It’s hard to contain the joy of the last week of school.  Memorial Day weekend gives us a little taste of what is just around the corner.  Students are giddy.  Teachers even more so.  Energy and anticipation is high.  Celebration assemblies and awards ceremonies fill the calendar.  It’s hard not to break out in a broad smile.

Unless you are a principal.  Yes, you share in the enthusiasm.  You are likely to give out more congratulatory high fives, handshakes, and hugs in the final days of the year then at any other time of the year.  On many levels, watching your students finish out the year and prepare to transition for their next challenge is deeply satisfying.  It speaks to the reasons we became educators and administrators in the first place.  Graduation and promotion ceremonies are major rites of passage, and our communities build tremendous meaning and celebration around these traditions.

But the end of year experience can be deeply bittersweet as a principal.

First off, the end of school year is when your logistical skills are most clearly on display and open to scrutiny. Families, community partners, district officials and board members are all in attendance.  You are pulling off a series of highly visible and well attended events, from awards ceremonies and celebration breakfasts to the granddaddy graduation ceremony itself.  On the surface you are all smiles, but underneath is a simmering anxiety that you combat by trusting your support team and investing in good planning and lots of practice.    

Even more difficult, and rarely seen by others, are the extremely difficult conversations with students (and their families) who have not met graduation requirements.  At least for me, this is one of the most difficult parts of the job as a secondary administrator.  It is extremely difficult to watch students and their families as they wrestle with the consequences of unmet expectations.  To further the agony, these situations typically highlight gaps in your systems of support and communication as a school.  Parents and students under threat of exclusion from end of year festivities are extremely good at pointing out where you and members of your team have fallen short.  Yes, the student does bear responsibility for failing to meet the standard for graduation, but so too do you as the leader of a system that has similarly failed the student.

In the end, the exuberance of graduation will triumph.  It is virtually impossible not to share in the authentic joy of the moment.   Yet for a student-centered school leader, the end of the school year is often punctuated with difficult decisions and moments of deep disappointment.