Thursday, January 16, 2014

2014 - Being Principal, Starting School and the year ahead.

It felt oddly strange being at school on the first day and not having a classroom to set up, students to welcome in or start of the year activities to plan. I am not going to say I missed it (not yet anyway) but it still felt weird. I felt like I should have been somewhere all day. Being principal sunk in pretty quickly when the first bell rang and the emails, phone calls and requests came flooding in. By the end of this first day I could have sworn that a principals job was to clear the backlog of emails, meet and greet new students and parents and decide how to persuade the ministry that we were still underfunded and needed more staffing and another classroom.

I love the personal interaction that this new role has attached to it. The good and the bad interactions. The other part of the job that does excite me is the decision making and the chance to try and make the school an amazing looking and feeling place for our staff, the parents and the students. At the end of the day the reason for being in this profession is simply to do right by the students. With this in mind I want my year as Principal to be student centred. 

As an old friend has always said "It's a big job, but someone has got to do it".