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 Tuesday, 11:40 in the morning, and a girl from Room 214 is standing in your office doorway, white as paper. She cannot get the words out at first.

Then she does.

By noon there are three students in your outer office. By 12:15 a parent has called. By 12:30 you are watching forty seconds of video shot from the third row.

On the screen is someone wearing your friend’s face.

She is inches from a fifteen-year-old boy. Her hand is wrapped around the leg of a wooden stool. The stool is off the floor. And the words coming out of her mouth are not discipline. They are not frustration boiling over into volume. They are a threat. Specific. Physical. Unmistakable.

You watch it three times. You are not gathering evidence. Not yet. You are searching for the version where it is not true.

There is no such version.

So, you do what the chair requires. You call the district office before you call anyone else. She is out of the classroom by the end of the period. The boy and his parents hear from you that afternoon, in person, with the counselor in the room. The investigation opens before the buses leave.

Two days later she sits across your desk to sign the administrative leave paperwork. She looks at you and says, “Larry, I don’t know who that was.”

And here is the part nobody warns you about. You believe her.

The investigation surfaces what twelve years of friendship never did. Her life had been coming apart for months. Quietly. Completely. She told no one. Not her sister. Not her doctor. Not you.

All those mornings in the parking lot, and you never saw it coming.

Neither did she.

Her union representative asks for grace. Cites twelve years of exemplary evaluations. Asks whether one moment should erase a career. You have asked yourself the same question at two in the morning, more than once, and you keep arriving at the same answer. This was not a moment of bad judgment. A child stood in a classroom, in your building, on your watch, and believed an adult might hurt him. There is no evaluation binder thick enough to balance that scale.

The recommendation goes forward with your signature on it. Termination. Your hand does not shake when you sign it. That surprises you too.

The building takes it hard. Teachers who loved her look at you differently in the hallway for a while. A few say so out loud. You let them. Grief needs somewhere to go, and you are there to absorb it.

You check on the boy every week through the end of the semester. Not a summons to the office. A walk past his locker. A question about the game. He needs to see the same thing every time he looks at you: the system that failed to predict the threat did not fail to answer it.

People will ask you, for years, how you fired your friend. It is the wrong question. The right question belongs to the boy in the third row, and it is this: do the adults in this building protect me, or not? Your signature was the answer.

She was the best teacher in the building. Right up until the forty seconds when she was not.

And forty seconds was all the job gave you to work with.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

Friendship does not come with foresight. The people closest to a school leader can break privately and surface publicly, and no amount of shared history entitles you to a warning. So the principle has two halves. First, when student safety enters the room, the career, the friendship, and the body of work all leave it. You respond to the moment in front of you, fully and immediately, because a child’s sense of safety is never averaged against an adult’s reputation. Second, separate the verdict from the grief. The decision belongs to the chair, and it must be made at the speed the chair requires. The sadness and sorrow belongs to you. You are allowed to carry it, after the student is safe, after the process is honest, and on your own time.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

theprincipalschair.substack.com

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 nobody talks about in this job.

The last day of the school year is the only day all year when the weight of it becomes visible to you.

Not during it. After it.

When the buses are gone and the hallways are empty and you’re standing in a parking lot that forty-five minutes ago held two hundred cars, something happens to a principal. Something quiet and private that you don’t mention to anyone. Not your family. Not your staff. Not your superintendent.

You run the year.

You think about the kid you never quite reached.

Not the ones you failed dramatically. The quiet ones. The ones who came through every single day, sat in every class, ate lunch alone in the back corner of the cafeteria, and left in June the same way they arrived in August.

You knew something was off. You’d see them in the hallway and make a note to yourself. Check in. Follow up. Find out what’s underneath that flatness in their eyes.

And then your radio would go off. Or the front office would buzz. Or a parent would be waiting. And the note you made to yourself would quietly disappear under the weight of everything else that needed you right now.

And they would come back tomorrow. There was always tomorrow.

Until there wasn’t.

You think about the teacher you were too hard on in October.

You know the one. Strong teacher. Genuinely committed. Struggling with something personal that was bleeding into the classroom in ways that were starting to affect kids. You had the conversation. You had to. It was the right call.

But you delivered it too sharp. Too efficiently. Too much principal, not enough person.

They came back the next day and did their job. And the day after that. All year.

But something shifted. And you noticed. And you told yourself you’d come back to it when things slowed down.

Things never slowed down.

You think about the decision you second-guessed from January. The one you’re still not sure about. Whether you got it right. Whether you got it wrong. Whether it was one of those calls that just doesn’t have a right answer and you carried it around for six months pretending otherwise.

You’ll probably carry it through the summer too.

This is the part of the job that doesn’t appear in any job description.

The accounting.

Not the formal kind. Not the spreadsheets and data reports you’ll submit before you leave for the break. The internal kind. The one you run alone in a parking lot when nobody is watching, and the only standard you’re measuring against is the one you set for yourself before the year started.

How close did you get?

And here’s the thing. Here’s what separates the principal who comes back in August ready to go from the one who comes back in August already tired.

The accounting has to be honest. But it also has to be complete.

You have to count what you missed. Every principal misses things. If you don’t account for what you missed, you’ll miss the same things next year.

But you also have to count what you held together.

The student who was two absences away from failing the year in March and graduated on time in May because you made one phone call to the right person at the right moment. The new teacher who was ready to quit in November and finished the year stronger than anyone on the staff because you sat with them for thirty minutes on a Wednesday afternoon and told them what you actually saw. The parent you never won over but kept in relationship with anyway, because you understood that the relationship mattered more than winning.

These count too.

The parking lot is getting dark.

You get in your car.

You sit there for a minute.

You’re not done. You’re not finished. You’re not leaving because the year is over. You’re leaving because this particular chapter is.

The difference between being done and leaving for the year is the same as the difference between a principal who carries their regrets and a principal who uses them. One of those principals comes back in August with a list. The other comes back with a plan.

You know which one you are.

You always have.

You start the car.

The parking lot is empty.

September is ten weeks away.

You already know it won’t be long enough.

It never is.

And you’re coming back anyway.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

Every school leader does a year-end reflection. The question is whether you do it honestly or just go through the motions.

Sitting with it in June, before you lock up and drive away, is an act of professional discipline. It forces you to name what you missed before you can decide what to do differently in August.

But the reflection only serves you if it goes both directions. Account for what fell short. Account for what held. Both tell you something about who you are in this job and who you want to be when the buses come back.

The school leader who leaves in June carrying only regret is not being reflective. That school leader is stuck.

