Maintenance as Leadership

Every August, a calendar event reminds me to check for hornets’ nests on the playground. I go outside and investigate each slide, swing set, and jungle gym, sometimes kicking equipment to stir up any life that might have made a new home there.

This might seem like a chore, a task to be avoided unless necessary. For some time it felt like that to me. What changed was my perception of the task. I no longer see it as simply “checking the playground equipment for hornets,” but rather as “helping keep students safe at school.”

These mental shifts make all the difference, and not just in physical safety. If a student feels safe to go outside and play without worrying about being stung, they are likely not worrying about it the 15 minutes before recess during instruction. Fifteen minutes a day for the month of September is around five hours. That’s almost one day of instruction.

I call this “maintenance as leadership.” It is not a major initiative in the building, nor is it simply showing up. It is somewhere in between, a continuous effort of ensuring the systems of a school are operating as they should. Developing and adjusting the schedule is an example. Securing and managing a budget is another. These things matter because they remove the obstacles from and create a space for teaching and learning.

Maintenance as leadership is supported by research. In a study conducted in the Miami School District in Florida, Grissom and Loeb (2011) found that the most successful schools had leadership who implemented strong organizational management practices. These skills were highly correlated with schoolwide excellence, more than what we associate with instructional leadership, such as informal classroom coaching by a principal. Not to say that the latter is unimportant—instructional leadership does make a difference—but that maintenance as leadership/organizational management is a prerequisite for success.

So where should we best apply our active presence in schools? What does maintenance as leadership look like in relationship to others: staff, students, families? How does it relate to literacy and learning?

Leadership as Presence

One area is leadership as presence. This means being available to faculty, visibly and knowingly, ready to listen or assist with a problem. During this year’s return to school and all the challenges that came with it, teachers were feeling overwhelmed. More than one teacher emailed me over the weekend, letting me know they were not feeling supported.

I could have become defensive and taken their perception personally, maybe countered with evidence that I was supportive. (I was tempted.) Instead, I emailed everyone and reminded them of my cell phone number and encouraged them to call me. “Really,” I reinforced. “I am here and available if you want to talk.” No one called, but several people responded with thanks for the offer. Simply being available and letting them know they were not alone in their feelings seemed to be the support they needed.

Leadership as Support

Sometimes words and presence are not enough. That is where leadership as support becomes important. This means attending to the systems we have in place for securing the resources, the physical space, and the time to actually teach. Budgets have become smaller, yet I have found that as long as we have books, writing materials, basic living supplies, and functioning technologies, the teachers are generally satisfied. What helps me is having a priority when I budget. This priority derives from our strategic plan and yearly focus.

For example, when reading to understand was a priority one year, we used a large chunk of our Title I dollars for classroom libraries. If requests came from other disciplines, I would ask how they connected to reading and developing readers. The focus filtered our wants from our priority. So, support is less about buying things than about clarifying what it is we really need and why we need it, and then doing whatever it takes to acquire the resources.

The things we do to maintain our relationships with the faculty and staff, as well as with the tangible aspects of school, are often quiet and unnoticed. This means regular reminders to myself to stay humble and not take myself too seriously. It means seeing the everyday tasks as more than just an obligation, but rather as steps toward our larger goal of sustaining a schoolwide community of learners that supports everyone inside it to achieve their potential.