The principal said I was "dressed like a co-ed"

then he put his hand on my head and told me to relax.

The last day of school in a small town can be special. Sometimes kids ride their horses to school. When buses are ready to roll, the teachers go out to the lineup and wave goodbye to the kids and holler, “Have a good summer!”

Pair of students who rode horses to school on the last day, 2021.

One year just as the buses moved out, a high school kid came jogging up to me and told me the principal needed to talk to me in his office. When I arrived, a school board member was present, there to discuss his young relative’s grade in my class. Grades had already been calculated and submitted, and this student had not passed. 

All the other teachers went to the luncheon at a nearby eatery, where we had planned to celebrate the end of school together. Meanwhile I sat in the office listening to this school board member give me reason after reason why his relative had not done well in my class. Reasons varied widely from lightly blaming the teaching staff (me) to critiquing the way public schools are run, to the student’s own academic weaknesses - one of which was not, notably, his inability to turn in his work. The school board member clarified that he was speaking as the student’s concerned relative, not a school board member, but the weight of his authority was not invisible.

The principal just sat there, letting me take every hit by this school board member, who had control over my job.

You might assume, and it would be reasonable, that this was a discussion among the three of us present in that room: perhaps the relative would offer some thoughts, and I might respond, or the principal might clarify what could be done and what could not be done, considering that grades had already been submitted. But this administrator said less than 10 words in an hour. He did not defend me or his other staff, or redirect the other man, or suggest any solutions. He just sat there, letting me take every hit from this school board member, who had control over my job.

I should have stopped the meeting right there and insisted on union representation. Later I was also told I should file a grievance against the administrator and possibly the school board member. But honestly, how would that help anyone? The kid still hadn’t learned things in my class. The administrator would not have changed his ways. I saw what happened to the last teacher who filed a grievance against him. It was ugly.

The effect on me was profound. I knew I could never again think to myself, this principal’s got my back. So I didn’t trust him after that, and as it turned out, this lack of trust was warranted. But that’s a different story, because this is a newsletter about the effect of administrators on teachers, not a diatribe on the awfulness of this particular one - though I could provide it.

You can’t have too many horses-at-school photos. This one was parked outside my classroom one day.

Teachers rely on their principals for so much. They need big-picture support, like a vision for the school, or new ideas to implement. For example, once I had a principal who suggested that each teacher set three goals for the year. He would check in with us. Did he? No, he didn’t once ask about them. But a colleague and I decided to check in with each other on our goals, a practice we kept up for years.

Principals should be knowledgable about pedagogy and classroom management, and be ready to assist a teacher who is struggling. If a teacher comes to the principal with a question or an “I need help” conversation, he or she ought to be willing to help find an answer. This answer might be grounded in the principal’s own experience, but if he was a PE teacher 25 years ago and you’re an English teacher, he might need to pony up for some professional development for you.

Teachers also need in-the-moment support, such as when a student is having a come-apart, or a girl walks into a classroom and punches another girl, or the entire hallway smells like pot because, pot. Or a kid brings a gun on the bus, or there’s a student suicide, or a school board member wants to bully a teacher into changing a student’s grade so he can be eligible for sports in the fall.¹ Teachers have to trust the principal to deal with the crisis, immediately and definitively.

If an administrator trips up on the job in any one of these ways, the trust is etched away. Teachers will put up with a lot, but after serial incompetence or neglect, they begin to feel they can’t count on anyone, because the one person who’s supposed to catch them when things start to fall apart, doesn’t. When COVID happened, teachers were fully at the mercy of their school district administrators. Would they have support, online meetings to answer questions, trust in their willingness and ability to teach from home? Or would they be belittled, their questions ignored, their meetings unattended, then be required to come back in-person before the end of the 2020 school year because they couldn’t be trusted to be professionals? It depended on which kind of principal sat in that office down the hall.

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And I have to tell this story too because it’s almost impossible to believe.

Short story: this one administrator kept calling me “girl.” Over and over. “What’s up, girl?” “Hey girl, how is your son?” One day he commented on my outfit and said I was “dressed like a co-ed.” I bristled. Then he put his hand on my head and told me to relax. After months of this shit, I finally told him not to call me “girl.” I said, “I am a 47-year-old woman. I am not a girl.” He said, flustered, “What would you like me to call you?” I said, “How about my name? That works.” He evolved to a dramatic and snarky “Doctor Baldwin”² after that. Then he retired. 

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And finally, one administrator had a wonderful impact on me: my first principal/superintendent. She trusted me to try new things in the classroom, let me make all the mistakes without judgment, and supported me consistently even though I was so, so novice and amateur at everything. This helped me become more confident to teach different texts, attempt unconventional classroom activities, start a poetry slam at the school, lead student groups in various reading/writing clubs, and more.

I interviewed her for my dissertation in 2012 and learned that her fierceness well preceded my time. She told me, “Back in 1972, the Tribal Council established a Reservation-Wide Education Committee to look at education issues on the reservation. After meetings – discussions, we decided that the Indian students were being ‘pushed’ out of the public schools on the reservation. We decided that we could establish our own school.” So the tribe got a grant, and they did establish a school. That was the school where I worked and where I met her. When I see her at community events even today, I make sure I stop, shake her hand and tell her how much I miss seeing her. 

Sometimes, a school administrator can be a teacher’s ally and best supporter. Teachers are lucky to find these, especially in Montana where principals and superintendents cycle in and out of schools across the state like dish towels through the laundry. When sour, obsolete, or neglectful administrators appear and reappear, they can absolutely destroy a teacher’s will to continue teaching. 

1. None of these examples is invented. I experienced all of them personally.

2. Married name