Leave with the regret. Leave with the wins too. Then come back with a plan built from both.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

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 it was hardest? Who picked up the extra class without being asked twice? Who covered the hallway before anyone knew it needed covering? Who made the difficult kids their business even when they didn’t have to?

You could name every one of them.

That’s what holds a school together in a year like this. Not the system. Not the district. Not the official organizational chart. The people who decide, without being asked, that the building is their responsibility. The veteran teacher who sees a student wandering the hall during coverage chaos and takes her into her classroom without a word. The counselor who stays until 6 PM because a student needed someone and the parent wasn’t available. The custodian who notices things and tells you — quietly, off the record — what the kids are actually saying.

They are not in any position description. There is no rubric for what they do.

The aftermath of a staff shortage year is when you take stock of that. Not in a newsletter. In a conversation. Face to face, one person at a time.

Before school ended you made a list. Not of things to fix — though you have that list too. A list of the people who held the building together. And you made time to find each of them and say, without making it a moment or a ceremony, just a real thing: “I know what you did this year. I know what it cost you. I’m grateful.”

Most of them said it was fine. That’s often what people say when they’re too tired to process being seen.

Say it anyway.

The systemic problems — the shortage, the market, the pipeline, the working conditions that drive people out — those are not yours to solve alone. You are one principal. You can advocate. You can be vocal. You can refuse to treat the shortage as something to manage quietly and accept. But you cannot fix it by Thursday.

What you can fix is culture. A building where people feel seen, where extra effort is acknowledged, where the principal makes time to say “I noticed” — that building retains people. Not perfectly. Not completely. But better than a building where the extra mile goes unremarked and the people who ran it finish the year feeling invisible.

The new teacher you hired in April is coming back in August. She called to tell you.

You didn’t expect that.

She said: “You checked in on me almost every week. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. You kept asking how I was doing and I think that made a difference.”

That’s the whole job, sometimes. Not the strategy. Not the system. Just someone who keeps asking.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

After a year like this, the accounting that matters most is not the one in the budget. It’s the human one. Who held the line? Who picked up what wasn’t theirs? Say their names to them, directly, before the year ends. The shortage is real and it’s structural and it isn’t your fault. What is your fault — in the good sense — is whether the people who kept your building running knew that you saw them. That’s not soft leadership. That’s good culture and the reason people come back.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

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 she genuinely needed to understand how things worked before she could do her job well.

Eleven days in, she knocked on my door and sat down with a spreadsheet she had built on her own time. She said something in the data had been bothering her and she couldn’t figure out why, and she wanted to ask me about it before she assumed anything.

I looked at the spreadsheet.

Then I looked at it again.

The scores had gone up. That was true. But they had gone up because of which students we were pushing toward intervention. Which teachers were getting the coaching hours. Which classrooms I was prioritizing when time and resources ran short.

The students close to the proficiency line had moved. With the right push at the right time they crossed it, and crossing it moved the percentages, and moving the percentages made my report look the way everyone wanted it to look.

The students far from that line had not moved.

Because nobody had been pushing them.

Not because I decided not to. Because somewhere across four years my school had slowly stopped organizing itself around them. Without a meeting. Without anyone saying it out loud. Without any single decision I could point to and say — that is where it happened.

They were still enrolled. Every one of them.

They had just stopped being part of my plan.

I sat there looking at that spreadsheet for a long time.

Four years. Four years of good numbers and board meetings and people telling me the school had turned a corner.

And…I had turned a corner. Just not the one I thought.

I want to be honest with you about what that felt like.

It did not feel like getting caught. It felt worse than that. Getting caught means someone else found something you knew was wrong. This was different. This was sitting across from a spreadsheet and understanding, for the first time, that something I had believed about myself for four years was not true.

I had believed I was running a school that was getting better.

What I had actually been running was a school that was getting better at serving the students who were easiest to move.

Those are not the same thing. And I had let four years go by without ever asking the question that would have shown me the difference.

My assistant principal was still sitting across from me.

I told her: give me a few minutes. I need to make a phone call.

I called my superintendent that afternoon. Not to manage anything. Not to get ahead of a story. To tell him what I had found, take responsibility for what I had missed, and ask for his support to fix it.

It was a hard phone call to deliver.

Not because I was afraid of what would happen to me.

Because I had to say out loud that the students who needed me most were the ones I had, without ever meaning to, served the least.

We rebuilt the intervention system over the next two years. Started with the students my data had stopped counting. Reorganized coaching hours. Walked into classrooms that hadn’t been visited in months. Sat with teachers who had been quietly managing impossible caseloads because nobody had checked.

My scores went down in year five.

First time in a long time they were telling the whole truth.

I have since thought about those four years more than almost anything else from my time in that chair.

Not because of what went wrong. Because of how easy it was to miss. How completely reasonable every decision felt in the moment. How genuinely I believed I was doing right by kids because the reports said so and the superintendent was pleased and the commendation letter was in the file.

The metrics told me a story. I stopped asking whether the story was complete.

That is what I want you to take from this.

Not that I was a bad principal. I don’t believe that. But I was a principal who got comfortable with good numbers. And comfort, in this work, is where the drift can start.

There are students in your building right now who are not part of your plan. Not because you decided to leave them out. Because the system you are running — like most systems — pulls toward what is measurable and away from what is hard.

The question I should have been asking every year is the one my assistant principal asked after eleven days.

Who is in these numbers.

And who stopped being counted somewhere along the way.

I could have buried that spreadsheet. Nobody outside my office knew what was in it. She had only been there eleven days.

I picked up the phone instead.

That’s the one decision from those four years I am most proud of.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

Good numbers are not the necessarily the same as a good school. They are a question. Who is inside these numbers, and who stopped being counted? Every organization can drift toward measuring what is easy to move and away from what is hard to reach. The leader’s job is to keep asking who isn’t in the plan. Not once. Every month, every year. Before someone who’s been there eleven days has to ask it for you.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: The parent who threatened to go to the board — and why I told her she should.

theprincipalchair.substack.com

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 nodded and said something about it being a hard fall. You both moved on.

Here’s the thing about teacher burnout in its early stages: it doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like someone having a rough stretch. And since teachers are professionals who are trained to show up regardless of how they feel, the early signs are subtle. The door that closes a little earlier. The lesson that gets a little less sharp. The teacher who used to bounce ideas off you in the hallway who now just nods and keeps walking.

You know your teachers. That’s part of the job. Not their test scores — their rhythms. When someone whose rhythm you know starts to shift, that’s information.

