Every Student Should Have Someone Waiting for Them
Welcome signs and first-day photos are real, and none of them answer the question a student is actually asking: is anyone here expecting me? For too many students the honest answer is no, not because adults do not care, but because noticing was never assigned. Someone waiting is a system.
Addiction Proofing Your School: Your Substance Use Policy Is Not the Whole Job
Every independent school has a substance use policy. Most were written for a supply that no longer exists and live in a handbook nobody reads out loud. In a recent episode of The Table, Kriya Lendzion and I worked through what addiction proofing a school actually asks of the adults.
The Culture Your Students Experience Begins in Your Faculty Meetings
Students almost never see a faculty meeting, and yet those rooms shape most of what they eventually feel. The culture students experience is a downstream copy of how the adults treat each other. Meetings say more than mission statements, which makes the Tuesday gathering one of the year’s real culture decisions.
Don’t Mistake Compliance for Alignment
Everyone can nod through an opening meeting. Then September arrives and the same expectation gets carried out five different ways in five different offices. Compliance is not alignment, and the opening weeks are where leaders most often confuse the two. Slowing down in August is what buys a steadier year.
Generational Differences in Schools: Stop Managing Categories, Start Leading People
Most schools now have several generations of adults working side by side, and when the friction never gets named it gets filed as a personality conflict. It usually is not one. In a recent episode of The Table, Dr. Unnatti Jain and I traded managing categories for leading actual people.
The First Week Isn’t About Students. It’s About Adults.
Ask most schools what the first week is about and the answer comes back fast: schedules, orientation, getting students through the door. The stronger case is that it is about the adults. What faculty and staff experience in those opening days sets the ceiling for what students experience all year.
The Adults Are the System: What Student Behavior Data Is Really Telling Us
Your behavior data is not a verdict on your students. It is a readout of the conditions your adults created. Referral counts and incident logs are lagging indicators, and the questions that move them are questions about adult consistency, expectation clarity, and role ownership. Strong student life systems are built adult-first.
Building Leaders on Purpose: Delegation, Succession, and the Systems Schools Skip
Most independent schools build their next generation of leaders by accident. Someone leaves, everyone scrambles, and the job goes to whoever has been there longest. In a recent episode of The Table, Rebecca Malotke-Meslin of Pleasantly Aggressive Coaching and Consulting and I unpacked delegation and succession as systems schools skip.
The Leadership Loneliness Nobody Talks About: Why Student Life Leaders Need Connection Before They Need Solutions
Isolation is not only lonely. It is a decision-making problem. The student life role sits in the middle, holding crises you often cannot discuss with anyone, and leaders carrying the hardest calls alone tend to make worse ones. Connection comes before solutions. You don’t have to do this alone.
If You Had to Start Over Tomorrow: The Student Life Systems Worth Rebuilding (and the Ones Worth Keeping)
A practice that has always been done this way has never actually been chosen. It was inherited. Summer is when you can ask which student life systems you would build on purpose tomorrow, sort them by whether they create clarity or complexity, and improve by subtraction rather than adding more.