Monthly Archives: November 2024

School Administrators don’t forget to address your own current events grief.

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As late as yesterday, I noticed that after five decades of professional educational work, there is a pattern for how I always choose to deal with grief. The work you put into the psychotherapeutic process helps you to discover and uncover all of the emotional patterns in your life. As a teacher, science center director, principal, and superintendent, when experiencing a family member or a close friendship death, my natural inclination was to seek a calm and salving head-place by burying myself in my work or engaging in the seemingly counterintuitive act of leaning heavily into the addressing of the despairing event, such as the 9-11 day tragedy where students, innocently unknowing, played with educational toys and puzzles in my office. At the same time, we were frantically searching for a relative since their parents were missing and not heard from.

Over the last few days, I have spoken to several school-based educational leaders and teachers who were dealing with understandably terrified children who are wondering if after January, either they, perhaps their parents, a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a fellow religious institution member would be rounded up and be removed from their lives forever. With so many streams of information sources today, there is just no way we can protectively keep this “Mass Deportation” (and now the slavery texting threat) story outside of their hearing. And those of us who, as principals, had to daily address (e.g., getting a student college money when their parents can’t fill out the FASFA form) the ‘everyday anxieties’ these students faced, but this time, principals will be facing a highly terrifying abnormal political, environmental impact on different cohorts of their students (e.g., LGBTQ, Muslim students etc.) not just undocumented students and family residents (see project 2025).

Child/Parent separation can be potentially devastating. We already know the tremendous amount of work that is needed to adequately support and serve students who are being raised by a non-parental (especially elderly grandparents) family member because, for a lot of different reasons (e.g., military service, incarceration, death, etc.), one or both parents were not present in their lives; we also know the extra attention that must be given to those students living in group homes or foster care.


Our nation, unfortunately, has selfishly and mean-spiritedly elected (literally) to potentially produce a large number of very psychologically harmed and hurting children, who will later be psychologically harmed and hurting adults, into our society if we separate these children from their parents and loved ones, and regardless of how you voted in the 2024 elections, we all will pay a heavy price for the pain and suffering we inflicted on these young people.

But as school administrators who do their best work in the worst of times, those educators who intervene and interrupt society’s most ugly plans for innocent children, my advice is that you don’t do what it took me a very long time to do, and that is realizing that you are also grieving the current events stories, not just for your students, but for your children at home, family members, neighbors, people you don’t even know, and most of all for what could happen to our nation and world.

You entered the profession primarily because you care about people and the future state of our nation, and you want to be a force for goodness in the world. Therefore, that Deweyan progressive education sensitivity instinct you feel means that your grief will be real and personal and not simply part of some lesson plan or school-wide healing initiative.

In my current conversations with school administrators, I first focused on what they need to do as school-building leaders to support their school family members (students, staff, parents). But then I switch the conversation: “Let’s talk about how you are feeling?” (“No, not how you are feeling about your kids, parents and staff, how are you feeling about you?”), right now, superintendents and peer colleague school administrators should be doing this for each other.


The principalship is a difficult, extremely challenging, and sometimes sadly siloed position (only one of you in the building) in education. Everyone in the school is looking at you to be that powerful lighthouse in a storm, but as we are advised on commercial airline flights, you must make sure that your emotional seatbelts are securely fastened first, or your ability to help others will be severely diminished.

Social media platforms are political shark tanks, and they’re not the place where educators who aspire to be or desire to remain school-building or district-level administrators would want to cut themselves.

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Professional educators should be careful about what they post on social media platforms. I speak specifically to those who presently serve or aspire to be an assistant principal, principal, deputy superintendent, superintendent, or district-level administrator. You could be dealing with folks in powerful positions who are guided by and operating in a mean, ugly and wanting to hurt you or your kids’ spirit. Stay calm and focused, lead with your mind and leave your hyper-emotions behind, and engage in affirming and gaining power for those disenfranchised and dismissed students of our nation who are under your care. Think of the immense impact you can have on these children if you can remain in or get into a school-based or district-level leadership position. Don’t let your adversaries know your thoughts; act audaciously and powerfully, and with student success supporting intentionality, but don’t talk about those actions publicly. Every highly valued and highly effectual school leader is a “rule maker-braker-bender.” You want to be able to say after you have acted boldly on behalf of your students (tongue firmly in cheek and a contrived look of sincere contrition), “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know I couldn’t do that, (and since it’s too late now), I am so sorry, and please accept my sincere apology!” (hopefully, my former superintendent won’t see this!:-) Remember, your positive and thoughtful actions can make a profound difference in the lives of your students.

