Thoughts on School Culture, Part I

What I understand about culture today is not very different from what I thought about it 5 or even 10, 15 years ago when I first started out in administration.  I hadn't really thought about it much before then, however.  When I taught, and when I was the Dean of Students at a middle school, what I thought most about was what I was going to do that day - survival stuff.  Now, it seems all I think about is the culture of the place and what it looks like, feels like, smells like - to both outsiders and insiders alike.  People ask how you know what the culture of a school is like, and to be honest, there really is no data to show that.  There is no possible way - not even through a survey - that you can measure the culture of as school in order to tell how that school is doing in this category.  The only one sure way to know, is to spend as much time as possible within the four walls of that school, with those teachers and adults, with those kids in their classrooms and in the cafeteria and hallways and at athletic and performing arts events.  This is the only way you will know for sure what the culture of a building is like.  And trust me, you will know.

The first time I really started paying attention to this phenomenon known as culture was when I was offered the principalship of W.J. Murphy Elementary School.  It was a bright, chilly afternoon in early January of 2003 and my principal, who was my first real mentor and fellow administrator, had called his admin team into the office to tell us he was leaving; he had taken a principalship at a neighboring high school.  We were shocked, I remember, and didn't know quite what to make of it.  I was too new in these shoes, but did the only thing I thought of to do - congratulated him and asked if he would write me a letter of recommendation.

By early May of that year, as we were wrapping up at the middle school, I had been on a couple of job interviews and finally accepted the elementary school position at Murphy Elementary.  I remember the interview clearly.  At least 15 people were sitting around a conference room table in the district office basement.  At the head of the table sat the assistant superintendent and the Mayor of the town.  I have always had much respect for principals, but to call the Mayor in?  Wow.  This must be some gig.

A month later, as I'm moving myself into the new office - the first real office, with an actual principal's desk and the word PRINCIPAL carved into a nameplate on the office door, who should give me a call and invite me out to lunch, but the very same Mayor who sat at the head of the interview table and asked questions I was sure I had gotten wrong.  I shared this with her when we sat down together for lunch as the agreed-upon day arrived, and she just laughed and told me that there were candidates who were much better suited for the job of elementary principal - those with actual elementary principal experience, for example - but at the end of the day, what it came down to for every single person sitting down at that interview table, was:

my personality and ability to speak truth and life into every single question,
the fact that I looked at every single person around the table
and held their gaze when speaking to them,
the way I remembered each person
and thanked them by name at the end of the grueling, two-hour interview that day.

I may not have had the experience, but I was honest about what I did and did not know, and offered them something different - something they had been missing for a long time: a fresh outlook and a cheerful disposition.  That was it.  That is what the Mayor of Round Lake Park disclosed to me at our lunch date that day in June as I was preparing to take on my first principalship.

I have carried that memory with me for the last 16 years - the Mayor's words to me, how she made me feel, the trust she and others were putting in me to lead and work alongside those teachers, those children, those parents and community members.  That was really the first time I began thinking about culture and what culture is, what it means, how it feels, what it looks like on a day to day basis.

The first day of school that year was an eye opener for me in terms of culture.  As I walked the lines of children awaiting the morning bell telling them it was time to file in and get our year started, a father walked up up to me and said, "I can tell I already don't like you."  A teacher approached me later that morning on break while her students were at Art and said, "This is a really toxic culture here, I hope you know what you've walked into."

I didn't know it at the time, but I would need to call up those warm and fuzzy feelings from my lunch date with the Mayor many times that year...