E6-Turning Right

 Good afternoon. 

Last week, a student from my former District committed suicide. The young man's father was a teacher in my former District. I knew the family and the student well. It is so disheartening to even consider having to face that reality for any family. 

Of course, this topic brings out feelings of "What could we have done to change this outcome?" Every school faces it at one time or another, and many times, it is multiple times over the course of a career or your life. I am going to focus on one part of this story from my past. 

When I was a Principal in the largest school from my past, I had to work hard to get to know all the kids, which was my goal. We had roughly 900 students at any given time. Those 225 freshman and sophomores took a while, to be sure. I had to have multiple levels of thoughtful action to allow me to get to know almost everyone. One of those things I would do is to find small groups of kids or isolated individuals to go ask a few questions. The right questions for me were: Who are you? (grade, pathway) What classes are you in? How are things going? Where does this fit on your plan for the future? I got pretty good at this just being an autonomous response to meeting new kids. 

One day, I noticed this young man in an afterschool ALC class. He was quiet, reserved and had no "power" in our school. Certainly, if I got to know him even a bit, that would be all that would be expected of me. He didn't want to talk to me. Quite frankly, I was going to have to use all I had to even be able to put his name with a face until his senior year. There were many students like this. 

I was in a tough spot. I was really busy. No one expected me to have this conversation, and it may be considered less important than the tasks that had mounted either here, there or in my email inbox. I had a decision to turn left and just go to my next task, or to turn right, and spend a few minutes getting to meet a student that I didn't know yet. This would get me one unit closer to the 900 total students in the building if I could find out enough about this student that I'd always remember him. You have to work at this to have any success. I turned right and got to know how he was connected to the school, his surname, etc. I remember him giving me a quick smile as I shook his hand on the way out. He was already a sophomore I should have added, so he'd been in the school for a year and a half. He was one student I didn't know. 

Some time later, I remember seeing him again and was left with that same left/right question. This time, I went left, justifying it by thinking I'll catch him some other time. Before too long, MD committed suicide. I felt so bad, like I did the other day. What if this person was only one conversation away from deciding that things were better than they'd thought? Who in our system, or society, had the capacity to move that student away from the self-destructive decision they chose? What if someone was there to turn right just at that time when a 16 year old life may have been saved into an 86 year old life? 

I don't fault anyone in these cases, but also believe that certain people and certain systems have better track records of "Turning Right". That is one of those areas that we are always trying to improve on -- personalization and maximization of talent. I'll use the words, "getting closer to the sun" as a metaphor for guiding your improvement effort. When you have people and systems that are there for students, and turn right more often than another system, I believe this is an example of personalization that allows your high school to get "closer to the sun", knowing that you'll never actually make it to the sun, or 100% of the students. It is still a great aspiration. 

What are you doing to personalize your approach to students systemically that gets your high school "closer to the sun?" How can you facilitate a systemic approach that gets people mindfully to turn right more often than they do today? 

Reminder: Podcast with Cory Steiner, 4:30pm today