Special education funding through IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is the financial backbone of services for students with disabilities in public schools. When federal IDEA funding is reduced, cut, or delayed, the students who are already navigating the most significant barriers to learning lose access to the support the law itself requires.

This is not a policy abstraction. This is a legal and ethical obligation with a human face. Every student on your campus with an IEP has a right to a free and appropriate public education. Federal funding disruptions don’t suspend that right. They just make it harder and more expensive for you to fulfill it.

When IDEA funding is threatened, the first call you make is to your district’s special education director. Understand what the district’s contingency plan is. If there isn’t one, make clear that one is needed before school starts.

The second thing you do is review your current IEPs against available resources and identify any student whose services are at risk. Do not wait for a parent to identify it for you. You will be in violation, you will have a grievance, and you will have failed a child.

The third thing you do is document everything. Every conversation with the district. Every staffing decision tied to the reduction. Every service that was modified and why. If this ends up in a due process hearing, which it might, your documentation is your defense and your evidence.

These students are not a line item. Treat the funding crisis the way you’d treat any threat to their welfare. Seriously. Immediately. With no equivocation.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

A legal obligation doesn’t wait for a funding fix.

When IDEA or other special education funding is reduced, school leaders must act proactively and not reactively. Review IEPs against available resources. Identify gaps before they become violations. Document every decision and every conversation about service modifications. The law does not suspend its requirements because the federal allocation changed. Your responsibility to each student on an IEP remains exactly what it was. Lead accordingly.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

You’re driving home on the last day of school. The parking lot is empty behind you. The year is over. For about ten minutes, you feel relief. Then your mind starts moving toward next year. The same four problems you didn’t solve. The same three relationships that frayed. The same gap in your data that you promised to address and didn’t. You turn onto your street and you realize you skipped the part where you actually thought about this year.

The end of a school year deserves more than relief. It deserves honest examination. Most school leaders move from the last day of school directly into summer operations mode, carrying the unprocessed weight of ten months of decisions, relationships, and results into the next year without stopping to understand what actually happened.

Block two or more hours in early July. Sit somewhere away from your desk. Take a legal pad. Answer four questions.

What worked this year that I want to protect and build on? What didn’t work that I need to change, and why did it fail? Where did I fall short as a leader, and what specifically will I do differently? What do my students and staff need from me next year that they didn’t fully get this year?

These are not comfortable questions. That’s the point. Comfortable reflection produces comfortable improvement, which is no improvement at all.

Then share what you found. Tell your AP. Tell a trusted colleague. Say out loud the thing you’re least proud of from the year. Naming it publicly, even to one person, creates accountability for changing it.

The leaders who improve most consistently are not the ones who had the best years. They’re the ones who examined every year, good and bad, with the same disciplined honesty.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

The year you don’t examine is the year you repeat.

School leaders who skip honest year-end reflection carry the same unresolved problems into the next school year and wonder why the patterns repeat. Schedule structured self-examination in the first week of summer. Use specific questions. Write your answers. Share at least one of them with someone who will hold you to it. Reflection without accountability is just journaling. Accountability without reflection is just busywork. You need both.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: A teacher tells you in confidence she’s been struggling with her mental health.

Federal education funding has never been more uncertain. Changes at the Department of Education, shifting guidance on Title I distributions, and ongoing policy debates about what the federal government owes to high-poverty schools have created a situation where school leaders can no longer assume that the money coming this year will match last year.

Title I funding serves the students with the highest need. Every dollar that disappears from that allocation hits the most vulnerable kids in your building first. That is not an abstraction. It means your reading interventionist. Your after-school program. Your family engagement coordinator. Your attendance counselor.

When the reduction memo arrives, don’t wait for the district to tell you what it means for your building. Do your own assessment first. Pull every position, program, and service funded fully or partially through Title I. Map what disappears if the allocation drops by 15 percent, then 25 percent, then 40 percent. Build three scenarios.

Then communicate with your staff before the rumor does. People will find out. The question is whether they hear it from you with context and a plan, or through the grapevine with fear and no information.

Advocate. Loudly and through every legitimate channel available. Contact your state education agency. Work with your union leadership if applicable. Support your district in communicating to board members and legislators what the real-building impact looks like. Numbers in a policy memo are abstract. A list of positions eliminated and programs cut is not.

The money may come back. It may not. Either way, your students need a leader who saw it coming and didn’t wait to respond.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

When federal funding shifts, school leaders who built scenarios early have options. Those who waited have cuts.

