBRUARY 8, 2023
One day I – provisionally – received the job I had been chasing for years: principal of Regis Jesuit High School.
Less than 10 months later, the dream job ended.
Shortly after that, I departed the school I had worked at for 20 years.
This is a very simplistic, but perhaps not inaccurate, way to look at the end of my years at Regis Jesuit High School. Following serving for seven years as an administrator in the Girls Division of Regis Jesuit, I was asked to take on the role of Acting Principal for the Boys Division in late May and agreed to do so.
My perception of the months I held that position is that they were challenging but rewarding, that I worked very hard to serve the faculty and staff and students at the school and that the results of my almost full year on the job were good.
I was thrilled to have the role but not everyone was thrilled to have me in it. I knew this and worked as diligently as I knew how to illustrate that I was the person for the role. I wanted to show through my actions that I had the best interests of the institution and the people who served our students at heart. I desired nothing more than to win over those who believed I was the wrong person for the position.
As I noted above, that quest lasted 10 months. When I applied for the ongoing position, I was not hired, though many, many signals were shared with me that I would be.
It was a very bitter pill to swallow, one of the most bitter of my entire professional career.
Following the limited explanations offered me by the president of the school (and, to be fair to him, I was in far too much pain to ask for further details than those he offered in one of the more uncomfortable conversations I have ever had), I sat down with the people I worked with on the administration of the Boys Division and told them I was not going to have the job.
I believe they were all surprised.
To one of them, I said: “If I could punch you in the face and be put on paid leave for the remainder of the year, I would do it.”
I found out the news in February. There were months left with me in the position, some pretty critical months in the life cycle of the school.
My favorite professional memory of this time concerns the plans the President and I created to tell the full faculty that a different hiring determination was made. We decided that he would meet with the faculty and staff for the first 15 minutes of our weekly staff meeting, share the news with them and then I would enter and run the rest of the meeting. Writing it out now, I wonder why we thought that would be a good plan. Surely there was a better way to proceed here…
Ah, well.
As the faculty and staff met with the president in the library, I waited outside the closed doors until the appointed time. My desire was to come in quickly and quietly with a modicum of dignity and assume leadership of the meeting.
There was tension in the room as I opened the door at the back of the library and began to walk in. Everyone’s backs were to me, but I could sense the mood. Perhaps I was projecting how I felt on the group. Regardless, I moved into the library. To enter the room, one had to pass through scanners that looked like metal detectors which tripped when something was being taken into or out of the library that was not checked out. If that happened, an alarm would sound.
You can likely guess what occurred next. While I had nothing with me that should have set off the alarm, it sounded.
Loudly.
And 150 heads turned to see me.
All I could do was laugh.
All any of us could do was laugh.
It was the perfect entrance to the meeting.
It feels like the last time I would laugh that year.