So, You Think You Want to be a Principal…

School Principal Job Description

• Unclogging toilets and mopping up sewage in the restrooms of your new facility
• Setting up hundreds of chairs for an event on your own because you know you can’t ask any more of your teachers or volunteers
• Subbing for Calculus one day and Kindergarten the next, outside of your comfort zone and with unclear lesson plans
• Kindly mediating an hour and a half long meeting with a teacher and an unhappy set of parents who will likely leave the school
• Trying to keep track of complicated budgets for various areas of the school, when you’ve got no background in accounting
• Picking up a screaming and flailing child from the hall and carrying him into your office, providing counseling to calm the child down, then calling the parents to follow up on a strategy for discipline
• Planning events and coordinating the speaking roles of many different parties: teachers, board members, parents and your own boss, the Head of School
• Calmly and gratefully receiving constant criticisms and proposed “solutions” from well-meaning teachers, parents, board members and colleagues, who only see part of the picture you see and who don’t understand the time and resource constraints the school is under
• Calling sets of parents who have applied to your school to navigate a tricky conversation sharing feedback from admission testing for their child who is not prepared to enter on grade level
• Feeling the need to innovate new programs even while you know you don’t have enough time to do everything you’ve already committed to doing well
• Experiencing the pressure to be an expert in 50 different areas of academics and the business of running a school, and knowing you actually have expertise in just a handful
• Dealing with the frustrations of people not following your rules or instructions, whether it’s students, parents, or even teachers, meaning you have to take time out of your schedule to tackle another potentially challenging interpersonal conversation
• Never knowing exactly what sort of crisis you’re headed for today when you turn the keys in the ignition and drive off to school in the morning, but knowing from experience that some sort of crisis is more than likely

Serving as a Principal at a classical Christian school is not for the faint of heart. 

In the list above, I’ve tried to highlight some of the elements of a principal’s regular duties that are often left off of your typical job description. If you’re skeptical about the above list, I can assure you that these are all autobiographical to one extent or another, and that I could have gone on with other categories of tasks, equally as difficult, unexpected, stressful and emotionally fraught.

A few years into my tenure as a school administrator I remember attending a session at a private school conference where the presenter shared that the increase in salary and benefits accorded mid-level leaders at private schools often does not match up well with the increased stresses, challenges, time commitment and responsibilities. 

Now I’m not writing this article to dissuade aspiring academic leaders at classical Christian schools. We are in desperate need of more men and women who are competent and willing to embrace the role. Nor even am I writing for the indulgence of a good, old-fashioned pity party for us principals (as tempting as that is…). 

Instead, at the instigation of my current Head of School, I think it’s valuable to explore some of the costs of being a principal or other mid-level academic leader at a small to midsize classical Christian school (say, under 250 students), or else a Head of School at a small school (under 125). This role has a unique set of challenges, and just as Jesus warned of the costs of discipleship, it is my hope that by clarifying the costs of principal leadership at a classical Christian school, more aspiring leaders will be able to willingly take up this specific cross with eyes wide-open and the mental and emotional resources to do so successfully. 

Before we begin, I would note a caveat. Your mileage may vary: not all school situations are alike, and so some of the aspects I mentioned above might be successfully carried by someone else on staff. But at the same time there might be other job requirements I won’t mention. I have used specifics to paint a general picture, not to detail an actual job description. 

So, you think you want to be a principal… Have you considered that being a principal is…

1) a dirty, messy and physically exhausting job,

2) an emotionally draining job that requires you to maintain a relentless optimism and joyful mood in the midst of disheartening circumstances,

3) a multifaceted job requiring a range of competencies and a dizzying variety of challenges,

4) a leadership nightmare because you are always navigating several different audiences, and

5) an ideal job for a teacher and philosopher who can maintain equanimity in an active life? 