Build a funding-impact analysis before you need it. Map every Title I-funded position and program in your building. Develop three reduction scenarios with specific consequences for students named in each. Communicate with your staff before the rumor cycle starts. Advocate through legitimate channels with real data. School leaders who engage the funding threat proactively protect more of what their students need than those who absorb the news passively.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: A community donor offers to fund a program the district just eliminated. You need to think carefully.

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There is a version of school leadership that is entirely administrative. Budget codes, compliance reports, facilities tickets, discipline logs, personnel files, board presentations. You can spend a full year doing only those things. Many principals do.

And then something small happens, like a card in a drawer, that reminds you why you came to this work in the first place.

Summer is the right time to revisit your why. Not in a motivational-poster way. In a practical, grounding way. Because the urgency of the school year will return fast, and if you don’t have clarity on what you’re doing this for, the administrative weight will fill every corner of your leadership and crowd out the human part.

Ask yourself the question directly. Why did you become a school leader? Not the answer you give in interviews. The real one. Maybe it was a teacher who believed in you when no one else did. Maybe it was a school that failed a kid you knew and you decided you’d run one differently. Maybe it was something harder to name than that.

Write it down. Put it somewhere you’ll see it in February when the state assessment pressure is climbing and the personnel situation you’ve been managing for four months has gotten worse and you haven’t slept well in two weeks.

Your why is the thing that outlasts every bad season. Keep it close.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

A leader without a clear purpose is just a manager with a bigger title.

School leaders who stay connected to their original purpose for entering this work sustain themselves through the hard seasons that would otherwise break them. This summer, write one clear sentence that answers the question: why do I do this? Not a mission statement. Not a professional goal. A true answer. Revisit it in January. It will cost you ten minutes and may save your career.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

School leadership is a relentless job. The year doesn’t stop at 3:30 and it doesn’t stop in June. Superintendents send emails in July. Parents call in August. Facilities issues don’t respect the academic calendar. And most school leaders never fully step away, which means most of them never fully recover.

Burnout in school leadership is not a character flaw. It’s a structural outcome of a job that was designed to consume. The principal who is exhausted by October is not weak. She’s responding rationally to an irrational demand load.

But exhaustion is not inevitable if you protect against it deliberately.

Take the time off. Really take it! Set an auto-reply. Identify who covers urgent situations and tell your district who that is. Give yourself at least one week, ideally two, where you are genuinely unavailable. Not guilt-available. Not one-email-a-day-available. Unavailable.

What you find in that space is not laziness. It’s perspective. The problem you’ve been spinning on for six weeks often resolves itself in three days of distance. The decision you’ve been avoiding becomes clear when you’re not surrounded by the noise that obscures it.

You are the instrument of your school’s leadership. If the instrument is worn down, nothing you do with it is at full capacity. Rest is professional preparation, not an absence from the job.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

Rest is not a reward for finishing. It’s a requirement for leading.

School leaders who don’t protect genuine recovery time diminish their own capacity over the course of a career. Build at least one true week of disconnection into your summer. Tell your district in advance. Set up coverage. Then step away without apology. The leader who comes back rested makes better decisions, reads people more accurately, and sustains the work longer. That is a professional responsibility, not a personal luxury.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

SUMMER LEARNING

You send your assistant principal to a national leadership conference in late June. Three days, four hundred dollars in registration, airfare, hotel. She comes back with a tote bag and a stack of handouts. You ask her what she learned. She talks for two minutes. Then she says she’s glad she went. A month later, nothing has changed.

Professional learning for school leaders is a significant investment. The conference industry has built an entire economy around it. Some of it is genuinely valuable. A lot of it is not. And the difference rarely has to do with the speaker or the content.

The difference is what happens before and after the conference.

Before you send anyone, including yourself, to a professional learning event, have a specific conversation about the purpose. What are you going there to learn? What challenge in your building is this conference going to help you address? Write it down. A leader who goes to a conference…

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SUMMER HIRING

She’s been your AP for four years. She’s good. Your staff respects her. She applies for the department head opening and she’s qualified for it, clearly. But when you sit across from her in the interview, something shifts. She’s not interviewing. She’s expecting. And you have another candidate who, on paper and in the room, is stronger.

Internal candidates are one of the harder judgment calls in school leadership. The person already knows your culture, your systems, and your kids. That has value. But loyalty and competence are not the same thing, and treating them as if they are doesn’t serve anyone.

The first mistake school leaders make is avoiding the honest evaluation because they’re afraid of the conversation. If the internal candidate is not the strongest applicant, hiring them because it feels safer is a disservice to your students, your staff, and ultimately to the candidate herself.

The second mistake is the opposite. Passing over a qualified int…

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The email arrives on a Thursday in late June. It’s from your district’s finance office. Subject line: “Carry-forward funds — action required by July 31.” You open it. There’s $47,000 sitting in a restricted grant account. Money that was never spent. Money you didn’t know you had. Money that disappears in 28 days if you don’t use it.

