Houston Blog
My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
Much of the work of any Head of School is completed behind closed doors, often alone, working on policy development, responding to directives from the Board, preparing reports, conducting reviews, writing options papers, and so on. It is important work (so I am told), and because I mention it so infrequently in my blogs, I would not want you to think I neglect it. Similarly, I would not want to over-emphasize this less interesting side of my job because I would hate it if you drew the erroneous conclusion that I am a boring person who does boring things :-)
My view is that these administrative tasks are the things I do between the times when I do my real work, which is working with people. That is why I have a open door policy that allows this work to be interrupted whenever someone comes to my door – people are my real work and my number one priority! I know other Heads have different views, but I believe the really important work for a Head of School is talking with parents, working with students and listening to faculty. Everything else remains important, but it is secondary to this over-riding priority.
This past week has been one of those times when the balance was not quite in the proportions I would normally choose. There was so much of the ‘other’ work pressing on my time that I had a choice – either I needed to neglect some of my ‘real’ work (i.e. working with students, faculty and parents) or I had to sacrifice some ‘down time’ and sleep. I chose the latter, which I hope was the right choice. When you are a Head of School, there are some weeks that are, quite simply, like that.
The pace of our building works at the moment is nothing short of breathtaking. The new classroom block and administrative facility near the front gate is still ahead of schedule. We expect the building to be completed in May and to be fully functional by the opening of the new school year in August.
At Thursday evening’s meeting, we shared our plans for the next facet of campus development, which is a major extension to the Lower School and construction of an all-new, purpose-built pre-school facility. We are working hard to gather the necessary funds to enable construction of the Lower School extension to commence in summer 2012, if possible, as this time frame would minimize the disruption to our students caused by construction work (such as noise and loss of playground space) during term time.
We certainly have some exciting times ahead of us. It should not be too long (I hope) before we have an unrecognizably state-of-the-art campus to serve our students’ needs through several decades into the future.
I expect that the momentum to plan Awty’s future will take yet another leap forward this Tuesday evening when I will be holding the first meeting of the Strategic Planning Advisory Task Force. At this meeting, I will be outlining the next stages of the consultative process and the plan of action to complete the Strategic Plan. I will also be presenting a summary of the results of the recent Awty-wide strategic plan questionnaire.
I would love to share more about the strategic planning process with you now, as I am feeling quite excited by it (sad as it may be, strategic plans do typically excite Heads of Schools!). However, I really should share this information with the Strategic Planning Advisory Task Force first, so I will restrain myself and write more about this next week.
Please watch this space!
The first group of bonus photos this week shows the progress made to date on our new classroom and administration block.
This second group of bonus photos shows the progress made to date on our new parking garage.
Two new buildings, with more to come
Sunday, 25 March 2012
It is not often that established schools like Awty have two major building projects underway simultaneously. Our new classroom block (right) is well underway, and have recently started our new 440-space parking garage.