True North by Greg Furlich

Post date: Nov 10, 2015 10:07:02 PM

About a month ago I sat down with Krista and we decided to write our newsletter articles about poverty. The more the concept rolled around in my brain, the more I found it morphing into something a little different. The spark for my thoughts, however, absolutely comes from dealing with a child in poverty and how, very early on in my career as principal, she forced me to evaluate and wrestle with the ethics of what it means to be a school leader in an era of federal and state accountability.

My story begins with Zan who was a fifth grader at Woodstock Elementary. She was (and probably still is) a great kid. Zan tried her hardest, did her homework, tried to please her teachers and pretty much came to school every day with a super attitude. By fifth grade, though Zan had taken eight SOL tests and had not come close to passing any of them. She’d been through the special education process without qualifying, and we were providing her all of the assistance we could.

Early in her fifth grade year, I noticed that Zan had begun to be picked up and dropped off for school. We all have our principal Spidey Senses and know when a student has likely moved out of our school’s zone. It took no more than a quick phone call to confirm that her family had moved into a neighboring school’s district. Zan had been a Woodchuck since kindergarten and mom pleaded that she be allowed to remain at Woodstock for the remainder of the year.

And now, perhaps, you know where I’m going with this article. I knew my African American sub group (now gap group 2) was going to be right on the edge of meeting the accountability cut score for that particular year. In fact, I was pretty sure I was going to make it or not make it by one or two students either way. As I’m sure everyone reading this would do, I of course, kept Zan at Woodstock, and we did squeak over the accountability finish line that year. Like all school based administrators, I learned early on that, when it comes to a difficult decision, you do what’s best for the child, but it was the first time I hated the Feds for even allowing the idea of doing the wrong thing to creep into my head, but it wasn’t the last.

I relived that situation just this week when trying to decide whether or not to revoke an out-of-zone. It comes into my head any time I have to make a decision when needs far out strip the limited resources at my disposal. Where do I spend my tutoring money, on the kids who I can likely to get over the SOL hump or all kids? Who gets pulled for extra small group help, the neediest of students or the needy students from a particular gap group that may make or break the school’s accountability status? Over time, doing the right thing has become a lot harder to pin down with any certainty.

I was originally going to title this article “How I made Peace and Learned to Live with the Feds”, but the truth is that I haven’t made my peace at all. Anyone who knows me knows that I agonize over pretty much everything all the time, and that’s never truer than when I am trying to balance decisions that are going to affect children.

In the end, regardless of the difficult decisions we make every day, we are really lucky to be working in education. I had the opportunity to have a visit with Chief of Staff, Kevin Hobbs, before he passed. One of the things we discussed was how fortunate we are to have that guiding principle of working for what’s right for children. In business the guiding principle tends to be profit margin, but in education we have a “True North” to follow. As long as we are constantly working to follow that internal compass we’ll naturally be committed to the ethics and social responsibility that are integral to authentic leadership.

So, yes, those decisions will continue to tie me up in knots, but the concept of True North and the lessons I learned from a little girl named Zan will always serve to keep me grounded in doing the right thing.