CHRIS
TOY
Diary #17
Teamwork
Makes a Principal's Life
a Little Bit Easier
It's amazing
how quickly we get back to work after a vacation. Sunday evening I received
two calls. The first one was from a teacher who works in one of the temporary
buildings. It seems the propane heat had stopped working sometime over
vacation.
Unfortunately we had to leave a message and it turned out that service would not arrive until early in the morning. That means I had to find other rooms until the problem could be fixed. Of course the reason for our building project is that there isn't enough room in the building to begin with.
The other call was from a teacher who was ill. A call to our permanent substitute teacher took care of that. As I was about to call my secretary to let her know there would be a substitute, I remembered that she would not be in for the rest of the week because she had taken a couple extra days to be with her family in Florida. This reminded me that there will be two new 6th graders starting as well. The morning after vacation is going to be interesting.I did manage to get to the 7th grade team meeting. It was the day they set aside for discussing students they have concerns about. Today they were struggling with how to deal with a student who has been missing a lot of school because of issues outside of school. Stress in the home over the past several months has resulted in severe headaches. This stress has been compounded by the student's worry about returning to school and facing lots of makeup work and low grades.
The team discussed the student's history for about 20 minutes. It was clear that this is an able student who will be able to meet the requirements of the state and local assessments. It was determined that it would be in the best interest of the student to only grade the student for the work accomplished when she was able to return. They also decided to minimize the amount of homework and makeup work they would send home, even though the parent had requested both. I spoke to the parent about the team's decision. She was clearly relieved. Interestingly, the student returned to school the following day, and the teachers reported that she was doing just fine.
This kind of process and the resulting decision by the team is an example of how I think the 7th grade team works to meet the needs of the students at the middle school. Its reputation as focusing on the developmental needs of the students is well deserved.One of the benefits of my job is that I get to see what's happening in each of the classrooms throughout the day. While I am aware of many good things teachers are doing with students the teachers are busy working so they really don't know what's happening in the other classrooms.
We have our monthly staff meeting next week and I've decided to use the meeting to have the teams share what is happening both in their teams and in their individual classrooms. I discussed this idea with the team leaders last week and they all agreed it would be a good thing to do. I'm hoping it will encourage the development of some ongoing discussion among the staff about what's going on in their classrooms.
