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The Best Job in the World: part threeNW: What's the biggest mistake principals make? Lewis: If you ever get complacent, somebody is going to pass you by. Once I saw a sign above a locker room door saying, "Every day you either get better or you get worse, but you don't stay the same." You can translate that into what you're doing with the school. If principals get complacent, that's it. When you're afraid to admit that you made a mistake, when you dig into a position, you lose support. Occasionally, an idea will fail. I don't think you can move ahead without failing. When you see the failure, you adjust and correct the situation. Parents, by and large, are great people and they want the best for their kid. They know things aren't always going to be smooth at the school, and they can accept that if you're open and honest with them. But if you ever shut them out, they'll never come back a second time. If you make that one mistake, they tell 10 people. Now you have 10 people who are questioning and looking at the school negatively. Over time, that creates problems. A big mistake principals make is not creating a climate within their school where communication is open. I hear teachers saying, "This principal never would tell us what was going on, would hide in their office" — all those kinds of things. I say to principals: "Get out of your office. Get to know your students; they need to know you." I enjoy being down at the cafeteria at lunchtime. I circulate, talking and saying hi to kids. That's the time when I counsel — lunchtime. We had a magazine sale in the fall. The best magazine salesperson got to be principal for a day, and I was a student. I went to his classes. I showed up with baggy jeans and a big wool shirt, tennis shoes, a backpack. And I went slouching off down the hall. NW: In the old days, the only kids who ever saw the principal were the kids who got in trouble. Lewis: Yes. This is my first year in this school. The first kids whose names I got to know, of course, were those kids who were continually sent to the office for the first month of school. It's easy to forget that that's only 5 percent. It can bog your day down. NW: What are the important issues that the NASSP is dealing with right now? Lewis: The principal shortage is something that we're struggling with. Principal accountability is another huge issue. When you're dealing with a national organization, you've got 50 different entities who look at it differently. For instance, in the state of Kentucky, all principals' contracts are tied to the superintendent's contract. If he gets fired, you have no job. Instant teamwork. Everybody's looking at test scores and what they can do to raise student achievement. School violence is a huge issue. I was asked to speak on this topic at the Hawaii Principals Association in early December, and every state is struggling with that in a different way — with what you can and can't do. We've tried to set up a framework. We have a National Principal's Team — 12 of us who are trained to respond to work with school districts. When the Littleton, Colorado, shooting occurred last year, we couldn't get in. Because of where it happened and the affluent area, they had their own resources and they really didn't want a national response team or a similar team from the federal government. They closed shop. NW: They circled the wagons. Lewis: They did. They took care of the thing themselves. We're now saying that really a national team isn't where we need to be. We need to be at the state level. We provided some trainings this summer and invited states to send people back. We're going to continue to provide some regional training and assist states in forming response teams to handle crises in the schools. We're also looking to do more cooperative things with the national elementary association. I will have the opportunity to speak at the national elementary school principals meeting in March. I'm looking forward to talking with them about that and see what we can do together. We're all in this together.
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The New Principal Special Report:
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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