Most school leaders never see it coming. You’re managing daily operations for ten months. Budget decisions happen fast, often without full information. And then summer arrives and someone finds money in a bucket you didn’t know was filling up.

The instinct is to spend it fast. Order technology. Buy furniture. Fill the supply room. But fast spending is where good principals make bad decisions. Urgency is not a strategy.

Before you spend a dollar, ask three questions. First, what does the grant actually allow? Restricted funds have rules. Spending outside those rules creates audit findings that follow you for years. Seco…

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A parent sat across from me and asked why her son was failing junior English when his transcript showed a 3.0 GPA. I had no good answer, not at first. What I found when I pulled his file was not about her son. The names in this story are gone. The transcript is not. This is what it looked like from my chair.

The meeting, 9:14 a.m.

She wasn’t angry. She was composed, organized, with a folder in front of her. Parents with folders are different from parents who come in hot. They’ve thought this through.

Her son was failing junior English. He’d passed everything else. He studies, she said. He tries. She slid the progress report across the desk.

I told her I’d look into it.

I did. What I found shocked me.

The records.

I pulled his file after school. Four years of grades. Mostly B’s, a few C’s, one failed semester in sophomore math pulled to passing by year’s end.

Then I pulled the assessment history. PSAT. State reading scores. The diagnostic from ninth g…

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Third period. Room 214. The bell rang four minutes ago and nobody is off task, because nobody is ever off task in her room. Then a sophomore in the back row says something under his breath. Quiet enough that you will never know exactly what. Loud enough that twenty-six students will remember what happened next for the rest of their lives.

She is the teacher you would clone if you could.

Twelve years you have known her. You sat on the committee that hired her. You stood in the back of her classroom on your worst days, because watching her teach reminded you why you took this job in the first place.

She runs the homecoming float. She mentors the student teachers. Parents request her by name in April for the following fall.

And she is your friend. Not work-friendly. A friend. Coffee in the parking lot before the buses roll in. Holidays at each other’s tables. The kind of colleague you stop calling a colleague.

Hold all of that in your thoughts.

It’s T…

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The Empty Parking Lot

The last bus pulled out at 3:47.

You know the exact time because you watched it go.

Stood at the window in your office and watched the brake lights disappear around the corner at the end of the access road.

Then you turned around.

The building was still yours. The list was still there. The summer calendar was already filling up.

But the kids were gone.

And for right now, that was the only thing that mattered.

The campus is silent now.

Not the silence of a Sunday morning or a holiday weekend. This is a different kind of silence. Earned. The kind that only settles in after ten months of noise.

You walk down the main hallway one more time. No particular reason. Just walking.

The trophy cases are still lit. Someone forgot to turn them off. You make a mental note, then let it go. It can wait until Monday. Everything can wait until Monday.

You push through the side door and step into the parking lot.

Your car is the only one left.

You don’t get in it yet.

Here is something n…

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Staff Shortages and Culture — Part Three

June came. You made it. You sat in the parking lot on the last day and asked yourself — honestly — how.

The year had cost the building three long-term vacancies, eleven short-term substitute days with zero coverage, four teachers who hit the wall hard enough that you worried about them coming back, and one position that had been posted, re-posted, and posted a third time before you finally hired someone in April who would spend the rest of the year learning the job on the job.

The kids were fine. Mostly.

That phrase — the kids were fine — carries a lot of weight you don’t always unpack. Fine compared to what? Fine means they made it, they passed, they graduated, they moved on. It doesn’t mean they got the year they were owed.

You know the difference.

Sitting in the parking lot on the last day, you started doing what school leaders do — the accounting. Not the budget. The human accounting. Who held the line when …

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Good Numbers

My scores were going up.

Year one, up. Year two, up again. Year three, same story. By year four my superintendent was showing off my school’s data at board meetings. Holding it up. Pointing to it.

Reading proficiency. Math proficiency. Both moving in the right direction four years running.

A commendation letter went into my file. People in central office started saying we had turned a corner.

And I believed them.

I need you to understand that part. I was not running a scam. I was not doing anything that felt wrong on any given Tuesday morning walking into that building. I was proud of what we had built. I talked about it. I presented it. I stood in front of my staff every year and pointed to those numbers as evidence that the work was working.

The scores were good.

For four years, that was enough for me.

She had been on my staff eleven days.

My new assistant principal. Very sharp. Asked questions the way good educators ask questions, not to challenge anyone, just because s…

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Teacher Burnout — Part One

She used to be the first car in the parking lot. You noticed she wasn’t anymore. You told yourself she was just tired.