Let’s tackle each of these five aspects of the job of principal in term. Hopefully, this list will deter the faint of heart and those who are not suited to the demands of the position. But more than that, hopefully, it will help other aspiring principals prepare themselves for such a noble task. As Paul says of the role of overseer in 1 Timothy 3:1, so I say, “If anyone aspires to the office of principal, he desires a noble task. But not one for the faint of heart or unqualified. Let each one test himself to see whether he has what it takes.”

If you’re still reading this article and you are neither a principal nor an aspiring principal, I would encourage you to read on. Parents and teachers can benefit from understanding better the demands that are placed on those who are leading them. This can give them compassion when their administrator (inevitably) fails them in some way. I know that I have been helped and encouraged to shoulder the challenges of my role by kind and thoughtful teachers and parents who looked beyond their own concerns and showed appreciation for me and an understanding of my circumstances.

In a similar way, board members and heads of school might be sobered to recognize the complexities and day-to-day realities of the mid-level administrator. Inspired and multi-competent leadership at this level might not be the only inciting factor in a school’s improvement and growth to maturity, but it’s a major one. A principal who can successfully tackle the physical, emotional, many-hat-wearing, and philosophical leadership demands of the role can propel a school on to excellence. This implies that such persons should be appropriately trained, sought out, empowered and supported.

All of us at Educational Renaissance have served in mid-level principal or academic leadership roles at schools, so we have a special concern for how this role can function as a lever for genuine classical renewal and excellence at a school. Without further ado, we count the costs of principal leadership.

So, you think you want to be a principal…

1) Have you considered that being a principal is a dirty, messy and physically demanding job?

If you think going into school administration might release you from the demands of teaching and give you the luxury of a desk job, think again. 

While it may seem like teaching keeps you on your feet all day, and the principal can sit behind her desk for hours on end, this image doesn’t adequately reflect the role at a small classical Christian school. 

The fact is that many, if not most, classical Christian schools cannot afford the full custodial staff of established schools. This makes the principal’s job dirtier and messier than your typical office job. There may be exceptions where the church a school is renting from has a competent and well-run custodial and facilities staff. But in general, aspiring principals should expect that addressing toilet issues and vomit cleanup are part of the J-O-B. 

Event set up and tear-down also require moving chairs and tables, purchasing food and drinks, napkins and plasticware. Even if you engage other employees and volunteers, principals often have the privilege and the responsibility to lead the way in this sort of manual labor and cleanup. 

In addition, a principal’s day should be active if she is to be successful in her role of leading teachers, parents, students and staff. The sheer weight of meetings can take a physical toll, if you’re doing your job right. I schedule bi-weekly check in meetings with every teacher or staff member who reports to me, and I think this meeting cadence is necessary for keeping everyone engaged and coaching them to their full potential. Likewise, if your school is growing, you should be interviewing every set of new parents before you admit them to your school. You should also connect with every set of parents once a year before re-enrollment, either through in person meetings or on the phone if you want to proactively engage parents and solve issues before they become a family’s reason for leaving the school. 

Then consider all the ad hoc meetings, meetings with coaches, fine arts directors, club leaders, community leaders and vendors for various services the school needs. The principal needs physical stamina simply to keep up with the pace of meetings. 

In addition to these meetings, the principal should be regularly walking around the school and visiting the classrooms of teachers. A rigorous schedule of observing teachers is the quickest and most effective way to increase the quality of teaching and learning that I know of. I am regularly held accountable for a certain number of observations a week. This discipline more than any other contributes to classical Christian excellence in a school. 

The energy demands of this sort of role alone are considerable. If you are currently a principal or are considering becoming one in the near future, make it a priority to care for your physical wellbeing through a healthy diet, a full night’s sleep and regular exercise. And as you face the temptation to cave on any of these due to the pressures and stresses of the role, refuse to give in and play the long game on your effectiveness. 

2) Have you considered that being a principal is an emotionally draining job that requires you to maintain a relentless optimism and joyful mood in the midst of disheartening circumstances?

