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Before the elections, a lesson in leadership
A few years ago, our school district selected a new superintendent of schools. She was very intelligent, had some strong opinions and ideas, and was skilled at implementing her ideas even in the face of entrenched resistance.
One of these ideas was a kind of reorganization of the department of which I was (and still am) the head. While no personnel changes were proposed, everyone’s teaching assignment would be changed. I thought that the years of expertise and experience that each teacher had accumulated in his or her subject would be wasted, and we would end up with “inexperienced” teachers at each grade level, which would not be beneficial to the students. As you might imagine, the teachers were not happy either, and they asked me to arrange a face-to-face meeting with the superintendent. We were all sure that after hearing our side of the argument, she would surely relent and not make this major change.
At the meeting, teachers with as many as 35 years of experience made impassioned, and sometimes tearful, pleas for a change in plans, but the superintendent was unmoved. She told me afterward, “They are just afraid of change.” I was shocked; she was in the meeting but apparently hadn’t heard a thing we were saying. Now, what was I going to do?
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