Dear ICS Community,

Tilling the Soil: Finding Grace in the Grid

Late last year, while racing to meet a deadline, a senior colleague offered me some timely advice: “Phill, we don’t need perfection. We need the best starting point so we can walk together from there.”

For a perfectionist—and I am one—any imperfection can feel like an insurmountable failure. Yet, my colleague's wisdom beautifully mirrors Peter’s restoration in John 21. Peter set an impossible standard for his courage: “I will never desert you.” When he inevitably fell short, Jesus met his failure with a meal and redirection. He invited Peter to shift from relying on his own strength to leaning on grace. Freed from the burden of proving his own perfection, Peter found true strength in collaboration and community.

Over the past seven weeks, building our 2026/27 secondary schedule tested that exact lesson. Balancing roughly 160 courses over a 10-day cycle, maintaining near 100% room utilisation, and respecting faculty loading limits came with fiercely high, self-imposed aspirations. All of this unfolded while learning a powerful new timetabling platform that steepened the learning curve. Have you ever been so close to a goal, with just one hurdle left to clear, only to clip it? That is a sharp reality check for a perfectionist—especially when trying to solve seemingly small scheduling hiccups, only to watch them escalate into significant structural threats to the grid.

In school leadership, we often distinguish between technical challenges and adaptive ones. Moving to this new 10-day schedule has been (will be) a profound adaptive change. For me, I have had to intentionally recall my colleague’s words many times and, as well, reflect on Peter’s restoration. Instead of seeking rigid fixes, I have had to accept what I did not know and lean heavily into the collective wisdom of my C&I colleagues (especially Mrs. Lisa Ho), our consultants, Principals, and Department Chairs.

By navigating the unfamiliar together, we have thus far secured remarkable results for ICS, for example, fulfilling 98.1% of High School and 100% of Middle School student course choices, populating  99% of our courses with the exact teachers their leaders requested, and all while preserving vital time for Chapel, P and M blocks, FaceGroups, Tribe, and a Middle School morning break.

The adaptive work of change will continue from here. I encourage each of you—students, parents, and faculty—to approach these 'new ways of doing school' with patience and an open mind, together.