I ran out of time yesterday morning to edit this piece, so it’s a special Saturday edition of Talking Out of School. Enjoy!
In a world in transition, perhaps the most anxious school constituency are parents. And given the world in 2023, it is a sane and normal response to be anxious. We’re not going back to the way things were; we’re figuring out a new normal. I have great sympathy for parents who are trying to navigate this while doing what’s best for their kids. It’s one thing for the stakes to be about yourself or another mature adult - it’s another thing entirely to consider the impact on your child’s future.
And life is hard, people are often more fragile than they appear, banged up a bit and tired from their travels, looking for an efficient way to get from “undesirable situation A” to “perhaps-better situation B.” And then throw a struggling, unhappy child in the mix.
And then whatever a family is paying for tuition, with very few exceptions, it is a stretch and a sacrifice for that family. I don’t know many families who write that check without thinking hard about it. And in the case of boarding school, not only is that family making a financial sacrifice, they are sacrificing time with their child as well.
In the NAIS “jobs to be done” framework on student recruitment, the bottom line was that if a student is applying to your school, something is going on that has made them look for a change because the most obvious option - usually the school system the parent thought long and hard about when they moved into their home - has proved not to suit their child.
And in some cases, families don’t fully disclose what job they are really looking for as they enroll in your school. A change of scene doesn’t instantly eliminate anxiety, depression, eating disorders or difficulties making friends. A different school doesn’t solve undiagnosed learning disabilities or ADHD. It doesn’t resolve tensions at home.
Schools are getting a front row seat to a family dynamic and I can only imagine how vulnerable that can make parents feel.
So it is quite understandable that parent relations have become more and more complicated over the past few years. And I’m not even going to get into the tensions around covid restrictions. (I keep thinking I should write about the intense hothouse year plus of the prevaccine covid era and running a school but then I can’t quite bring myself to do it… yet.) But in general - the reason for this context is that approaching parent relations with some empathy in your heart, even for difficult parents, goes a long way.
The reasons behind tense conversations with parents are a wide range and I would divide them up into two general categories between the “special requests” and the “complaints and grievances.”
There are so many possible requests - parents who repeatedly request for their student to leave early for vacations to the requests to be exempted from an academic or co-curricular core requirement. And in the scheme of things, is the world going to stop rotating on its axis if a student doesn’t take four years of math? Did I always think in a 25 year plus career that 100% of school programs, inside and outside of the classroom, were perfectly executed? The answer to both is NO. Of course.
But the larger point here is that as a head or a senior administrator, you are there to partner with families AND represent the collective values and principles of the school. You have a relationship in the context of an institution that was there before you arrived and will be there long after you (and the family) are gone. To use the example of a requirement, requirements evolved over time and perhaps you may privately think they need to be revisited, but at the moment, they are what they are. The understanding of everyone who delivers the school’s program knows these are the standards required of every student.
School/parents relations are a balancing act. There is no “the school is right” 100% of the time and there is no “the parent is right” 100% of the time. Either extreme makes for an unhealthy culture. What you are doing is nurturing a relationship that exists in the context of the mission of the institution. That means tending to the relationship - being responsive, a good listener, asking good questions, bringing conversation back to what you both desire - the best for the child - AND it means preserving the integrity and credibility of the institution. Most schools are not “choose your own adventure” and you will need to be able to develop responses that are warm but clear and firm about where there can be compromise and where it is not possible.
So could there possibly be flexibility in supporting a family in how to achieve a requirement? That is the gray area to explore. What can be an appropriate program for the student and satisfy the spirit of the graduation requirement? What meets the needs of the student and preserves the credibility of the institution? This will be highly variable depending on your school. Some schools are fine with students taking a core requirement as a summer class where they can bring more focus to bear in an area where they are challenged. In other schools, a core course is a communal event. In some schools, it would not be a big deal to substitute a student’s serious off campus ice skating program for a team sport requirement but at other schools, that won’t fly. Whatever the circumstance, you can’t bend your mission out of shape for one family. On the other hand, it’s not ideal for long term parent relations to shut down most requests with a “that’s not how we do things here” response.
(And if you are seeing a pattern of the same requests - it might be time to reconsider some of your priors.)
And with complaints, sometimes it is a complaint about nothing and sometimes mistakes happen. And it’s certainly necessary to listen to a parent complain if they reach out to you, respond so that they know you’ve heard their concern and even admit if you realize in retrospect there was an unintended consequence: “I realize the speaker did go somewhat over the allotted time and you were sitting in your car for forty five minutes, texting friends frantically as to who could pick up your other child from swim practice.”
And then often there are complaints that rest on fuzzy perceptions about a teacher’s attitude towards a student that manifest in an “unfair” grade, etc. Keeping the wellbeing of the student in the middle, you can both reflect back to a parent you understand the distress the student has experienced but you can also gently challenge their perception with reality as to the record of the student/teacher meetings, the positive comments, etc. Sometimes parents leave your office disappointed.
And it will never be helpful to receive the request for the meeting or phone call and decide, “I’m not dignifying that with a response.” If someone just hijacks you outside your office at 7AM, of course it’s appropriate to set the boundary and ask them to follow the protocol to make an appointment to speak with you. (I recently heard an extremely creepy story about a parent who was let into the school building by security on a pretense and was waiting INSIDE an administrator’s office when she came in at 7AM. Yikes! Not OK!) But complete non-responsiveness will just ultimately escalate the situation.