You didn’t act on it. You logged it somewhere in the back of your mind under “keep an eye on it” and kept moving.

What you didn’t know — what you couldn’t have known from the outside — was that Dana had been offered a position at a private school in September. She’d turned it down because she wasn’t ready to leave. By November she was reconsidering. By December she had started the application.

You found out in January.

The window between September and January wasn’t empty. It was full of moments where a different kind of attention might have changed the outcome — or at least opened a conversation. Not a performance review. Not a formal check-in. A real conversation. Principal to teacher. Human to human.

“How are you, really?” is a different question than “How are things going?”

Most principals ask the second one. It’s safer. It doesn’t obligate either party to honesty.

The first one is a door. And sometimes a teacher who is quietly disappearing just needs someone to open it.

You didn’t know she was leaving until she was already most of the way out. Not because the signs weren’t there. Because you were moving too fast to read them.

Teacher retention is a leadership problem before it is a staffing problem. The teacher who is one bad month away from resigning is standing in your building right now. She is probably covering her prep, grading papers on her lunch break, and telling parents she’s fine.

She’s not fine.

The question is whether you find that out in October or February.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

Early-stage teacher burnout looks a lot like a rough stretch, and most principals give it space out of respect for their staff’s professionalism. That instinct isn’t wrong. But space without attention becomes distance. Slow down enough to notice when a teacher’s rhythm changes — not to intervene, not to fix, but to ask the kind of question that opens a door. “How are you, really?” Those four words have saved more teachers than any retention incentive I’ve ever seen.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

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 parking lot before you’ve even started the incident report. Your secretary tells you someone had a phone out in the crowd. You don’t know yet if anything has been posted.

Your district discipline policy says one thing. The students’ histories say another. What the classroom teacher tells you privately is different from what each student tells you separately. There is no clean version of this story.

You sit with each student individually. You listen. You take notes. You keep your voice level even when your adrenaline isn’t.

The father comes in first. He’s not yelling — yet. That’s often worse. He sits down and tells you exactly what he expects to happen to the other kid. He has a list. He has documentation from previous incidents. He has many opinions about your school, your staff, and your discipline process that he delivers without pausing for breath.

You let him finish.

Then you say: “I hear you. I’m going to tell you what I can tell you, and I’m going to be straight with you about what I can’t.”

That’s the line. That’s the moment. Not when you have all the answers — you never have all the answers — but when you decide to be present and direct with a parent who is scared and angry and trying to protect his kid in the only language he has right now, which is confrontation.

Here’s what most principals don’t talk about: the physical weight of a major discipline incident. It’s not just mental. Your body carries it. By 4 PM you’ve absorbed the fear of two families, the frustration of three staff members, a potential video, and the knowledge that whatever decision you make will be wrong to someone.

You still have to make it.

Suspension decisions are not punishments in a vacuum. They are messages — to the students, to the families, to the staff, to the building. What you do here tells everyone what you believe about safety, about accountability, about whether this school is a place where consequences mean something.

But they are not the end of anything. A suspension is a pause, not a solution. The problem that led to Room 214 will still be there when both students walk back through the door.

You know that. You also know you can’t say it out loud to either parent right now.

Documentation is critical here — not to protect yourself, though it does, but because the story you write today shapes every decision that comes after it. Be accurate. Be specific. Be careful with what you include and what you attribute. This record will matter.

Before you leave the building that night, you check in with the three staff members who were first on scene. Not formally. Informally. You walk into the room where one of them is still sitting with the lights half-on and you say: “You did what you were supposed to do. I saw it.”

That’s five seconds. It costs you nothing. It will be remembered.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

A major discipline crisis tests everything — your composure, your judgment, your ability to hold multiple truths simultaneously. The student who threw the punch is not just a disciplinary case. The parent in your office is not just an obstacle. The staff member who broke it up needs to hear from you before the day ends. You will not make everyone happy. That’s not the goal. The goal is to be fair, to be present, and to make a decision you can stand behind at six in the morning when you read it back to yourself.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: He came back Monday. And the real work began.

theprincipalschair.substack.com

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 hallway.

You told yourself it was a phase. You’ve been doing this long enough to know that kids go through things — family stuff, friend stuff, the invisible weight of being fourteen. You gave it space.

But here’s what nobody teaches you in your principal prep program: the early warning is almost never loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the margins — repeated referrals, small changes in a kid who used to be predictable. And if you’re busy, if you’re running from meeting to meeting, if your inbox is full and your schedule is impossible, you miss it. Or you log it and move on.

You called Jonathon’s mom. She was working a double shift and couldn’t talk long. “He’s been different at home too,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

That sentence should have been the moment.

Instead, you made a note in the student file and told your counselor to check in when she had a chance. She had 147 other kids on her caseload. She did her best.

What you didn’t do was slow down. What you didn’t do was sit with Jonathon the next morning before first period — not about behavior, not about referrals, not about consequences — just talk. What you didn’t do was ask his teachers separately: has anything happened? Has anyone heard anything? Does anyone know what’s going on in this kid’s life?

You had the information. It came to you in pieces through the slow drip of referrals and a worried phone call, and you treated it like paperwork instead of a signal.

Here’s the thing about early warnings in student behavior: they are gifts. Expensive, uncomfortable, easy-to-dismiss gifts. A kid acting out is a kid communicating. Every principal knows that in theory. The job is to know it in practice — when you’re tired, when you have a board presentation due, when the budget meeting ran long and you haven’t eaten since six in the morning.

You have systems for this. Or you should. Intervention teams. Tier 2 supports. Counselor check-ins. Early identification protocols. But systems only work when a person with authority decides they matter more than what’s already on the calendar.

That person is you.

When a student shifts — when the behavior changes, when the referrals start stacking up, when a teacher says “I don’t know what’s gotten into him” — that is your cue. Not to refer and move on. Not to document and wait. To lean in.

Jonathon needed someone to lean in about six weeks before things got serious. Not a program. Not a referral to an already-overwhelmed counselor. A person. A conversation. A principal who noticed and decided that one kid was worth an hour of unscheduled time.

You had an hour. You spent it on other things.

That’s not condemnation. That’s this work. But it’s worth considering, because the next Jonathon is already in your building. He’s quiet. He’s showing up. He’s just starting to slip.

Are you watching?

