[The following post was an April Fools Day prank, as all who clicked the link at the bottom of the post came to find out.]
Hello everyone,
I possessed an undeniably Utopian and rather naive vision of how the principalship would look when I agreed to do it in June 2011. Once made interim, I imagined that we, you and I as a Faculty, would, like members of a modern-day hippie commune, rise up together to confront the challenges of collective school leadership and all pitch-in as one, with our many-hands, corporately and for the good of all that is Marshall.
In my imaginings, “The inmates shall run the asylum!” was to become our rally-cry.
But upon assuming my new office, and finding so many aspects of the job at-once mysterious, cumbersome, overwhelming and indigestible I soon realized: I cannot ask them to do this. Because I knew in that moment, in my teacher’s-heart, which had not yet fully blackened and shriveled into the dense, dark administrative lump it has since become, that it was your primary desire to be first empowered -- and then left alone -- to Teach.
So instead I have endeavored to do just that, all the while doing whatever I could to guard you from mysterious, cumbersome, overwhelming and indigestible District-level distractions. Over the course of the five years that have transpired since then, with whatever minimal-interruption and maximal-empowerment of you that I as a leader was able to muster, I have tried to make it possible for you to have the Time and the Things you have needed to Teach. Every day.
Nevertheless...
The responsibilities of this work of school administration have proven to be extraordinarily daunting and, as many of you know, of late they have become quite costly to me, on both an emotional and physical level.
Thus, it was with great interest this Monday morning that I received an unexpected call from outgoing Superintendent, Barbara Hickman. In what was likely to have been one of her very last acts this role (Thursday, 31 March, was officially her last day), she asked me during our closed-door conversation to consider stepping down as principal at Marshall to assume a newly created position in FUSD: Director of Marketing and New Program Development.
After much careful deliberation, and with my wife's blessing, I have decided to accept the offer.
I want you to know: I am really sorry to leave you like this and at this time.
Marshall is such a Good place, comprised of so many wonderful families, a host of great kids, and, most emphatically, an unprecedented number of truly talented teachers and support-staff members. I really do hate the idea of leaving you.
“This place is Dr. King’s dream.” That’s what I’ve always told people when describing the character of Marshall Magnet School.
Please, never forget: Marshall is uniquely equipped to deliver an exceptionally well-rounded, interesting, and eclectic curriculum and catalog of extracurricular electives to a beautifully diverse student body. In fact, I am convinced you are better able to do so than any other school in the nation. With or without my leadership, you, as the truly excellent gathering of professional educators that you are, are poised on the edge of real Greatness.
To those of you who have been my fellow true-believers, sympathetic-listeners, and ever-capable lieutenants throughout this process, to all of you diehards who have stood beside me and, along with me, dreamed big dreams for this little public school, to all of you who have hired-on with us recently with such earnest excitement, ready to carry the vision of Marshall School forward into the future, to all of the above I say Thank You. I suppose it’s right for you to accuse me of abandoning you midstream. For in truth, I am. As I said before, I cannot deny being genuinely sorry about that.
Nonetheless, thank you for your understanding.
I look forward to working with many of you in my new role as Director of Marketing and New Program Development for the Flagstaff Unified School District.
Kindest regards,
Please acknowledge that you read the 01 April 2016 Blue Note.
