The Principal Initials the Glue Sticks
Nobody knows why, and the new teacher was the only one who asked. Part one of three.
Tuesday, 3:40. Kendra, in her first year teaching fourth grade, needs forty glue sticks for Thursday’s project.
She stops at the front office and asks how supply orders work.
“Fill out the pink form,” the office manager says. “Initial it, and I’ll take it to the principal for his initials. Orders go in on the first Friday of the month. Anything after that waits.”
Kendra checks the calendar. It is the nineteenth.
“Why does the principal need to initial glue sticks?”
The office manager opens her mouth, then closes it. “That’s how we’ve always done it.”
The principal is at the copier, close enough to hear. He does not know why either. He got the pink form from the principal before him, who got it from someone else.
Kendra buys the glue sticks herself.
Why a system outlives its reason
Systems exist so the school keeps working when a person is out sick or gone. That is worth doing, and a good system earns its place.
But a system that works keeps running after the problem that created it has gone away. Somewhere back in the pink form’s history, a school probably overspent a classroom budget. The initials fixed that. The overspending stopped. The initials stayed.
Nobody decided to keep the step. A system persists by default, and the only thing that ends it is someone asking why.
Kendra asked. She could, because she is new. Your veterans stopped seeing the step years ago. You may have never used it at all. A new teacher sees your systems clearly for about six weeks, and then she learns to stop asking too.
What it costs
Friction you never feel. You do not fill out the enrollment form. You do not request a substitute or order supplies. So the steps most likely to frustrate families and staff are the ones you never experience, and you cannot fix what you cannot see.
Frustrated staff. Teachers work around a step that makes no sense. They buy their own glue sticks. Every workaround tells them the system was not built for them, and eventually they stop mentioning it.
Wasted time. Someone is doing work that does not matter, or does not produce the result the work was built for. The initials on glue sticks cost the principal and the office manager a few minutes each, every month, for years.
Families who leave and cannot say why. No single step loses a family. A dozen small ones can. When they go, they name the tuition, the commute or the schedule, because no one step was big enough to mention. I have watched families leave over the cumulative weight of how a school works, and none of them could point to a cause, they could just point to the straw that broke the camels back.
Two questions for every system
A system is anything your school does the same way twice: supply ordering, enrollment, substitute requests. Every system sits in one of five essential categories: Leadership and Vision, Academic Excellence, Student Life and Discipleship, Operational Excellence, and Community and Culture. Supply ordering is an Operational Excellence system.
POWER is the plan I use to score each category on five criteria: Purpose, Outcomes, Workflow, Energy and Results Sustainability. You can run the first two on any single system this week. A system has to pass both to stay.
P is Purpose. Why does this system exist?
Write the answer in one sentence a new teacher could repeat.
The pink form passes. “The principal initials supply orders so no classroom overspends its budget” is a clear sentence.
A system fails P when the honest answer is “because we’ve always done it,” “I’m not sure,” or a full paragraph. A paragraph usually means the system is trying to do two jobs.
O is Outcomes. What result does this system produce, and can you check it?
Look at last year’s records. Count how many times the system changed something.
No records? Ask the two people who use the system most when it last stopped or changed something.
The pink form fails here. Pull last year’s supply orders and count how many the initials stopped or changed the order. If the answer is zero, the system produces nothing, even though it has a good reason on paper.
A system can pass P and still fail O. Many habits do. They had a real purpose once and stopped producing the result.
Then decide. A system that passes both stays. A system that fails P gets cut or rewritten. A system that fails O gets changed, or cut if the result no longer matters.
For the pink form, the fix is small: each teacher orders from a budget line she can see, and the office checks the monthly total. The overspending problem stays solved. The initials go.
Put a date on it
Habit does not review itself. It needs a date on the calendar, in a low season.
October and November work. The fall launch is behind you, re-enrollment has not started, and the people who will run the steps are not underwater yet.
Pick two systems that touch families. Enrollment and communication are the usual places to start.
Walk each system the way a newcomer would. Fill out the enrollment form yourself. Submit a request the way a new teacher would.
Run P. Write one sentence on why the system exists. Mark any system you cannot write a sentence for.
Run O. Name the result it should produce, then check last year’s records, or ask the two people who use it most. Mark any system that produced nothing.
Decide on each marked system. Cut it, or change it to something smaller.
Ask your newest teacher what confused her. Her answer is the best data you will get.
Nobody asked why for years. A new teacher asked on a Tuesday afternoon. Ask it on purpose, once a year, in the quiet months.