School-based leaders must have a 2024 election emotional crisis response and a peaceful restoration calming plan.

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School Administrators can’t ignore any ‘outside-of-school’ caused emotional crisis that could inflict traumatizing pain and suffering on one, some, or all of their school building family members (SFMs), that is, students, staff and parents, and the plan must go beyond the baseline response of only asking folks “Are you ok?” Because we know that, particularly middle and high school students that they could very likely say “Yes” when the answer is really a serious “No,” especially male students. As much as we may correctly try as school-based leaders to shield our SFMs from the “horrible noise” occurring outside of the school building, the truth is that we can’t completely. This means, just like we must address any ‘disturbing stuff’ that students and staff members will bring to school, for example, parents facing a personal or family crisis at home will perhaps unknowingly and unintendedly send that traumatic story to the school, most likely via the child’s personal ‘emotional backpack.’

For Wednesday morning (and possibly for the days following), principals should have a “worst case scenario” student and staff counseling and consoling plan. As both a Title-1 principal and superintendent of a Title-1 school district, I had a high number of:

• Latino (all countries) students.

• Puerto Rican-American students.

• Haitian-American students.

• Any students, parents, or staff members who may feel traumatized (disenfranchised or marginalized) by the 2024 election results.

• Muslim-American (US-based and outside of the US) students.

• Caribbean and those students born in an African country.

• Students who themselves, their parents, other family members, or neighbors are undocumented immigrants.

If I were presently in either the principalship or the superintendency, I would (once I noticed the ‘tone’ of this election cycle) think long and deep about a practical ‘after election’ plan for initiating a checking-up on and checking-in with my most emotionally vulnerable SFMs. The most basic outline of a grief counseling and consoling plan’s first act would be to meet students as they enter the building on Wednesday morning, carefully noting their body language (e.g., their facial expressions) and verbal language (when they return your greeting). Follow this up by engaging in a ‘walking around’ leadership investigation of observing and inquiring how the staff members, from the cafeteria aides to the custodians, are doing—leave no staff member overlooked! If (not always true, unfortunately) you have a guidance counselor(s), and further, if you are fortunate to have a school psychologist like I had; then you should already as part of your school (the necessary emotional not just physical section) safety plan, have school-wide grief counseling plan, then be prepared to roll it out. And since as a principal (especially Title-1) on any day of the school year, you won’t have enough grief or otherwise counselors. You should have, (and if not do it now) a ‘special skills,’ ‘talents,’ and ‘abilities’ staff organization sheet. In this or a similar case the organization list would show those staff members who although they are not licensed guidance counselor, but in an acute emergency, they do have that special talent of being able to serve as unofficial advisors and counselors for students and their fellow staff colleagues. Have a quick Wednesday morning stand-up meeting with them letting them know they you may need to call on them to help the authorized guidance team to keep the school free of emotional pain and drama. I mention the word “drama” because as we know from our studies of adolescent developmental psychology, and from our own professional experience, that students who are afraid, hurting, or experiencing a great loss, will often respond to those feelings in the worse not-helping-them-to-heal incorrect behavioral ways, with either their student peers or staff-members.

Take special note of middle and high school students who could, upon hearing a staff person improperly say something ‘discomforting’ about the results of the election, could cause some students to act-out in a most unproductive way. Pedagogically, the school should use the election results as a clarifying, calming and educative opportunity to provide students a lesson in civility and civics.

Having Supervision, means that as a school leader your job, as I told principals as a superintendent, your unwritten but absolutely necessary job description is to have a Supervisionary understanding of what could happen, given the arrival of certain incendiary catalytic conditions. Any average leader can follow a script of response actions to a terrible incident, but having highly effectual Supervisionary skills means that you are able to get in front of, mitigate and/or eliminate any deleterious incident before it shows up!

Being Able to Pick the Perfect Good is a School Leadership Myth!

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Principalship school-building leadership words of wisdom that I found showed up every 74 years of my life.  You will find that during the course of your life, being able to select the ‘most good,’ best, and perfect option in any scenario is so rare and few in number that I can almost remember every one of those (single digit) incidents I encountered as a principal or superintendent. The vast, overwhelming majority of daily decision-making situations required me to select the best, not hurting kids, staff, or parents’ selection from a group of less-than-perfect options. And if you are fortunate in this life, you’ll be able to live through all of those imperfect decision-making moments and remain sane when, through some amazing, enlightening, spiritually gifted miracle, you come to humbly realize that you yourself were never and never will be that ‘perfect’ choice.