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

In student behavior, the early warning is almost never dramatic. It’s the slight shift in a kid who used to be predictable. The job of a principal isn’t just to respond to crises — it’s to see them coming. That requires slowing down long enough to actually notice individual students, and then deciding that a kid in trouble is worth more of your time than whatever else is on the calendar. Build systems, yes. But never outsource the noticing.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: The situation the warning was warning you about.

theprincipalschair.substack.com

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 explain to parents why their children’s school was going to look different next year. We had looked at administrative consolidation. At transportation restructuring. At energy contracts and food service bids and every line in a budget that most people never see.

In the end, we had to cut programs. Reading specialists at three elementary schools. The middle school athletics supplement. A technology integration coordinator position that had existed for six years and that most people had never heard of until the night we eliminated it.

We had also, in one of those decisions that seems defensible in a spreadsheet and devastating in a parking lot, closed the district’s smallest elementary school.

Eighty-three students. Eleven staff members. A building that had served the same neighborhood for forty-one years.

That was why they had come.

I had been advised, by people whose counsel I generally respected, to lead with the data. To present the financial picture in a way that made the decisions feel inevitable rather than chosen. To use the language of fiscal responsibility and long-term sustainability and the difficult but necessary steps required to protect the district’s future.

I stood at that microphone and I made a different decision.

I told them the truth.

Not the version of the truth that was easiest to defend. The actual truth. That closing that school had been the hardest decision we’d made in thirty years of working in public education. That the data had pointed in that direction for two years and I had spent two years looking for another way. That I had found cost savings that bought us time but not enough time. That the enrollment numbers and the building condition reports and the financial projections had eventually formed a conclusion I could not argue my way around no matter how much I wanted to.

And then I said the thing that nobody in that room expected to hear from the person standing behind the microphone.

I told them I understood if they were angry.

Not that I hoped they would understand the decision. Not that I was confident they would see the wisdom of it over time. I told them their anger made sense — that a school closing in a neighborhood is a real loss, and real losses deserve more than a PowerPoint presentation and a Q and A session with fifteen-minute parking.

The room got very quiet.

Not the quiet of people who have been satisfied but the quiet of people who have been surprised.

They asked hard questions for ninety minutes. Some of them were questions I could answer. Some of them were questions I had been asking myself for two years. A grandmother stood up and talked about dropping her granddaughter off at that school every morning for three years and what it had meant to the child to walk through those particular doors. A teacher who had worked there for nineteen years asked me, quietly, what she was supposed to do now.

I did not have a perfect answer for either of them.

What I had was the truth about how we had gotten there, a genuine accounting of what had been tried, and the willingness to stand in that room for as long as it took without retreating behind a process or a policy or a consultant’s report.

People did not leave that meeting happy. I didn’t expect them to.

But something shifted in that room when the anger stopped being directed at the institution and started being a conversation between people who were all trying to make sense of a hard thing together.

One of the fathers who had come in loudest was the last one to leave. He shook my hand at the door and said: “I still think you made the wrong call. But I believe you made it honestly.”

I drove home and sat in my driveway for a while.

I have thought about that sentence almost every day since.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

When a community is angry, the instinct is to explain. To justify. To present the data until the logic is undeniable. But people in pain do not need to be out-argued. They need to be heard, and they need to believe that the person across from them is telling the whole truth. You will not always make the right decision. But you can always make it honestly. And in the long run, honesty is the only currency that buys back trust.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

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 main office. Your secretary handed you the phone — law enforcement was already on the line. You told them your building count. Your layout. Where your vulnerable entry points were. You were specific, because vague gets people killed.

Your AP was coordinating the north wing. Your head custodian had locked the exterior doors — all of them — without being asked. Twenty-two years in this building. He knew what to do.

And then you waited.

Twelve minutes. It feels like I should tell you it felt like an hour. But it didn’t. It felt like twelve minutes of hyperawareness — every sound amplified, every second accounted for.

Law enforcement called back. They had him. Three miles away. He never made it to your zip code.

You gave the all-clear.

And then — here’s the part they don’t talk about in crisis training — you walked every hallway. Slowly. Because your teachers needed to see your face. Not a voice over an intercom. Your actual face, in their doorway, telling them it was over and all was ok.

Some of them were shaking. One of them was crying. You didn’t rush past that.

You just stood there.

Because after a lockdown, the building doesn’t ever go back to normal by announcement. It goes back to normal because the person in charge is visibly, physically, calmly present.

The kids went back to class. The crayons were still on the desks. Morning light still came through the windows.

And you went to your office, closed the door, and gave yourself five minutes before the phone started ringing.

Five minutes. Because you earned every one of them.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

A crisis doesn’t reveal your character — it reveals your preparation. The decisions you make in the first sixty seconds of a threat depend entirely on what you’ve already decided before it happens. Lockdown protocols, communication trees, staff role clarity, law enforcement relationships — none of that gets built in the moment. It gets built in August, in drills, in the conversations nobody wants to have because everyone hopes they’ll never need them. The visible calm you project during a crisis is not performance. It is the direct product of having done the work beforehand. Prepare like it will happen. Respond like you’ve been there before. Walk the halls after, because your people need to see you standing.

Until next time, the chair is yours.

theprincipalschair.substack.com

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 spring, I really love it here.

You could push back. You could make the case that cutting mid-year destroys morale, disrupts kids, and signals to your community that the district doesn’t know what it’s doing. All of that is true. And none of it will change the number.

So what do you do?

You do what principals must do.

You get honest about what you actually control. You separate emotion from analysis. You ask yourself — if I have to make this cut, how do I do it in a way that preserves as much as possible for the kids still in the building?

You call your assistant principal. You pull your master schedule. You look at class sizes, co-teaching models, elective offerings, and coverage gaps. You don’t start with names. You start with structure.

And then, when you’ve exhausted every structural option — when you know with certainty that a personnel cut is unavoidable — you go back to the superintendent with a counter.

Not a complaint. A counter.

Here’s what I can absorb. Here’s what I can’t. Here’s what it costs either way.

That is advocacy. And it’s the only kind that lands downtown.

The superintendent isn’t your adversary. She’s caught between a board, a budget, and a building she doesn’t run day-to-day. Your job is to give her the clearest picture of what the cut actually means at the classroom level — because she can’t see what you see.

You may not win. You probably won’t get everything you ask for.

But you’ll have done your job. You represented your people with data, with clarity, and with your head up.

And on Friday, when you make that call to the teacher whose position is being eliminated — you’ll be able to look them in the eye. Figuratively speaking.

