Sometimes, these decisions are easy to make.
For example, at a recent school dance, we were in a bit of a predicament. The DJ showed up an hour late to our two hour dance. For sixty of the longest minutes any adult will ever experience, we had four hundred students in our cafeteria, expecting music and instead getting nothing of the sort. Surprisingly, our students were incredibly well behaved. They started their own dance party (sans music) and just enjoyed the company of their classmates. I had assumed we would experience something closer to what happened in the Lord of the Flies, but no, they just waited for the DJ to arrive.
So it's now 7 pm and the DJ is about to start. Our students had expected a full two hour dance and were only going to get a short 60 minutes. I checked in with our Activities Director and then the DJ himself. Both were willing to extend the dance for an extra 30 minutes. On the spur of the moment a decision was made to extend our dance until 8:30 pm. We announced the decision to the students. They responded with prolonged cheers. Almost on cue, the DJ started playing a Justin Timberlake song and everything was back to as normal as a middle school dance can be.
The decision to extend the dance may seem like an easy one. However, I realized that there could be complications with the decision. After all, our parent and staff volunteers had expected to participate from 6 pm to 8 pm. Extending the dance an extra 30 minutes was taking advantage of their generosity. I also considered the text I'd have to send my wife, sharing that I'd be home a half hour later than expected. There were also parents who showed up at 8 pm and had to wait for an extra 30 minutes before their students was ready to depart for the evening.
Fortunately, our chaperones were extremely kind in their understanding, my wife completely understood, and the parents who arrived early got a in-person demo on how to sign up for the Remind app to receive my text messages and updates.
Sometimes, these decisions are extremely difficult to make.
Rewind a week and we're having our annual UMS Home and School Club Blast. The Blast is something akin to a carnival where our current (and future) students spend an evening on our campus with fun games, bouncy houses, and tons of food. It's a huge fundraiser and a fun experience for everyone.
Earlier in the week, our community had been rocked by both national and local events. There was a Las Vegas shooting that ended up becoming one of the nation's worst mass shootings. Locally, there were reports that a local high schooler had almost been kidnapped en route to/from school. Our students were somewhat on edge; young teenagers who have confronted a flood of social media post on such adult topics.
At some point, during the event, something shifted. I noticed our students acting a bit different. I moved toward what seemed like the epicenter of the kid chaos and was shocked at what I was hearing: "there is a kidnapper and a rapist and a scary man dressed in black and they have a gun."
For a split second, I froze. My mind wandered and became scared for our school community, for our students. I quickly shook off the fear and listened to our students. What information did they have? What did they know? What exactly did they see?
As I spoke to more and more students, it became increasingly clear that this was a situation that was rooted in rumor. Nevertheless, I had to make a tough decision: How do I ensure the safety of our students while not overreacting to potentially false student rumors.
My answer was clear and yet difficult to make: you have to treat the rumor as fact.
Carefully, the assistant principal and I, based on all of the information gleaned by the student responses, walked the side streets where the individual may have been located. We had already communicated with both staff and our parent volunteers on the rumors. Everyone was on alert.
Our local police department had been called and were now on site. We followed up with them, sharing our facts of the situation and asking for advice. They reassured us that, based on their own conversations with students and witnesses, that there was no individual with a weapon and that our students and community were safe. We then relayed this message to our parents, staff, and students.
Now that we had effectively researched the threat and determined, with the support of our local police department, that our students' concerns were based on false rumors, our job was now to spread the word and diffuse the spread of the rumors that had already taken a life of their own.
That evening, I prepared a recap of the events for our parent community and sent the message out first thing Saturday morning. I wanted to give our parent community the chance to speak with our students prior to the chaotic gossip on instagram took hold later that day.
Upon our return to campus that Monday, I began a two day investigation into what actually happened. By the end of the day on Tuesday, I had finally pieced together what had actually happened the previous Friday night.
A few students saw an adult in a black sweatshirt walking down the street by our school. They began to point at this person and may have pointed back. Our students, concerned that this person pointed at them, began to chase this individual who then took off running.
Another student, upon hearing this story, said that if this person came after them, they'd chase him off with a baseball bat.
Another student, as if this were a game of telephone, heard a modified story of the baseball bat response. They were told that a student who lived across the street had just chased a man out of their house with a baseball bat.
Another student, present for the story, believed they saw someone in a nearby bush and decided to throw rocks in their direction. As the rocks hit the bush, this student then told another student that they thought they heard the 'click-click" of a gun.
The other student then shared this story with five more students who then each shared it with five more.
So on Friday, we had a random man in a black sweatshirt pointing at our students, escaping from a nearby house after being chased by a middle school student with a baseball bat, hiding in a bush, getting rocks thrown at them and then loading their weapon to retaliate, and ultimately being named as a possible kidnapper/rapist/vigilante on our school campus...
While the truth was anything but.
But the decision to err on the side of caution had to be made in a split second and without pause.
My fear as an administrator is that I make a wrong decision.
Perhaps I didn't ask the right question of a student with a concern.
Maybe I didn't give enough caution to a situation and things turned horrible for our students, staff, and community.
It's even possible that a decision made with the best intentions ended up damaging our school policies and practices.
Sometimes the decisions are frustrating... and I'm cancelling music for Friday due to the air conditions, even though I truly believe that it would have been okay to have our leadership students bring out the speakers for some fun on a Friday.
Sometimes the decisions are based on my time limitations... and I'm having to send an email at 4:10 pm instead of picking up the phone to connect with a family about a conversation I had with their student.
Sometimes the decisions allow me to provide a bit of mercy... and I give a student a second chance at making a better choice, even though I know they should have made the right one the first time around.
And sometimes the decisions may just be simple, choosing to extend the dance a half hour to the cheers of four hundred kids.
Or the decision may be drenched in fears that some rumored harm could come to one of our students if I don't act as swiftly as possible.
This daily life of an administrator is stuffed with constant decisions that tilt the course of our school community. It's the most challenging part of being a middle school principal: always worried that the decision we made may not have been the best one for our students, our school, and our community.
But we still have to make the decision. It's the hardest part of our job.
No comments:
Post a Comment