You are Them

You are not you. You are them. Don’t feel bad; we are all them. And they allow us to survive. We may think of our body as being autonomously us. However without trillions of independent beings (if bacteria can be classified as beings) we could not digest our food and would not survive. Our “independent” body depends on other living things to survive. We are equally the cells that are us and the cells that are them.

Schools are like that. We, as leaders, sometimes think of the school as a complete, autonomous organization that functions independently. After all, we have a fiduciary duty to protect the organism that is the school. It is a coherent whole.

But while school may (and should be) coherent, the whole survives because of its many parts, each which have their own needs. The school exists because of leadership and because of teachers and because of the business office and because of parents and because of alumni and because, most importantly, students. The whole would not function if any of these parts did not play their role.

I eat yogurt to help protect that bacteria that allows for digestion; schools need to proactively support all the pieces that make it whole. The summer is a good time to strategize about how to better support all these pieces.