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Hello, Several years ago, I was in a conversation with a group of school principals when one of them said something that has stayed with me ever since. "We should not be judging the words or actions of children as if they are the words or actions of adults." At the time, I nodded in agreement, but the more I've thought about that statement, the more I've realized it applies to far more than children. What struck me about his comment was the assumption hidden inside it. When a

Hello, If you're a parent, you know one of the strangest parts of parenting is that the challenges never really go away. They just change. For example, there was a time when my husband and I spent countless hours wondering whether our kids were developing "normally." We met with pediatricians. We read books. We talked with other parents. We asked questions like, "Is this normal?" and "When should I expect this?" We celebrated first steps without expecting perfect balance, and

Hello, I was watching a news story recently about a professor who teaches students how to navigate disagreement. As he described one of the exercises he uses in class, I found myself thinking, "I know where this is going." I've spent enough time around leadership training, communication workshops, and books like Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to assume I knew the lesson. One student would talk about something they felt passionate about. The other stud

Hello, Do you have a minute...or eight? Simon Sinek tells a story about learning that a close friend had been going through a difficult chapter. When he found out, his reaction was immediate. "Why didn't you call me?" That conversation eventually led to a simple phrase between friends: "Do you have eight minutes?" The idea is rooted in research suggesting that a brief moment of meaningful connection can help someone who is struggling begin to see a little light. At first glan

Hello, One of the most visible responsibilities of a superintendent is deciding whether to close school because of the weather. It's one of the few decisions about which almost everyone in the community has an opinion. Make the call too early, and people think you overreacted. Wait too long, and they wonder why you didn't close sooner. Before long, you find yourself checking forecasts, watching radar, and second-guessing whether Mother Nature is about to prove you wrong. The

Hello, This is my last new letter of the 25/26 school year, and what a year it’s been! As I've done for the last two years, I wanted to take a moment to spotlight some of the posts for this year in case you missed them and want something to peruse over the summer. Think of this as a mix tape that might encourage you to dive deeper into any of the other posts from this or previous years! September 2025 The Choice Is Yours - In this post, I reflect on my love of audiobooks and

Hello, Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue is the kind of book that lingers in your mind long after you finish it, partly because it understands something essential about storytelling itself. Throughout the memoir, Nayeri references Scheherazade, the storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights, who tells stories to stay alive. Every night, she leaves the king suspended inside a narrative so that he will spare her life long enough to hear the next part. Lately, I have be

Hello, Imagine you are a first-year elementary teacher on a grade-level team, and you have a background in theater that you genuinely love. You have been doing readers’ theater with your students, and they are engaged in a way that feels different. It feels meaningful. It feels like something you could build on. So you start thinking about what might come next. A full play for all of the students in your grade level starts to feel like a natural extension of what you have alr

Hello, Imagine you and I are playing a familiar game: Two Truths and a Lie. It is simple, recognizable, and, in many ways, revealing. Here are mine. I never paint my fingernails. I hate sushi. Two of my children are named after people in my family. Take a second and decide which one is the lie. The lie is that two of my children are named after people in my family. Only one of them is. What makes that lie effective is that it is close enough to the truth to feel believable. I

Hello, I’m short. I’ve always known it. I was never the girl who shot up tall and then plateaued early. I was always the shortest in the class. Always. In fact, I was even voted “shortest” in my high school yearbook, which was odd. I am still not sure how that was something people voted on. It was not an opinion. It was simply a fact. In my family, however, I am of average height. I am taller than my older sister, one of my cousins, and my maternal grandmother. On my mom’s si

Hello, My name is Heather, and I’m a recovering perfectionist. For a long time, I believed perfectionism was a strength. It felt like a high standard, something worth striving toward. In practice, it did not give me joy. It gave me stress. It made me hesitate, question whether I should even begin something if I could not do it exactly right, and sometimes stop midway because I felt too far from where I thought I should be. Perfectionism is deceptive in that way. It does not j

Hello, When my husband and I bought our first house, a charming Cape Cod, I thought it would be our forever home. It was where we began married life and where we brought our first two children home. I loved that house and poured so much care into it, assuming it would hold all of our firsts. What I did not expect was how challenging homeownership would be. We never imagined dealing with flying carpenter ants in the nursery, ice dams in the gutters, a basement prone to floodin

Hello, I’ve been noticing something lately. I am no longer “in the know” when it comes to pop culture. My teenage children reference people, shows, and music that I have never heard of, even though they all definitely know what they're talking about. In the meantime, I'm watching reels on Instagram (which my kids tell me is like TikTok leftovers) to listen to translations of what kids are saying, so it makes sense to me. There was a time when I felt like a pop culture connois

Hello, The Gottman Institute, which studies relationships extensively, explains in their post," Managing Conflict: Solvable vs. Perpetual Problems ," that “sixty-nine percent of relationship conflict is about perpetual problems.” In other words, most conflict is not something you solve once and move on from. It is something you return to. Perennial problems are not the same as solvable problems, which are situational. They arise, you address them, and you move forward. They m

Hello, In one of the quarterly surveys I recently sent to both my Board of Education and my staff, a piece of feedback caught my attention. Both a board member and several staff members shared a similar thought: they would like to see me more. Not that they never see me, but that they would like to see more of me in schools and around the district. I did not take that as criticism. In many ways, it felt like a compliment. If people did not want to see their superintendent at

Hello, In my previous post, " Not the Problems Is Not the Solution ," I argued that the opposite of harm is not silence. The absence of wrongdoing is not the same as the presence of good. I ended by suggesting that when silence becomes predictable, it is rarely accidental. If silence is predictable, then it is patterned. And if it is patterned, then it is designed. That brings us to systems. Over the past few years, I have been thinking deeply about systems and what I mean by

Hello, We spend a great deal of time teaching students to be upstanders. We tell them to do the right thing, to stand up for others, and to say something when something is wrong. We encourage courage. We celebrate character. We write mission statements about belonging and respect. Yet, if we are honest, it is still remarkably difficult for adults to do those very things in real time. That tension has been sitting with me. We tend to imagine morality as a simple line. On one e

Hello, If I told you that I played the violin for over a decade, including in college, you might assume I was talented. We tend to equate time with quality. The more hours invested, the better the outcome. You might even reference the 10,000-hour rule. But repetition alone does not produce excellence. It is not practice makes perfect. It is refined practice that makes progress. If I repeat the same mistakes for years, I simply become good at doing them wrong. If I consistentl

Hello, Recently, three different friends shared situations they were navigating. On the surface, their stories had nothing to do with one another. Beneath them, however, was a striking similarity. The first friend, who professionally works in mediation and restoration of harm, reached out to someone she occasionally walked with. No response. She followed up. Still nothing. She was left wondering what she had done. The second friend, a school principal, experienced an accident

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called On Target . It was about schools as systems, and how easy it is for leaders to miss the mark when they forget who they actually serve. The bullseye model I shared was my way of naming a simple truth: you support the people you directly touch, and that support is what makes student success possible. More recently, I wrote another post called Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game . That post was less about the structure of a system an