This means listening. This means talking. This means communicating.
One of the things I adore most about living the life of an educational leader is August. I love the start of the year rituals. I love opening faculty meetings. I love registration days. I love orientations. And, the more I do them, I love speaking with the parents of incoming students.
The process of speaking with these parents often begins almost a year before orientation, when students and their families start the process of discerning which high school to choose. Tours, open houses, and interviews all influence that decision, they are important for the school to get right, and I have enjoyed taking part in them.
I have engaged in more interviews, open houses, and welcome speeches than I care to number. What I share with families and students has become repetitive, though not disingenuous. It has become rote, though not heartless. It has simply become practiced.
What has surprised me in recent years is that one of the themes I repeat in these contexts has become a truth in how I proceed as a principal: parents are the best partners a school has.
This is a significant shift from early in my teaching career when I dreaded a parent phone call (my career pre-dates email) and early in my administrative career when an email or a phone call would cause me no small amount of stress.
Upon receiving a contact from a parent, I typically felt that there was something wrong, that I had done it, and that I was being called out for it. This reaction must be adjacent to Imposter Syndrome. It is as powerful and as destructive as that disorder.
Perhaps it was becoming a parent myself that leavened these dark feelings. Perhaps it was transitioning into administration where the contacts were more frequent that improved my take on them. Perhaps it was growing as a person and as a professional.
Regardless, I have come to embrace what is obviously true: the adults our students live with are our best partners in the work we do. They can be our best supporters if we are proceeding in transparent and clear directions. They can be our advocates with their students when they understand our approaches.
What I realize now is that schools cannot miss out on creating positive contacts with parents. These relationships must be as strongly constructed as possible before they are tested, and they sometimes are. As educational professionals, we must own the fact that parents and guardians trust us with their most valuable and loved companions – their children – and we are required to act accordingly.
This means listening. This means talking. This means communicating.
This means that what we do must always be done in the context of knowing that our students’ parents are a critical part of their lives, more critical than we, and are a critical part of our “audience.” What happens in school should never stay in school. That is not what schools are designed for. Schools are designed to shape and educate and mold students in preparation to face an increasingly complex world.
Parents are our best partners in this work. As educators, we should embrace that truth.