What the End of the Year Feels Like for (this) Admin

If you read here often, you probably are aware of the posting schedule: New pieces post every Friday that school is in session. School was in session yesterday, and no new piece posted. Did I forget? Did I finally stop being able to come up with a topic? Have I abandoned my exercise in public reflection?

Nope. I was just too occupied with other things.

Now before I talk about why that is, I want to acknowledge that two things tend to happen in pieces like these that I try to avoid: Complaints about jobs that people have voluntarily agreed to do, and discussions of how busy people are. Neither tends to be useful, and the first one is a universally bad look. I mention these in the hopes of avoiding them. As I talk about what follows, I am not in any way complaining about it, and while it does explain why I was too busy to hit my writing schedule this week, I’m not going to come back to notions of business in any direct way. I’m also NOT suggesting that being an administrator is uniquely difficult work. It’s not. But it is work, and this is what that work is like for me right now.

I was trying to figure out how best to illustrate what the end of the year feels like for an administrator (at least one in my role in my district), and the best that I could do was the following:

This is what the end of the year feels like to me. Maybe my perception will change on the other side of June, or when I come back around to this time next year, but right now, this is what it seems to be. And as far as I can tell it feels like this because there is a lot of stuff that needs to happen in a relatively short period. Here’s a tour of the major things that I need to make sure are accomplished from May through June (in roughly chronological order):

• Put on the “STE” parts of the District STE@M Expo.
• Hire two teachers for the science department.
• Administer the ILS8 Exam (four days of lab practical appointments for classes, and one day of written test administration).
• Administer the Regents Earth Science Lab Practical.
• Administer all in-class finals, finals-week finals, and Regents Exams.
• Make sure all required evaluation instruments for department staff are set for the year.
• Meet with all department teachers for end-of-year reflections.
• Gather all budgetary requests from department staff for next year.
• Inventory equipment and textbooks and present any obsolete/broken items to the Board of Education for disposal
• Facilitate the packing of all middle school science rooms for upcoming summer renovations.

None of the above are small tasks, though some are certainly larger than others. All of them require a series of smaller action steps that mostly have to happen sequentially, which makes them feel pretty complex in their execution. And at least two of them (hiring and packing for renovations) are not necessarily going to present themselves again during subsequent years. But it seems from talking to my colleagues that my perception and the dynamic of “many big things in a short timespan” are a constant of what it means to administer a school during the end of the year.

It’s intense, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. Any readers know that I have systems in place to manage tasks, and I’d like to think that my systems are pretty robust, even for complex work. But I won’t know that for sure until I’ve been through this part of the year at least once, which means that here in year one there’s an added unease from the tension of taking the first run through a bunch of critical job responsibilities. Still, I haven’t cracked yet, and we’re closer to the end than the start at this point, so I’ll take some comfort there.

Bottom line: This is why I missed my post this week. I hope you’ll understand. Let’s see what happens next Friday…

Do you have any thoughts about the above? Are you secretly holding on to a series of tricks that enable you to administer at the end of the year without feeling like I do? Maybe you just want to let me know you feel the same way, too. In any of the above cases (or any others), drop me a line and let me know your thoughts. It will brighten all of our corners!