Because you fought. Just not loudly. And not without a plan.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

When the district hands you a problem you didn’t create, your first job isn’t to fix it — it’s to understand it completely before you respond. Principals who react emotionally to budget cuts lose credibility with central office fast. Principals who show up with a clear-eyed analysis of options, trade-offs, and real-world consequences earn a seat at the table. Know your numbers before you pick up the phone. Know what you can absorb, what you can’t, and what each choice costs the kids. Then advocate — directly, specifically, and without drama. That’s the kind of leadership that survives budget season.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: What happens when you give a teacher every chance — and they still don’t make it?

theprincipalschair.substack.com

ISSUE NO. 16

The 98th Percentile Trap

 Monday morning. North Texas. The thermometer outside the 600-wing is already pushing 88 degrees — and it's March.

The HVAC in that wing is losing the argument.

You're sitting in the chair. On the screen in front of you: Universal Screening data. Under the new 2026 Automatic Enrollment policy, any student in the top quintile gets fast-tracked into Advanced Math. No interviews. No exceptions. No bias.

There is one name at the top of your list.

Marcus.

98th percentile. On paper — a math prodigy. By law — Algebra 1, no questions asked.

Then your doorway filled up.

 She has been Teacher of the Year. Three times.

 She is standing in your doorway — and she is not happy.

 "Marcus isn't ready," she says.

 Not ready. That phrase sits in the air between you.

"He has the brain for the math. But he doesn't have the stomach for the pace. He's already missed four days this month — helping at home. You put him in Advanced, he's going to fail. His confidence gets destroyed. And he drops out of the STEM track forever."

 She pauses. "Keep him in Tier 1 where I can actually support him."

 She means it. You know she means it. Ten minutes later, Marcus's mother calls.

 She's heard the Advanced class is a lot of pressure. She doesn't want Marcus to be the only Black student in a room full of kids whose parents can afford private tutors. She wants to opt out.

 She loves her son. That much is not in question. So here you are.

The data says Marcus belongs in that room. The policy says he goes. The teacher — three-time Teacher of the Year — is predicting a wreck. And a mother who wants to protect her son is asking you to stand down.

 You have three moves.

Option A. The Policy Purist.

 You enforce automatic enrollment. You tell the teacher her job is to scaffold, not to gatekeep. You tell Marcus's mother that the data proves he belongs there — and you'll assign a success coach.

 Risk: Marcus crashes. The teacher loses faith in your leadership. The mother feels ignored. And you built your equity argument on a number while a kid paid the tuition.

 

Option B. The Intuitive Pivot.

You honor the teacher's instinct and the mother's request. You move Marcus to the standard track. You promise to enrich him there.

 Risk: You just became the gatekeeper you've spent your career criticizing. Marcus is bored. He disengages. And a 98th-percentile mind sits in the slow lane because the adults around him were more comfortable with their own discomfort than with his potential.

 

Option C. The Middle-Management Architect.

You keep Marcus in Advanced Math — but you change the environment around the placement. You move his math block to first period when he's sharpest. You find him a peer mentor who looks like him. You tell the teacher his grade gets weighted for growth for the first six weeks, not perfection.

 Risk: You're now custom-making a schedule for one student. Your assistant principal is already circling back about the scheduling nightmare. And every parent who hears about it wants the same deal for their kid.

 I chose Option C. It broke my master schedule for three days.

 My AP didn't speak to me for a week. But here's what I also did.

 I went and found three other 98th-percentile kids whose parents were also afraid, also opting out — for the same reasons. And I moved them all in together.

 Marcus is currently sitting in Algebra 1. And for the first time — he is not the only one in the room. Because I went and found the others.

 Access without support is just an invitation to fail.

 Equity isn't the placement. Equity is what you build around the placement.

 Any principal can enforce a policy. The question is whether you're willing to take three days of scheduling chaos and one week of silence from your AP — to make the placement mean something.

 That's the chair.

 THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

Automatic systems are designed to remove bias. What they cannot remove is context. And context — the missed mornings, the exhausted eyes, the fear in a mother's voice — is exactly what you were hired to hold.

 When a policy and a person collide, your job is not to choose between them. Your job is to use the policy as the floor and your judgment as the ceiling. Marcus's data got him to your door. Your leadership determines what happens on the other side of it.

 The Access Gap doesn't close because we write better policies. It closes because principals are willing to absorb the friction that equity actually requires — the broken schedules, the awkward silences, the AP who thinks you're playing favorites.

 You are playing favorites. You're favoring the kid whose potential is real, whose circumstances are hard, and whose future depends on whether the adult in the chair had the nerve to act.

 That's not gatekeeping. That's leadership.

 Until next time — the chair is yours.

 Next issue:

When the teacher evaluation puts you across the table from someone you've already decided to move on — and they don't know it yet.

 

theprincipalschair.substack.com

If you’re reading this, you made a decision most people don’t make.

You didn’t wait for the next hard moment to teach you.

You decided to prepare for it.

That matters more than you probably realize.

Read more

The Day AI Walked into My School

It started with a sophomore English paper.

One of my best teachers — seventeen years in the classroom, the kind of educator who could tell in two paragraphs whether a piece of writing was authentically a student’s — came to me in October with a printed essay in her hand and a look I hadn’t seen on her face before. Not anger. Not confusion. Something closer to grief.

“I can’t prove it,” she said. “But I know this isn’t his writing. The vocabulary is his vocabulary. The argument structure isn’t. And I don’t know what to do about it because there’s no policy.”

She was right on both counts. It probably wasn’t entirely his writing. And there was no policy.

I sat with that essay for a long time after she left. Because I understood that we weren’t talking about one student and one paper anymore. We were talking about a seismic shift in what learning looks like — and every school in the country was about to be standing exactly where I was standing, holding a piece of paper they couldn’t fully evaluate with tools that no longer fit the problem.

The instinct in school leadership — and in organizational leadership — when a disruptive technology arrives is to ban it, contain it, or wait for someone else to figure it out first. I understand that instinct. The ban feels like it restores order. The waiting feels like prudence. But both responses cede the most important ground: the conversation with your own people about what this means.

I called a faculty meeting the following week. Not to announce a policy. I didn’t have one. I called it to say out loud: this is here, it changes things, and I need to think through it with you rather than hand you a memo.

What happened in that room over the next ninety minutes was the most honest professional conversation I had witnessed in years. Teachers who had been quietly panicking were suddenly able to name it. Teachers who had already been experimenting with AI tools in their classrooms shared what they’d found. A math teacher pointed out that calculators had once triggered the same fear, and nobody had banned arithmetic. A humanities teacher said the real question wasn’t about cheating — it was about what we were actually trying to assess and whether our assessments had kept pace with the world our students were living in.