If your school is anything like the schools I have worked at, it is full of human beings. And the fact of the matter is that human beings sin. They talk behind one another’s backs. They grumble and complain. They don’t always live up the high ideals of classical virtue and communal cooperation. 

And many of these problems will come knocking on your door if you are the principal. Even if you don’t have to solve every issue that rears its ugly head, you will know about more problems in your school than you care to. You must bear the weight of disappointment and, to a certain extent, anxiety for the possible negative effects of these issues on the future of your school. You may not be suffering persecution like the apostle Paul, but sometimes being a principal makes me think of the end of Paul’s rant in 2nd Corinthians 11 about his sufferings, 

“And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?” (2 Cor 11:28-29 ESV)

A mentor of mine once compared school leadership to the role of a priest in the Old Testament. You must be able to bear the sins and heartaches of the community and lift them up to God, not spit back at the community the hurt and pain and disappointment. You must find a way to be joyful and optimistic, even in those moments when it feels like the institution that you’ve been pouring out blood, sweat and tears to build is tearing itself apart. You need to be able to maintain your equilibrium with student discipline problems, teachers crying in your office, and background drama about this or that initiative or decision. 

A few tips for doing this well include having clear boundaries as a school leader. Have a regular practice of what Cal Newport calls Shutdown Complete. Close your laptop at the end of the day and stop responding to email unless there is a real emergency. And no, that issue that a parent emailed you about late at night is not a real emergency. Seriously consider not getting your work email on your phone, as I do. Don’t try to solve every issue or problem. Know what you can control and what you can’t. Have realistic expectations. 

Your classical Christian school is not going to be a utopia that brings Christ’s kingdom fully to earth before Jesus comes again. Don’t put all your hope in the institution. I believe in institution-building and the power of classical Christian schools, but we must remember that arguably no Christian institution has stayed faithful to its calling for more than several generations. Human institutions, no matter how fine, do not last forever. 

On the other hand, the human beings you work with each day, the students and parents, teachers and fellow staff, are eternal beings. C.S. Lewis’ description in “Weight of Glory” helps me keep my perspective in the midst of these emotional demands:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

3) Have you considered that being a principal is a multifaceted job requiring a range of competencies and a dizzying variety of challenges?

The principal at a small classical Christian school must be a generalist. There are too many aspects of the business of running a school that will neglected, if you focus most of your attention on any one. Spend all your time on improving the curriculum, and you will blow out the budget AND your teachers will have problems with student discipline. Spend all your time on classroom discipline and order, and the lack of extracurriculars and sports will hamper your growth. Spend all your time on planning events for parents, and your teachers will be worn out and disengaged. Take my advice and spread your time wisely between the things I mentioned, and your school still may struggle because you have no marketing and admissions strategy.

In order to function well as a principal, you must be ready and willing to learn about aspects of the business of running a school. Whether it’s heading up the marketing and admissions of the school, as I do, or tackling budgeting and payroll, insurance, fundraising, or event planning, you’re likely going to have to figure out how to be competent at other major functions of the business of a modern school. It’s pointless to protest and say, “Medieval schoolmasters didn’t have to learn how to manage a website and run online ads for Open Houses.” We’re not in the Middle Ages anymore and running a school in our society is complex.

It may help to think of a flourishing classical Christian school on the analogy of a symphony rather than a solo performance. School communities have many aspects that must be in harmony and must grow and develop in harmony. The principal (and head of school) are not solo musicians who light up the stage in their area of competence and skill. They are more like conductors who keep time for everyone and bring different sections of instrument in at the right time for their special moment. Schools grow and improve because many things are going well in many different areas of the school. 

Principals can’t just play to their strengths. They must operate in their weaknesses until the school has grown to the point that they can raise up other leaders who will outshine them. When you don’t have a marketing director, you still have to do marketing. And in fact, you will never be able to afford a marketing director, until you have done improved your marketing to a certain point. It’s a painful but true irony that these core functions of the school need attention most, when you have the least resources to give them. 

