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!
THE ROLE I WANTED
MARCH 1, 2023
In mid-December 2017, I drove across town from my home to Mullen High School for an afternoon interview for the position of Principal and Chief Academic Officer.
Months earlier, after telling my wife that my dream job – the principalship of a co-ed, Catholic high school in Denver did not exist, I was out to lunch with a former colleague and shared with him that I was searching for a principal position. He told me that Mullen was looking for a principal.
Mullen High School.
Here’s the thing: I had departed Regis Jesuit High School four years earlier. I was a graduate of Regis Jesuit. Over the course of my time there, especially when I was a student, Mullen High School was Regis Jesuit’s major rival. When I was a student, both had been all boys schools. They competed fiercely in academics. There were fights in parking lots. There was an enmity between the student bodies of the two schools. My own, small contribution: I was yearbook editor my senior year when our basketball team defeated Mullen for the first time in a long time. I made a picture of the scoreboard showing the final score of that game the divider spread for the Athletics section of the yearbook.
Oh, and there was this: about seven years prior to this principal hiring cycle, Mullen had hired the principal I replaced in my year as acting principal of Regis Jesuit. He had a torrid tenure at the school and had left after less than a year.
Feeling the cards were stacked decidedly against me, I submitted my application.
I was, frankly, surprised I received an interview. Perhaps the intervening four years between my tenure at Regis Jesuit had somewhat inoculated me.
I arrived at the school and was greeted and taken into a waiting room outside Mullen’s Board Room to await the interview. As I sat, I noticed that a buffet of food which had been seemingly attacked and demolished. As I recall, my interview was in the mid afternoon and I realized, looking on the food, two things: first, the interview committee had been at this all day and, second, that I was the last candidate they would be interviewing.
That realization, coupled with the fact that I did not think I was actually going to get the job, immediately relaxed me. I truly thought I was the kind of candidate whose resume almost forced an interview and that there was no point in not speaking my mind. I went into that interview with a calm, let them get to know me attitude.
I had fun. The committee must have, too.
A few weeks later, I was back on campus as the “lead candidate” for the job, meeting faculty and staff (a handful of whom I had known as our paths had crossed at Regis Jesuit) and interviewing once again.
A few weeks after that, I was offered the position.
I was thrilled!
I had interviewed with two other schools, both out of state, and was not the first choice of either but, as it turned out, they were not my first choice following my interview at Mullen.
Mullen did something in their interview and with their committee that no other school did: they had students on the interview committee. And the students were not simply for show: those students interviewed me. They led large tracts of the conversation. They were concerned and they loved the school.
This said so much to me about what kind of place Mullen is. It told me what kind of leader I would need to be to serve the school well.
I received the offer and set out to being just that.
