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 HARD CALLS
APRIL 12, 2023
The hard calls one makes as a principal tend to deal with departures. There are times that, for the good of the school or for the good of an individual, someone must be asked to leave or be mandated to leave. Over the course of my almost five years as principal of Mullen and in my years as an assistant principal and acting principal at Regis Jesuit, I have taken part in more of these kinds of separations than I would have liked.
There have been situations which are all but obvious, when someone has done something that is so far over the line that there is really only one decision that can be reached, but those are very, very rare.
More often, these decisions are heart wrenching and, as I write this post, I picture faces and remember names and recall – vividly – the emotions around each of these separations.
While I remind myself that, at the end of each scenario, I and those making the decisions with me did the best we could with the information we had, the sting lingers. Choices such as these change people’s lives. There is immense responsibility in them.
All of these hard calls remain with me. The emotions still impact me. The history of each choice informs the next.
It might be better if I had the capacity to simply let them go but I do not want to be that kind of principal or that kind of leader.
In the much maligned Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Captain Kirk is offered an opportunity to have the pain of the worst moment of life erased from his psyche. He refuses. “… pain and guilt can’t be taken away with the wave of a magic wand! They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away, I need my pain,” Kirk says.
While I might, sometimes, especially directly in the aftermath of these decisions, want the pain to go away, I have to agree with Kirk.
It is my sincere hope that each hard call and the reflection thereon makes me a better principal when I have to make the next one.
I have learned the next one is always coming…