A practice that has “always been done this way” has never actually been chosen. It has only been inherited. Summer is the rare season when you can put each of your student life practices back on the table and ask the real question: if I were building this school’s student life systems from scratch tomorrow, would I create this on purpose? What you would keep, you keep with conviction. What you would not, you finally get to question.
This is not an argument for blowing everything up. The best summer audits keep more than they cut. It is an argument for knowing the difference between a tradition that still serves students and adults, and a habit that survives only because no one has had time to look at it.
Tradition is not the same as effectiveness
Schools are unusually good at keeping things. A weekend duty structure, an assembly format, a check-in ritual, a consequence ladder: many of these outlast the people who designed them and the problems they were designed to solve. There is a difference between a practice that works and a practice that is simply familiar.
The honest test is not “do we like it?” or “is it ours?” It is “does this create clarity, or does it create complexity?” A practice earns its place when it makes expectations clearer for students and easier to hold for adults. A practice has overstayed when adults cannot quite explain why it exists, or when it takes more energy to maintain than the result it produces.
Identify what creates clarity versus complexity
Walk through your student life systems and sort them into two honest piles.
Clarity-makers are practices where everyone knows the purpose, the roles are obvious, and a new staff member could understand the “why” in one conversation. These are usually worth keeping, sometimes worth protecting.
Complexity-makers are the ones with workarounds, exceptions, and “well, it depends on who’s on duty” attached. They generate questions instead of answering them. They are where role clarity has quietly eroded. These are your candidates for rebuilding, not because they are old, but because they no longer make anything simpler.
This sort alone will surface practices you have been carrying without deciding to.
Improve by subtraction, not just addition
Here is the instinct worth resisting. When something is not working, leaders tend to add: another initiative, another form, another meeting, another layer of process. Education is especially prone to this. The field’s pattern of reaching for the next new program is well documented, and so is the cost: initiative fatigue, where adults are stretched so thin across competing priorities that nothing is done well (NAESP on school leader initiative fatigue). Many improvement efforts fail not because the idea was wrong but because it was added on top of everything else rather than replacing anything (EdWeek, The Simple Reason So Many Initiatives Fail, 2023).
The research on schools that actually sustain improvement points the other way: purposeful selection, clear goals, and the discipline to protect a few things rather than chase many (Sustaining School Improvement Initiatives, 2023). Part of why education stays so fad-prone is that adding feels like leadership while subtracting feels like loss (The 74, Why Is Education So Fad-Prone). It is not. Removing a practice that no longer serves students is one of the strongest moves a leader can make.
So before you ask “what should we add next year?” ask “what should we stop?” Subtraction is how you make room for the work that matters.
Small improvements create meaningful change
You do not need to rebuild everything to feel the difference. A sustainable model is built from a few practices chosen on purpose and held consistently, not from a constant churn of new ones. Pick the two or three complexity-makers that cost your team the most energy. Rebuild those. Protect the clarity-makers that already work. Leave the rest alone until next summer.
That is the quiet power of a summer audit. You are not reinventing student life. You are deciding it, on purpose, one practice at a time, so that what your adults carry into September is lighter, clearer, and chosen. Strong student life systems are not the ones with the most parts. They are the ones where every part still earns its place.
If you are not sure which practices to keep and which to rebuild, that is a useful conversation to have with someone who has helped other schools make exactly these calls. You do not have to sort it alone. You can find that kind of support through The Deans’ Roundtable.
Key takeaways
- A long-standing practice has been inherited, not chosen. Summer is when you get to choose it again, or let it go.
- Tradition and effectiveness are not the same. Test each practice on whether it creates clarity or complexity.
- Sort your systems into clarity-makers (keep) and complexity-makers (rebuild candidates).
- Improve by subtraction. Adding more is the most common and least effective response.
- Rebuild only the two or three practices that cost the most. Protect what already works.
Frequently asked questions
How should a school decide which student life practices to keep or change? Ask whether each practice creates clarity or complexity. Keep the ones with a clear purpose and obvious roles that a new staff member could understand quickly. Rebuild the ones full of workarounds and exceptions that generate more questions than they answer.
What does “improve by subtraction” mean in a school setting? It means addressing a problem by removing a practice that no longer serves students rather than adding another initiative on top. Schools tend to add, which produces initiative fatigue; subtracting protects adult capacity and focuses effort on what works.
Why do schools keep practices that no longer work? Because they are familiar and inherited, and because no one has had time to question them. Adding new things feels like leadership while stopping things feels like loss, so outdated practices quietly survive year after year.
