… I was immediately struck by a significant question: can I do this job?
Had a coat of fine leather and snakeskin boots
But that coat always had a thread hangin’ loose – Lucky Town, Bruce Springsteen
Following my late summer departure from Mullen High School and an aspirational – if ultimately unsuccessful flirtation with consulting and starting my own enterprise – a singular reality hit me: I had worked in Catholic education my entire life and had not made enough money to live on savings for very long. Motivated, perhaps, more by fear than anything else, I began to look for positions in school leadership and turned my eye toward charter schools. They held two advantages. First, I had never worked in them and wanted to try something new. Second, they did not immediately require credentials, a reality very appealing to an uncredentialed dude approaching his mid-fifties.
Following a significantly arduous application process, I was hired as Assistant Principal of Culture at KIPP Northeast Denver Leadership Academy. I was eager and I was anxious.
Arriving at KNDLA with an understanding of my position that bore little resemblance to what the job would actually entail (a situation for which I blame myself; no one misled me), I was immediately struck by a significant question: can I do this job?
There are so, so many individuals at KNDLA who are doing wonderful, even heroic work. They are serving a school in turn around that has challenges beyond my limited understanding to enumerate. They are working with students who need them and are changing lives each and every day. They are passionate. They are devoted. They are first responders in the most praiseworthy sense of that term.
I was sad to realize that I was not one of them.
Early on in my one semester at KNDLA, I understood that the work behind me – the almost 30 years I had already spent in schools – had not prepared me for the work ahead of me, at least not the work at KNDLA. Though I worked very hard, I was not successful and had a suspicion, a gnawing feeling, that I was letting the school down, letting my colleagues down, letting our students down. I was overmatched and I was underperforming.
I was, simply put, miserable.
That I also was dealing with health issues during my short tenure there was real – though the hindsight of a couple of years leads me to understand that the mental health issues I was contending with were utterly intertwined with the physical ones.
Determining with my wife (who was suffering in her own purgatory at the time) that our next positions would not be in Colorado, I resigned in January and devoted myself to a nationwide search for my next position.
This was the right decision for us, but I will ever feel shame for departing KNDLA in the middle of the school year.
There were heroes there, colleagues who changed my outlook on education and who challenged my conception of our work. I smile when I think of Carrie and Brittani and Kelly and Erin. Kelly and Brittani, in particular, have had a lasting impact on my life. I was blessed to know them all and blessed in my short time there.
For, without question, my months at KNDLA led me to Xavier College Prep.
But that is a story for next week…
Next week, Lucky Town – Xavier College Preparatory High School