Honestly, there is nothing worse than an unreasonable parent with a valid point. It’s one thing for an unreasonable parent to rant about something that is a clearly a giant overreaction - “Yes, perhaps we did have chicken nuggets in the dining hall twice this month” - it’s another entirely to have that person hysterical about the fact you held the line with them about not allowing their student to leave early for vacation and then the teachers all canceled their classes the last day. Or that B+ that was, in fact, miscalculated and should have been an A-. Ouch.
These are moments where you just need to apologize and make it right to preserve the integrity and the credibility of the institution. Sometimes things go wrong and then you do what needs to be done.
Also, pretty much every time I heard something and thought, “there is no way that happened,” it turned out in some way, shape or form, it had. Many years ago as academic dean, I walked into the dining hall one day and an adult ran up to me to tell me she heard another teacher had “hit a student on the head.”
WHAT? No way. Preposterous. Outlandish.
When I returned from lunch, the “accused” teacher walked into my office and said, “I blew it.” Was it exactly “hitting a student on the head?” No. Did it involve a pen in her hand, a student who gave a ridiculous answer to a question as she walked around the classroom, a tap on the student’s head with said pen, the student being incredibly embarrassed in front of the whole class? Perhaps. Did we initiate an apology meeting with the student and the parents? Perhaps.
This is just one example. Teachers are human. Stuff happens. It’s the administrator’s job to hold employees accountable in private and then repair the relationship between the school, the student and the parents without throwing the teacher under the bus. Because throwing the teacher under the bus undermines the credibility and integrity of the school. It looks cheap, low-road and as if you are personally trying to distance yourself from the ick. Not a good look. Take the high road, apologize on behalf of the institution. You can assure the family the issue is taken care of but you should not share any details of how you have managed the situation with the teacher as an employee.
Then there are times where the parents push the bounds of the relationship over the line and threaten the integrity and the credibility of the institution. The above story about the parent lurking in a dean’s office before school opens is one of these instances. Allowing this behavior undermines the mission driven nature of the organization. Parent relations is not customer service; you all have membership in the same community and membership is not without responsibilities.
Grading should be considered correct until demonstrated otherwise. Discipline goes through a process and the results are not negotiable. And you may believe your discipline process needs an overhaul but you need to follow your documented process. And then make it a priority to overhaul the system if you can’t explain or defend the results.
Never put up with a pattern of bullying behavior from a parent. Everyone can lose their cool momentarily or have one negative interaction over a heated topic. However, after that one instance, I strongly recommend you not meet alone or have a 1-1 phone conversation with that parent again. If you have a parent who is repeatedly yelling or being hostile in other ways, consult with the school attorney or, if you’re a senior administrator, your head of school and consider very carefully whether you invite this family back into your school. You also have permission to end a conversation or meeting if it turns nasty or if a parent uses foul language. There is an old saying, “what you permit, you promote.”
There is a limit to empathy and the tactic of helping an unreasonable person “feel heard.” You have permission to end a conversation if it is going on and on in a black vortex of unhappiness. I once allowed a parent to rant at me for over two hours as her daughter finished senior year about every miniscule sin the school committed against her. You are not a whipping post and it was my mistake not to cut her off after twenty minutes.
And you can always kick it upstairs if you are a senior administrator (and if you can’t, maybe think about if that’s a head you want to work with…). I will never forget an unreasonable parent with a point who I talked to and talked to and talked to and finally I had to include the head. He scheduled the meeting for the end of the day and we did it together over speaker phone with post-its and pens and the mute button ready so we could confer. We had been prepared to just hold the line but then we stumbled upon a “getting to yes” solution that suited both the family and the school. Then we went out to a well deserved dinner. That is being a good boss!
One thing I know for sure, to my eternal sadness, is that there are, very occasionally, just plain bad people out there. The worst is when you have previously judged a parent to be reasonable or even a good partner but something turns when they aren’t getting what they want. Or it can be even just not getting it in the way they want or as quickly as they want and suddenly they are a wrecking ball. There are messed up people with their own agenda out there and you may happen to be in their way. Trust your instincts. Call your lawyer, fill your board chair in or tell your head of school.
Sometimes too big a dose of empathy or not trusting your own instincts will cause way more problems down the road.
I will end by saying as I wrote this piece, I thought it would be short and that I didn’t have that much to say on this topic. It appears I was wrong and it actually took me a while to edit this down! And it turned into more of a reflection on conflict management. I’ve been lucky to work in schools where the majority of the parent body were generous, kind and extremely grateful. Family weekends were typically a love fest. And even in conflictual situations, the vast majority of times, I felt privileged and humbled to be working with a family through a very important moment in their lives and often we left a room feeling closer to each other, even if not always exactly fond.
But - there were so many stories that floated to the surface as I wrote this, a few that I edited out to explore in more depth in later posts. We have what can only be described as intimate relationships with parents and families, particularly when there is tension. As another of my former bosses used to joke every year at student orientation, “We won’t believe everything they say about you, so don’t believe everything they say about us.” It always got a big (perhaps nervous?) laugh.
People lead complicated lives!
Enjoy the weekend - back on schedule with a new post March 24th!
Julie