Full Time Assistant Principal - What's It Like and Where Are We Going?
The Purpose
What's it like to be the Vice Principal of a K-12 school? Well, as I have recently taken on this position, here is where I am going to post what it's like.First Thing I Did
I have been at this school for 18 years now but always in the role of a teacher (or computer network administrator). I kept my nose out of the administrative going-ons for two reasons: first, I was not a fan of the politics that I thought must go on in these positions and, secondly, I didn't want to deal with the apparent "garbage" that administration tended to get from staff, parents, and students. Yes, I had a very bleak view of this job. One thing that should be noted is that I am a big proponent of "truth" - hard facts. The biggest issue I have had with people over my 40-ish years on this earth is that people sometimes tend to speak and act on what they perceive as truth but they have not personally checked on the credibility of their beliefs. This, I believe, was where much of the politics and garbage I spoke of earlier was based on.
Thus I wanted to first look at the truth about our school in general. Many Principals have come and gone form our school and I wanted to see their impact. Thus, I went back to the beginnings of the school's inception and made a chart of the total number of students from each grade. I then totalled the numbers up and charted it. Here is what I found:
As you can see, our school enrolment is on the decline. Interestingly, the school started with a very large number of students at it's inception (over 500 at one point), but we have steadily shrunk. Another interesting point is that each of the up-swings in the chart correspond to the 2 and 3 years of new Principal at our school.
I propose this: our school was started by many families who brought their families together. There was "Hype" to the school at the beginning (a new independent school). This trend follows the Hype cycle well (http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp). As well, for each principal, there seems to be a small upswing, something that could be attributed to a new leader's Halo effect http://psychology.about.com/od/socialpsychology/f/halo-effect.htm). However, as you will also notice, that effect does not last.
A side note here is that I still need to overlay this with standard demographic information of the public schools in our area: are we simply seeing a larger demographic trend? I think there is some of this, but I don't believe it is as closely related as I would hope it to be. Therefore, I will assume that there will be some correlation, but that the larger school demographics will not be the determining factor in our own school's numbers.
Conclusion?
What can we conclude from all this? I believe the following is what's playing out:
- The school's vision from 25 -30 years ago is not strong enough to create growth. The school needs to change focus dramatically. We need to create Hype again, and to do this means changing focus.
- Changing Principals is not the answer - though it might bring some change to the short term, it will not bring lasting effect.
So what is the focus of the school? What makes us different than other schools? Being simply a private school with spiritual focus is seemingly not enough to garner growth. This is the question to answer next.
On a more concrete note, I have been keeping busy with scheduling (which teachers are where and making sure that schedules match up for our teachers who teach both high school and elementary (PE and Art specialists, for example), looking at FTE's (who is at 1.0 and who is not), and creating a Personal Growth Plan for myself (this I think is key to my success). To that end, I want to personally thank those Principals and schools who are part of my group of advisors and who are allowing me to come to their schools and shadow their VP's and Principals. I am looking forward to it!