That last question stopped the room.

We didn’t leave with a policy. We left with a working group, a commitment to revisit assessment design across departments, and — most importantly — a faculty that felt included in a problem instead of handed a solution they hadn’t been consulted about.

AI is not going away. It is going to keep changing what work looks like, what learning looks like, and what leadership looks like. The question for every school leader and every organizational leader is not whether to engage with it. The question is whether you are going to lead that conversation in your building — or whether you are going to let the conversation happen around you while you wait for guidance from above.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

When a disruptive change arrives in your organization — technological or otherwise — your first job is not to have the answer. It’s to create the space where your people can think through it together. The leaders who navigate disruption best are not the ones who react fastest. They’re the ones who ask the best questions and make their people feel like partners in finding the answers.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

The Student Who Taught Me to Stop Reacting

His name was Kendrick and he had been in my office eleven times in eight weeks.

Not for anything violent. Not for anything that made headlines. Disruption, mostly. Defiance. The kind of behavior that wears on a teacher’s patience until the referral feels like the only option left. He’d come in, I’d talk to him, he’d go back to class, and three days later he was back in the chair across from my desk wearing the same expression he always wore — not angry, not remorseful, just somewhere else entirely.

On his twelfth visit I had everything ready. The documentation. The escalation plan. The call home that I had been building toward for two months.

I looked at him across the desk and I was about to launch into it.

Then I stopped. I don’t fully know why. Some instinct. Some exhaustion with my own script.

I put the folder down and asked him one question instead.

“Kendrick, when’s the last time school felt worth showing up for?”

He looked at me like I’d asked him something in a foreign language. And then — slowly — he started talking.

What came out over the next twenty minutes reframed every single one of those eleven office visits. He wasn’t disrupting class because he didn’t care. He was disrupting class because he was terrified of being wrong in front of people, and disruption was the one tool he had that reliably got him removed from situations where that fear was triggered. He had been managing anxiety the only way a fourteen-year-old with no other framework knows how.

We had been responding to the behavior without ever once asking about what was underneath it.

This is the central failure in how most schools — and most organizations — handle chronic behavioral problems. We treat the surface because the surface is visible and urgent and documentable. The referral system is built for surfaces. The escalation ladder is built for surfaces. And so we keep climbing the ladder with kids like Kendrick while the actual problem sits untouched at the bottom.

I’m not saying consequences don’t matter. They do. Structure matters. Accountability matters. But consequence without curiosity is just punishment on a schedule. It manages behavior. It doesn’t change it.

After that conversation I worked with his teachers to quietly restructure how he was called on in class — less public exposure, more private check-ins, a signal he could use when the anxiety was building. His referrals dropped from eleven in eight weeks to two in the next three months. Nothing dramatic. A small change based on actual information rather than escalating reactions to symptoms.

Kendrick didn’t become a model student. But he became a student who started to believe the building might be on his side. That belief — fragile and hard-won as it was — was worth more than anything in that documentation folder.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

Before you escalate a behavioral pattern, stop and ask what’s underneath it. Chronic disruption is almost never about defiance — it’s about a need that isn’t being met in any other way. In schools and in organizations, the leaders who change behavior are the ones who get curious before they get consequential. Ask the question the system never asks: what is this behavior solving for this person?

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: The faculty meeting where AI walked into the room and nobody was ready — including me.

theprincipalchair.substack.comIssue #9

The Day I Almost Quit

It was a Sunday night in February.

Not the dramatic kind of breaking point you read about in memoirs. No single catastrophic event. No screaming match. No moment you could point to and say — that’s the one that did it. Just a Sunday night, sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of unread emails, a discipline report I hadn’t finished, a parent callback I’d been avoiding since Thursday, and a feeling I couldn’t name that had been sitting on my chest for about six weeks.

My wife walked in, looked at me, and said quietly: “You haven’t laughed in a month.”

I didn’t argue with her. Because she was right. And because somewhere underneath the exhaustion I already knew what I hadn’t been willing to say out loud.

I was burning out. And I had been so busy performing competence that I hadn’t told a single person.

Burnout in school leadership is uniquely dangerous because the job selects for people who push through. Every principal, every CEO, every leader who rises to the top of a demanding organization got there partly by ignoring their own limits. The same trait that makes you effective makes you blind to the moment when effectiveness becomes depletion.

I had been running on obligation for months. Not purpose — obligation. There’s a difference, and your body knows it even when your calendar doesn’t.

What pulled me back wasn’t a wellness seminar or a self-care weekend. It was a conversation with my assistant principal — a woman I trusted completely — in which I said out loud for the first time: I’m not okay. Three words. Twelve seconds. The hardest thing I said all year.

She didn’t fix it. She couldn’t. But she did two things that mattered more than any solution. She listened without advice for the first ten minutes. And then she said: “What’s one thing you’ve stopped doing that used to fill you back up?”

I hadn’t played piano in four months. I know that sounds small. It wasn’t small. It was the thing I had quietly surrendered to the weight of the job, and I hadn’t even noticed it was gone until she asked.

I went home that night and played for forty minutes. Nothing changed at school the next morning. The emails were still there. The parent callback was still waiting. But something in me had shifted — a small recalibration that reminded me I was a person before I was a principal.

The leaders who sustain themselves over decades are not the ones who never burn out. They’re the ones who learn to recognize the early signs, name what’s happening before it becomes a crisis, and build the habit of refilling — not as a luxury, but as a professional responsibility.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

Burnout doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates quietly in the gap between what the job demands and what you allow yourself to need. Name it early. Tell one person you trust. Then ask yourself: what have you stopped doing that used to fill you back up? Start there. A leader who is empty has nothing left to give the people who are counting on them.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

The Post

It started as a post.

Then a screenshot of the post.

Then a screenshot of the screenshot.

By midnight it had been shared four hundred times. By morning my phone had sixty-three unread messages. Parents I hadn’t spoken to in years. Community members I had never met. A local news reporter asking for a statement before eight o’clock.

The post accused one of my teachers of misconduct.

It named him. It named the school. It named me.

And half the people who read it had already decided it was true.

The teacher’s name was Mr. Callahan.

Eleven years in my building. Ninth grade English. The kind of teacher who stayed late, knew every kid’s name, coached the speech and debate team on his own time. Well-liked. Trusted. The kind of colleague other teachers went to when they needed advice.

The post claimed he had made inappropriate comments to a student.

