Two Heads ARE Better Than One

Co-principalships are rare, but at the Lewin G. Joel Elementary School there's a match made in heaven with Claudia Norman and Jack Gedney. Patch interviewed the duo about their unique arrangement.

PATCH:  How many other schools in Connecticut have two principals, and why did they opt for this arrangement?

Gedney:  We actually have one school with a co-principalship. There are a lot of magnet schools that have multiple administrators that are called directors, but as far as having a co-principalship model of leadership, there's only one and that's in Somers.  I haven't spoken with them but it's like having cousins in north-central Connecticut.

PATCH:  How and when did this idea come about for Joel?

Gedney:  It actually began with the previous superintendent and the Board of Ed, and I think predicated on the fact that six years prior to Claudia and I becoming co-principals, they had eight administrators in the building. If you know how much effort and time goes into the process of finding and hiring an administrator, you'd understand that that was a difficult period for a variety of reasons. Some of the assistant principals would come and because it's a critical shortage area at the state level, they would leave to become principals themselves. I think early on it was retirees. It was eight people in about six years. So, the former superintendent in collaboration with the Chairwoman of the Board Deb Grass decided that potentially a co-principalship could work at Joel School if they had the right people.

PATCH: Is it strictly the size of Joel that necessitates two of you, or is there something else as well?

Norman: Prior to the co-principalship there actually were three administrators that were overseeing the building. The school takes in the whole community. Definitely it's the workload, the curriculum that's involved when you think about developmentally a child that's three years of age through nine years of age the kind of curriculum that needs to be in place, never mind the other duties. We're the first school where parents are coming in as an initiation to just learning what public school is about and the Clinton school system specifically.

Gedney: Also the fragility of our population – our oldest students are very young. The other thing that you would see with bigger schools is that they may have 500-550 students where we have almost 700 students. Of the 550, perhaps 100 to 125 of those are kindergarteners who are only there for three hours. I may have 150 kindergarteners in another school but really equals 75 because they're half in the morning and half in the afternoon where we have all-day K, so we have 185 kindergarteners who are here all day.  We have nine kindergarten classrooms with essentially 21 students in each classroom, which is a large number. While we're the biggest school, if you double the size of our kindergarden as most elementary schools would be, we'd have almost 900 kids!

I think the superintendent saw the need for a longer vision because the building is so big. When you focus on instruction and learning and curriculum and climate and culture and all the myriad of things principals have to do every day, there was no continuity because of the constant turnover of staff. By bringing two people in and we're both here to stay, you do get some longer range planning. Then, we're around to implement the plan.

PATCH: How do you divvy up responsibilities?

Gedney: First of all, Claudia and I talk to each other constantly throughout the day. We don't have a scheduled one-hour meeting a day to talk school but every time we pass each other in the office or the hallway, we do touch-and-go constantly, talking to each other about what's going on in the building. One of the things that we consciously decided is we're not going to break the building in half and have Joel North and Joel South. What we were going to do is have a true collaborative model in how we ran the building or supervise the building.

Too many cooks spoil the soup on certain things so we decided that the two biggest things that would have the danger of too many cooks would be the budget and essentially calendars, schedules, etc. from everything from specials to teachers to happenings in the building.

If one of us was to lead for one and the other lead for the other, it would prevent catastrophe. Essentially, all things money Claudia handles and all things schedule I handle, but that doesn't mean that if one of us needed to do something and the other wasn't present we couldn't do something if it needed to be done right away.

Another advantage of a co-principalship, if you have an assistant principal, a person may need to wait on something that needs a nearly immediate answer.

Norman: Professional development and curriculum tends to fall under what I would do. That's a big chunk too.

PATCH: How do you resolve differences of opinion?

Norman: I always win!

Gedney: There are things that we don't always agree on. The power of the collaborative model is that we ask each other, first of all, how strongly do you believe in what you're saying, how important is it to you, let's stay in the room until we have the answer. The one thing we agreed we would never ever ever do is walk out of the room and say "well, that's his decision but I don't agree with it."    

We have 117 staff members in the building and that means 117 different personalities so you have to be a unified team. Believe it or not, there's not a lot we don't agree about. It's minutia really.

Because we both believe so strongly a student leaving Joel school absolutely has to be proficient in literacy and numeracy or every bit of data and research indicates that child is in trouble for life. You have to be able to read when you leave Joel School. If you both believe that with every fiber of our body, what else is there to disagree about other than the minutia?

PATCH: Do certain types of students tend to gravitate to one or the other of you?

Gedney: As far as student discipline or the need to interact with students or families, that tends to be more random than deliberate. If one of us has a history with a student or family, we would then tend to stay with that situation as it unfolds keeping the other person informed, but generally speaking we try hard not to divide the school. 

We don't want to be seen as a pair; we want to be seen as two parts of one.  When it comes to calling parents, whoever dealt with it calls the parents. If a situation is more sensitive, perhaps we'll have a chat with each other and one or the other of us will call the parent. If there's a special ed situation that is complicated (and we have several that are very complicated), we might tend to stay with that family through several years to keep that historical perspective and continuity.

PATCH: What is the biggest advantage of this arrangement?

Norman: I don't think it falls into one single plus. It's an umbrella. Continuity is the umbrella. I think of my principalship as CEO of a business. There are certain long-term objectives. I think 10 years out – where do I want to see my school in 10 years, where do I want to see myself as a professional, what rules and objectives do we have in mind? The continuity piece over long-term is really the one big umbrella.

The other piece of it is the parents – they get to know who we are and what their roles and responsibilities are. They know where they can come to get help and what to expect.

Gedney: It gives us a sense of understanding within the community. We know the community. We know what will work well and what won't work well from a historical perspective because we've been here for a while and know what's been tried.

PATCH: What is your biggest challenge?

Norman: We're entering into a time period where our veteran teachers are heading into retirement. When you have teachers entering into retirement, you lose a knowledge base. When a person makes a decision to retire, they take with them a piece of our school. The biggest challenge for me is to keep that changeover in staff to a minimum. When people retire, we want to make sure they don't take too much of the things we've built up in our school. And, how can I creatively keep that going. So, if all of a sudden seven teachers decide to retire, that's going to be devastating to us. That's what I mean about thinking futuristically.

Gedney: The people that we've hired in the past five years are incredible with the science of teaching. It's the art of teaching they need to become proficient with over time. I think a lot of what Claudia is referring to is that art walks out the door with the retiring teacher in a lot of cases. Our frustration is that we're worried we'll lose a big chunk of that in the near future.

PATCH: Do the taxpayers ever kid about why they are paying two principals?

Gedney:  There's a small handful that are asking the question, especially in these budget times and I don't blame them. I kind of wrestle with how do we tell them that the difference between a principal and an assistant principal and two co-principals is $4700 – that's the difference.

All the things that we can offer with a co-principalship versus what a principal and an assistant principal can offer and the collateral downside of a principal/assistant principal which is the constant training, the mentoring, the "I can't let him do that because he's only been here three months" or now "I have to clean up the mess because he's only been here three months." Those things, are they really worth $4700? I'd like to think they are but how do I get a megaphone and say that to the community?

I'd like to think that we roll into the parking lot at 7:40 in the morning and never roll out of the parking lot before 6:30 at night is worth $4700. 

We both believe that the only important thing in this building is student achievement and learning. That's true whether it's phys ed, music, art, and certainly reading and writing and math. If that's the only important thing and everything else comes second, how could you not be collaborative and work towards those goals?