Teach Boldly

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!

Expectation: The president who hired me at Mullen High School would be the president I would work for.

Reality: The president who hired me retired before I officially started my responsibilities as principal.

Expectation: The Board of Trustees would secure an interim president until a search for a full time replacement could be completed.

Reality: Through no fault of the Board, the interim plan did not work and Mullen was faced with a leadership challenge in the fall of my first year as principal.

Expectation: The administration I was hired to serve would be a solid group for the foreseeable future.

Reality: 2 of the 3 positions in the administration were occupied by different people by the end of my first year than those who were in the positions at the beginning of my first year.

Expectation: I was Principal of Mullen HIgh School.

Reality: By mid-fall, I was Acting President and Principal of Mullen High School.

To say that my realities were different than my expectations is something of an understatement though I could hardly anticipate all of the variables and challenges that combined to create such upheaval in the leadership structures of the school I had just joined.

Mullen had enjoyed almost a decade of stable leadership. The principal I succeeded had been with the school for over 20 years and had served as principal for the last 7. Likewise, the president who hired me had been in place 7 years as well. The leadership shifts were surprising and something of a shock to the system.

I served under 3 presidents in my first months at the school: the president who hired me, an interim president who had made it clear that her tenure would last no longer than early August (she was a former principal of Mullen the school had already coaxed out of retirement once before this – and she is simply wonderful) and an interim president who took the position and moved to Colorado for a year before realizing his health and a mile high altitude were incompatible.

Feeling the community was reeling a bit from all of the leadership changes, I asked the Board of Trustees if it made sense to have me, with the incredible support of Mullen’s amazing and dedicated Chief Financial Officer, serve as Acting President rather than hire another interim person.

The Board believed it did and I began a very short (by design) tenure in both roles. 

Looking back on my first year at Mullen, very few of my expectations were matched by reality. But all of them were exceeded.

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!

I do not remember being intimidated in the first days and weeks I served Mullen High School as its principal. I was absolutely aware of the responsibility and I was incredibly humbled to have the privilege. Through the generosity of my boss at the Jesuit Schools Network, I had been able to work a few days a week at Mullen throughout the spring of 2018 so, when the 2018-2019 school year opened, I felt I knew the school a bit better than I had when I interviewed. As the calendar moved into late July and early August, I was ready for the opportunity life had presented me.

I spent days reviewing the staff list, looking over the prior year’s yearbook and running through lists of departments to try to familiarize myself with everyone’s name. I had met many of the faculty and staff over my brief association with the school, but I wanted to know them as best I could before the year started.

I walked the campus every day. Mullen’s campus is vast and encompasses over half a dozen buildings. Some of the classroom numbers do not exactly follow logical patterns. Many of the locations are not referred to by what they are actually named, but by some colloquial understanding. I wanted to be certain I would not get lost on my way to any particular gathering or find myself in the wrong hallway in a crisis. 

As I got to know more people and they got to know me, I realized that all of my old stories, the stories I had told many times at Regis Jesuit and the stories I had used as an instructor for JSN, were all new. The folks at Mullen did not have a 20 year history with me. Hell, they did not have 20 minutes experience with me.

Many of my early conversations with people at Mullen necessarily dealt with my past, with what made me want to teach, with who I was.

It was like interviewing all over again sharing my professional and not a small amount of my personal history with my new colleagues. And it was a gift.

I have found when I tell someone why I am a teacher or why I am an administrator, I am energized because the work I am blessed to do truly inspires me. 

Mullen High School inspired me in those early weeks.

It still does.

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!

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.

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!

I had a wonderful 4 years working for the Jesuit Schools Network. I served the organization alongside wonderful colleagues who were dedicated to the mission of Jesuit education and to supporting the schools which we served. I logged thousands of air miles all over the country (and, as you will read below, internationally). I got to meet hundreds of people. I was blessed by the work and gifted by the experience. And I remain very, very close to some of my co-workers to this day. I love these people and the gifts they shared with me. I will always have “two minutes?” to speak with them.

In my fourth year with the JSN, I was asked to go to Rio for an international conference of leaders of Jesuit education from all over the world. “Asked” is the wrong word. “Honored” is more appropriate. I was honored by the invitation to go to Rio.

But I am an idiot and resisted. I am a bit timid when it comes to international travel, having not done much of it. I looked at the calendar for the month of October, the month during which the gathering would take place, and saw that I would be home in Denver for fewer than six days that month adding the conference to my schedule. I was reluctant to commit.

My boss at JSN removed the reluctance. We were blessed to go and we would all be going.

Roger that.

What I could not possibly conceive when I boarded the plane in Denver to layover in Houston to get to Rio was that the trip would change my life.

This is not a hyperbolic statement. This trip changed my life.

I am a religious person and ever have been. I am a devoted Catholic. I pray. But I had never had what I would define as a “religious experience” where I really, truly felt God speaking to me until my trip to Rio.

At a Mass, Arturo Sosa, SJ, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus was celebrating. I was seated in the front row and was within feet of Father Superior as he offered his homily. He spoke about how leaders in Catholic schools need to be in touch with who they are and how they must be authentic in their leadership.

When he said the word authentic, there was something of an echo in my mind, as though he and I were standing in a cave and he was speaking the word only to me and it was reverberating off the walls, back and forth, ringing gently in my ears.

Authentic. 

I heard the word repeated in my mind. 

Authentic.

I knew I was doing good work at the Jesuit Schools Network, and I was enjoying it.

I also knew that I felt I had not done the authentic work I was called to do: I had not been a principal (not a bloody “acting” principal, but a principal) of a Catholic high school. That was authentic. That was my calling.

When I arrived home, I spoke with my wife about the message I had received and she was absolutely supportive. She made my next choice possible. Without a job and without having applied for a position, I told my boss at the JSN that I would be leaving the organization at the end of the school year. He was gracious, supportive and told me ‘it’s time for you to run your own show.”

Following my conversation with my boss, my wife and I spoke again. She asked me “what’s your perfect position? What are you looking for? If you could wave your magic wand, what would your perfect job look like?”

That was easy. I would be hired by a co-ed, Catholic high school in Denver. I knew there was no such position open so we began to look at schools that would require a move.

Two weeks later, a co-ed, Catholic high school principalship opened.

Funny how religious experiences work.