Dana had been teaching in your building for eleven years. She was the kind of teacher you don’t recruit — you grow. She knew every kid. She remembered siblings. She showed up at games, covered duties without being asked, answered parent emails at 10 PM with the patience of someone who genuinely believed it mattered.

In September she submitted three absence requests for professional development she’d never shown interest in before.

You signed them. You were busy.

In October her classroom door, which used to be open until 5 PM, started closing at 3:45. Her bulletin boards — always changing, always current — stopped changing. The same anchor chart from September was still up in November. You noticed. You said nothing.

Your assistant principal mentioned it in passing: “Dana seems a little checked out lately.” You nodde…

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Student Behavior & Discipline — Part Two

The call came over the radio at 1:47 in the afternoon. You were in the middle of a budget meeting. You left.

Room 214. Two students. A hallway that went sideways fast.

You came around the corner and saw three staff members already there, voices up, a crowd of kids pressed against the lockers. One student on the floor. Another being walked toward the wall by your assistant principal. The sounds were what stayed with you — not the shouting, not the crying — the sound of things already broken and still in motion.

You took the situation. That’s what you do. You move toward it and you take it.

What follows in the next four hours is not a leadership theory exercise. It’s a sequence of decisions made under pressure, in real time, with incomplete information — and each one has consequences you won’t fully understand until later.

The parents are coming. Both families. They are not friends. One father is already on his phone in the…

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You didn’t think much of it the first time. Most principals don’t. That’s usually how it starts.

Jonathon was a ninth grader who is used to be invisible. Not in a bad way. Some kids are steady and quiet and present without demanding anything from you. They blend into the daily rhythm of the school, rarely drawing attention but always dependable. Their quiet presence can sometimes make it easy to overlook subtle shifts in their behavior or mood.

His teachers liked him. His attendance was solid. He showed up, did his work, and went home.

Then he didn’t.

The first office referral came from Mr. Patterson in third period. “Refused to work. Wouldn’t respond when redirected.” You read it twice because the name didn’t fit the behavior. You called Jonathon in. He sat across from you with his arms crossed and said almost nothing. You gave him the grace-and-warning conversation. He nodded. You sent him back to class.

Three days later, another referral. This one from the ha…

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The Night They Came for Answers

The community meeting was scheduled for seven o’clock.

By six forty-five, every seat in the gymnasium was filled.

By seven, people were standing three deep along the back wall, and the energy in that room was the particular kind of energy that builds when people have been worried for a long time and have finally found a place to put it.

I was the High School Principal. I was the one who had called the meeting.

And I was the one who had helped make the cuts they were there to confront me about.

The district had entered the year facing a $4.2 million shortfall. Not a projection. Not a forecast. A deficit already in motion, inherited from a combination of declining enrollment, rising insurance costs, and a state funding formula that had not kept pace with what it actually cost to run a school in the year we were living in.

The board, superintendent and I had spent four months trying to find a solution that didn’t require us to stand in a gymnasium and ex…

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Code Red

It was 9:47 on a Wednesday morning. You were in a third-grade classroom doing a walkthrough. The teacher was mid-lesson. Twenty-two kids. Crayons. Morning light. Then your radio crackled. Your secretary’s voice. Calm, the way people are calm when they’re trying not to be.

She said law enforcement had called.

A man had made a threat. He’d named your school. He was last seen eight minutes away.

You stepped into the hallway.

Your brain did something interesting in that moment. It got very quiet. Not because you weren’t afraid — you were. But because twenty-five years of decisions had trained your mind to go still when everything else goes loud.

You called the lockdown.

I was uncertain, and in this business, uncertainty breaks toward caution every single time.

Within ninety seconds, every classroom door in your building was locked. Lights off. Kids against interior walls, away from windows. Teachers doing what they practiced in August, hoping they’d never need it.

You got to the m…

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It was a Tuesday in October. The leaves outside your window had just started to turn. You were three weeks into a strong school year — good energy in the hallways, teacher morale up, your discipline numbers down. Then your phone rang. It was the superintendent. And she didn’t call to say well done.

She said there was a problem with the budget.

Not a small problem.

The district had miscalculated enrollment projections in the spring. Three sections. Eleven teachers. And now, six weeks into the school year, someone downtown had done the math and come up short.

She needed to cut. And she needed your list by Friday.

You sat with that for a second. Maybe two.

Because here’s what she didn’t say, AND you already knew. Every name on that list was a person. A colleague. Someone who showed up on the first day with a new classroom theme and a box of supplies they bought with their own money. Someone who stayed late on Tuesdays for tutoring. Someone who told you last sp…

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