It offered no specifics. No date. No context. Just the accusation, a name, and a school.

That was enough.

I want to tell you I handled the first hour well.

I did not.

My first instinct was to defend him. Eleven years of trust, dozens of parent compliments in my files, a spotless record — I knew this man. And everything I knew said the accusation didn’t fit.

My second instinct was to say nothing publicly and wait for it to pass.

Both instincts were wrong.

Here is what I have learned about social media accusations and leadership — the hard way, in real time, with my name in the thread.

Silence reads as guilt.

Defense reads as cover-up.

And the truth — whatever it turns out to be — moves at a fraction of the speed of the original post.

What a leader has to do in that moment is the hardest thing imaginable.

You have to hold two things at the same time that feel like they contradict each other.

The first: every accusation deserves a serious, thorough, fair investigation. Every one. Regardless of how well you know the person. Regardless of how implausible it sounds. Because the alternative — deciding in advance that something couldn’t have happened — is how institutions fail the people they were built to protect.

The second: an accusation is not a conviction. A post is not evidence. And a person’s reputation — their career, their family, their name — deserves to be protected from the momentum of a news cycle until facts are actually known.

I called Mr. Callahan at seven-fifteen that morning.

I told him what was happening. I told him I was taking it seriously. I told him I was also not going to treat him as guilty before a single fact had been established.

Then I called the district. Then HR. Then our legal team.

And then I wrote a statement — one paragraph, measured, careful — that said the school was aware of the post, that we take all concerns about student safety seriously, and that a proper review was underway.

I did not name him. I did not defend him. I did not dismiss the concern.

I said: we are looking into this, and we will follow the process.

The investigation took eleven days.

What it found was this: a comment Mr. Callahan had made in class — about a novel the students were reading — had been heard differently by one student than he had intended it. There was no pattern of behavior. No prior complaints. No corroboration. The student’s concern was real and it was heard. The comment was addressed directly with Mr. Callahan, who was genuinely shaken that his words had landed the way they did.

No misconduct. No discipline.

A conversation that should have happened in the classroom before it ever reached the internet.

The post, of course, was never updated.

The shares did not come back.

The four hundred people who saw the accusation never saw the outcome.

That is the thing about social media and institutional trust that no communications training fully prepares you for.

The accusation travels at the speed of light.

The truth travels on foot.

Mr. Callahan came back to his classroom.

He was quieter for a while. More careful with his words — not in a bad way, in a thoughtful way. He told me months later that it had changed how he thinks about the weight a single sentence can carry in a room full of teenagers.

I told him I understood.

It had changed how I think about a few things too.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

When an accusation goes public before the facts are known, a leader’s job is not to choose sides. It is to hold the process. Investigate seriously, protect the accused from presumption of guilt, and protect the community from presumption of innocence. Say less than you want to. Move faster than feels comfortable. And remember: the accusation will always travel farther than the outcome. Your job is to make sure the process is so thorough and so fair that you can live with it — regardless of what it finds.

What a Seventh Grader Taught Me About Motivation

His name was DeShawn and he did not want to be in school.

Not my school specifically. School generally. The whole enterprise. He’d decided somewhere around fifth grade that it wasn’t built for him, and he’d been quietly, consistently proving that theory ever since. Failed classes. Missed assignments. A guidance file that was starting to get thick.

Every adult in the building had tried something. Tutoring. Parent meetings. Incentive programs. Stern conversations followed by encouraging ones. DeShawn was pleasant about all of it. He’d nod, agree, and then return to doing exactly what he’d been doing — which was essentially nothing.

I decided to try one thing nobody had tried yet. I stopped talking about school.

I pulled him out of study hall one Tuesday afternoon, brought him down to my office, and told him straight up that I wasn’t going to talk about his grades or his attendance or his future plans. I just wanted to know what he was actually good at. Not what he was supposed to be good at. What he knew, in his bones, he could do.

He looked at me like I’d switched languages.

Then he told me he could fix anything with an engine. Dirt bikes, go-karts, his uncle’s pickup truck. He’d been doing it since he was nine. He described pulling apart a carburetor with a confidence and a precision I had never heard from him in any classroom. He was a completely different person talking about that engine than he was sitting in eighth period math.

I didn’t fix DeShawn. I want to be honest about that. He still had hard days. He still struggled with classes that felt disconnected from anything he cared about. But something shifted after that conversation — because for the first time, at least one adult in that building had gotten genuinely curious about who he actually was, rather than who the gradebook said he wasn’t.

He started showing up more. Not perfectly. More.

I started asking that question differently with every student and every staff member I worked with after that. Not “what do you need to improve” but “what are you already good at, and how do we build from there.” It sounds like common sense. It is common sense. It is also not how most schools — or most organizations — actually operate. Most systems are built around deficits. The gap. The missing standard. The thing that needs to be fixed.

But motivation almost never starts with what’s broken. It starts with what’s already alive.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

Before you try to move someone forward, find out what they’re already moving toward. In schools and in boardrooms, the leaders who figure that out first are the ones who get the most out of the people around them. Motivation isn’t something you install in a person. It’s something you find — and then connect to the work that needs to be done.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: The parent meeting that changed how I think about conflict — permanently.

theprincipalschair.substack.com

When the Room Turns Against You

It’s the third Tuesday of October and you’re standing in front of your entire faculty.

You’ve prepared for this meeting. You have slides. You have data. You have a plan you genuinely believe in — a new approach to how the building handles chronic absenteeism, one you’ve spent two months researching, piloting in three classrooms, and shaping with input from your leadership team.

You start talking.

And within four minutes, you can feel the room shift.

It’s not loud. It’s never loud at first. It’s the crossed arms. The glance exchanged between the two veteran teachers in the third row. The question that isn’t really a question — “So are we saying that what we’ve been doing for fifteen years just doesn’t work?”

You’re not losing the argument. You’re losing the room. And those are two completely different problems.

I’ve watched strong leaders — smart, prepared, data-driven leaders — make the same mistake in this moment. They double down. They bring out another slide. They explain more clearly, as if clarity were ever the issue.

But the room didn’t turn because people didn’t understand. The room turned because people didn’t feel seen. And no amount of data fixes that. You can be completely right about your plan and still lose the people you need to execute it.

There’s a move I learned to make in exactly this moment and it feels counterintuitive every single time. You stop. You put down the clicker. And you say something like: “Before I go any further — what am I not understanding about where you are right now?”

And then you wait. Genuinely wait. Not to manage the pause. Not to show you’re listening. Actually, to hear what comes next.