The best analogy for this that I have treasured over the years is the plate spinning routine of Henrik Bothe. Watch the whole video if you are an administrator at a small school, and everything about the experience of the school year will suddenly make sense.

4) Have you considered that being a principal is a leadership nightmare because you are always navigating several different audiences?

Let me explain what I mean. In most businesses, it’s clear who the customer is and the product is fairly simple. In the business of private schools, the parent is the customer, but your chief relationship is with their child. The child’s education is the product but it’s a challenging project with a long time horizon and inevitable ups and downs that you can’t entirely control. This creates a unique communication dynamic to say the least. Add to this the ethos of a Christian school, and many of the leadership challenges that churches have suddenly enter into the mix. Add in the specifics of classical education with all the variety of expectations that parents will have of that term, and now most of the things you can say are liable to misunderstanding from a number of fronts. Lastly, consider that your customers are paying a price tag for their children’s education, when most parents pay nothing to send their kids to government schools. They are understandably going to be pickier and more demanding about all aspects of the school.

As my Head of School often says at prospective parent interviews, “We deal with people’s money, their religion and their kids.” If that isn’t a situation fraught with rhetorical peril, I don’t know what is. Emphasize too much a particular denominational distinctive at your Christian school and half your audience might grow concerned. Talk up the discipline and rigor of classical education, and some parents may ask where the joy and love of learning have gone. Tell them about the joy and play-learning, the discovery centers and discussions, and some will ask why their child’s test scores aren’t high enough and why they keep hearing about this other student misbehaving in class.

One of the main lessons I learned in my first few years as an administrator is the need to understand and sympathize with the parent’s perspective. When I was just a teacher, I was so focused on exploring the philosophy of classical education and on my own experiences of teaching that I couldn’t envision things through a parent’s eyes. A principal must be able to toggle back and forth between his teacher hat and his parent hat. 

I’ve also been really helped by the statement of Keith Nix, Head of School at Veritas in Richmond, that school leaders should emphasize more what they are for, rather than what they are against. Polemics have their place, but speaking in terms of what you are for enables you to strike the right note for multiple concerned parties. You can pair together seemingly contradictory goals like ‘joy’ in the classroom and ‘order’, high standards and high support, excellence and intentional care. It’s also important to remember that when you speak at events, you are being heard both by teachers and by parents, by board members and by fellow staff. In some ways the role of a principal is mediator in chief. In another sense you must have the conviction to stake out a direction and say hard truths that neither party may be particularly happy to hear. 

5) Lastly, have you considered that being a principal is an ideal job for a teacher and philosopher who can maintain equanimity in an active life? 

If you’ve read all that I’ve shared so far and are still undeterred, the role of a principal might just be the noble task for you. So, I want to end on a positive note. The particular beauty of a role like principal is how it combines several exciting and challenging tasks. The role begs for a leader with some level of philosophical bent, especially at a classical Christian school. If you are to stake out a direction for the academic programs of the whole school, you should ideally do so from a deep well. But you must also be conversant with practical concerns. You should be idealistic enough to challenge the status quo of modern education and realistic enough to work improvements out gradually with real people in real time. 

You should be a competent teacher, not only because you may need to substitute for kindergarten or seniors, but also because you must teach teachers the art of teaching, the art of resolving conflict well, the practical details of lunchroom expectations, and the grand philosophy of education.

The ideal principal has a hunger to learn and grow and half wishes for a life of contemplation and study but loves the activity of people and planning too much to fully embrace scholarship alone. For the principal the active life of school leadership is cast with a contemplative hue. Practical application and philosophical consideration must be blended well. The principal must love pedagogy and people, building programs and performance evaluations. 

So, you think you want to be a principal? It’s a noble task if you have what it takes!