How is it going at your school(s) when you have online Zoom meetings with the administration? My one kid's school meetings are good, the principal has coherent comments, makes it clear what he doesn't know yet and that there are still a lot of open issues because Central isn't giving him the staff/budget/info to make the plan a reality. Parents get it and respond and it feels like a community. He's also really good with the Zoom technology and is speedy with the mute button when people accidentally take themselves off.
Then with my other kid's school, the poor principal just opens for a Q&A immediately with no presentation, and then parents just get more enraged with everything he says. And the tech issues are cringeworthy. It's awful, I had to get off the call last week b/c it was making me so anxious.
It's not that one principal has more info that the other, it's all about projecting leadership and communicating clearly.
Just curious what is going on at other schools.
My experience has been similar to the first one you described. I find the meetings actually reassuring, because I get the sense that I'm dealing with reasonable and relatively competent people.
Meetings with DC's school are similar to your first description. Our principal is very transparent about what she does and does not know, and I feel reassured that she (and the school in general) has the students' best interests at heart and will do the best they can with the situation we're in and the resources available.
Our principal is great, open and honest and the meetings themselves run smoothly. That said, our school is 27 teachers short of what we need to start next week (this number is average compared to other schools) and as of last night, the job postings haven’t even been created by central DOE. To lessen the gap, our (lovely and talented) cluster teachers are being redeployed to teach academic subjects for the remote students with 1 week of training and thus there will be no PE, art, music, dance offerings.... DOE is a shitshow rn and teachers and administrators are NOT to blame.
Very opposite experience here. Principal is a no-show at these meetings, leaves them to his whiny, incompetent office staff. The teachers make no effort. I blame the DOE but I equally dislike the administrators and teachers for being lazy and getting paid to do nothing. Would love to move my kid elsewhere, but he's in his final year at the school (5th grade), and I feel like seeing his friends on Zoom is probably better than a bunch of strangers. But it's really awful.
Well, I’d agree that your principal needs to step up and be an outward facing presence, but what are teachers supposed to do? They likely do not even know what grade/subject they are teaching, if it’s remote or in-person, which location, etc. From what I’ve heard (friend is a teacher at my dc’s school), classrooms/grades/co-teacher pairings, etc have been changed multiple times already in the two days they’ve been back.
@anonymous The teachers made no effort this spring. Minimal if any live teaching, no feedback, generally just a big FU to parents. I heard this from parents in multiple grades and classes. Don't imagine anything will be different this fall - with no leadership at the school, why would the teachers bother? They clearly don't care.