What happens almost always surprises leaders the first time they try it. People don’t attack. They exhale. Someone says something honest. The veteran teacher in the third row says what she’s actually been thinking — which turns out to be a legitimate concern you hadn’t fully considered. Now you can address it directly instead of talking past it for the rest of the meeting.

You don’t have to abandon your plan. You don’t have to pretend the data doesn’t exist. But you have to earn the right to lead people somewhere new. And you earn it by proving — in that moment, in front of everyone — that you actually want to know where they’re standing before you ask them to move.

A leader who can read a room shift and respond to the emotion underneath the words — not just the words themselves — is the leader people follow into genuinely hard change. That skill is not soft. It’s the hardest thing in this work.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

When a room turns against your idea, the instinct is to defend the idea. The move that works is to defend the relationship first. Get curious before you get persuasive. People don’t resist change because they’re difficult. They resist because they’re uncertain and nobody asked them about it. Ask first. Lead second.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: What a seventh grader taught me about motivation that no leadership book ever did.

theprincipalchair.substack.com

Leadership decisions from the real world of schools and organizations.

Issue #104

The Hire You Almost Didn’t Make

She wasn’t the obvious choice.

Her resume was thin compared to the other two finalists. Four years of teaching, no advanced degree, nothing on paper that made her stand out from the stack. When my assistant principal reviewed the candidates, her folder ended up on the bottom. That’s almost always where she would have stayed.

But something in her interview stopped me.

I’d asked every candidate the same question: “Tell me about a student you failed.” Most people flinched, recovered, and then told me a story that was really about how hard they’d tried. Understandable. Human. Not what I was looking for.

She didn’t flinch. She looked at me for a moment and then told me about a ninth grader named Marcus — specifically, painfully, and without a single hedge. No pivot to the silver lining. Just honest accountability and a clear-eyed understanding of what she wished she had done differently.

I hired her!

Seven years later she was one of the finest teachers I’ve ever watched work with at-risk students. Marcus had moved on by then, but she carried him with her into every classroom after that. You could see it in how she taught — the way she stayed a little longer, asked one more question, noticed the kid in the back who was starting to disappear.

Most hiring decisions — in schools and in organizations of every kind — over-index on credentials and under-index on character. That’s not because leaders are foolish. It’s because credentials are easy to measure and character is uncomfortable to probe for in a forty-five minute interview. So we default to the transcript, the degree, the years of experience. And we miss the person sitting right in front of us.

But there are questions that crack the window open. “Tell me about a student you failed” is one of them. So is “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a decision your supervisor made and what you did about it.” And simply: “What are you working to get better at right now, and what are you actually doing about it?”

The answers matter less than what the person does with the question. Do they go somewhere real or do they manage you? Do they sit with the discomfort or perform their way around it? Do they talk about growth like it’s a goal they’ve set, or like it’s something they’re genuinely living?

The best hires I ever made shared one quality above everything else. They were more interested in getting better than in looking good. That distinction sounds simple. In practice it’s rare. And in a school — where the stakes are children and the margins for mediocrity are thin — it’s everything.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

In your next hire — for any role, in any organization — build at least one question into the interview that has no comfortable answer. Then watch what the person does with the discomfort. Credentials tell you what someone has done. That moment tells you who they are. Hire who they are.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: The board meeting that almost ended my career — and what I did in the parking lot afterward.

theprincipalchair.substack.com

Leadership decisions from the real world of schools and organizations.

Welcome back to The Principal’s Chair. I’m Larry. Let’s get into it.

Issue #103

The Moment I Realized I Was the Problem

It was a Wednesday afternoon in my third year as a principal.

I was sitting across from one of my most experienced teachers — nineteen years in that building, someone I genuinely respected, someone whose opinion of the school I trusted more than almost anyone else’s. She had asked to meet with me. She’d been careful setting it up, choosing the words in her email the way you choose your steps on ice.

She told me morale was struggling. She gave me specific examples, named specific moments. And then, after about ten minutes of that, she said something I wasn’t ready for.

“I think people are afraid to bring you bad news.”

I almost defended myself right there. I could feel the response forming — I have an open door, I ask for honest feedback, I’ve never punished anyone for telling me the truth. I had evidence. I had a whole case assembled and ready.

Instead I put the case down. I looked at her and asked one question.

“What makes you say that?”

What she told me in the next four minutes changed how I led for the rest of my career.

She didn’t say I was mean or unapproachable. She said that when people brought me problems, I solved them so quickly and so completely that they stopped feeling like contributors and started feeling like they were just delivering bad news to someone who would handle everything from there. They’d bring me a problem, I’d fix it, and they’d walk out of my office feeling somehow smaller than when they walked in.

I was so good at fixing things that I had accidentally taught my team to be helpless.

Sit with that for a moment. Because it’s a hard thing to hear about yourself — harder still because on the surface it looks like a strength. Decisiveness. Competence. Action orientation. Those are qualities every leader wants. But deployed without self-awareness, at scale, in a building full of professionals who need to grow, those same qualities can quietly close people down.

After that conversation I started doing something uncomfortable. When someone brought me a problem, I would ask them what they thought we should do before I said a single word. Even when I already had the answer. Especially when I already had the answer. Because my answer wasn’t always the point. Their development was the point. Their ownership of the solution was the point. A problem solved by a leader produces compliance. A problem solved by a teacher, with a leader’s guidance, produces growth.

The building changed after that shift. Not overnight — it never happens overnight. But over the following months, people started bringing me half-formed ideas instead of fully packaged problems. They started showing me their thinking before it was clean, before it was certain, before they were sure I’d approve. That’s the signal you’re waiting for as a leader. When people trust you enough to show you their rough drafts, you’ve built something real.

The teacher who told me the truth that Wednesday afternoon did me a professional favor I never properly thanked her for. She had every reason to stay quiet — it’s not easy to tell your principal that his strength is becoming a liability. She said it anyway because she cared about the school more than she feared the conversation.

That’s the kind of person you want on your team. And the only way to get that kind of honesty is to earn it — by proving, over and over, that you can hear hard things without making the person who said them regret it.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

The most dangerous blind spots in leadership are not your weaknesses. They’re your strengths operating without self-awareness. Ask someone you genuinely trust this week — not ‘how am I doing’ but ‘what do I do that makes your job harder without realizing it.’ Then listen without defending. What you hear might be the most valuable feedback you get all year.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: What a seventh grader taught me about motivation that no leadership book ever did.

theprincipalschair.substack.com