Looking Back at a Crazy Job

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on my incredibly short, and incredibly long, eight months with St. Louis Public Schools. What began with the strangest job interview I ever had, the weirdest first day on the job, and the ongoing chaos of every single day ended with a very quiet farewell.  

In previous jobs in corporate communications, I’d experienced periods of media blitzes and controversies. But I’d never experienced a job in which every day was a media blitz, every day was a controversy, and I had to work and publicly communicate in a highly political environment where it was difficult to know who was telling the truth, whose information was accurate, and who was trying to help or merely trying to gain an edge on an opponent. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

6 Enjoyable Ways to Read Classic Novels –or Pretty Much Anything – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Goodness Will Come Back for You – Lara d’Entremont at A Mother Held.

 

Of Steamrollers and Hummingbirds – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Swan Upping on the Thames – Spitalfields Life.

The Scenes That Stick from a Chaotic Job

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for eight months. It was the position I worked for the least amount of time in my entire career, the most chaotic job I ever held, and the one that likely remains the most vivid in my memory.  

Perhaps it was the political battles inside the district, the arrests at school board meetings, the ongoing protests, my boss getting doused with a pitcher of water by a member of the school board, the typical chaotic day of an urban school district. It might have been the constat media exposure, starting my first day (eight separate interviews on a teacher sick-out) and continuing until my last day. I did more media meetings and discussions in those eight months than the rest of my career combined.

 

A lot of scenes have stuck with me; a few even got worked into my five Dancing Priest novels. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph of Headquarters by St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Van Eyck: The Portraits – National Gallery, London.

 

Does Christian Fiction Exist? – Tessa Carman at Mere Orthodoxy.

Communicating Through the Chaos

If I had any doubts from the job interview, the first day on the job was confirmation. The next few months underscored it. If I could summarize it one word, my job as Director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools was all about chaos.  

Every day was chaotic. Little if anything could be anticipated or planned for. I often looked at the office telephone (and my Blackberry; that was the phone we used) as the enemy. You answered a call, and your day instantly changed.

 

I learned that I wasn’t the only one dealing with chaos. The man brought in to take over the district’s finances (which were a train wreck; the district was not only technically but actually bankrupt) was a former corporate CFO.  He dealt with impossible tasks every day. His wife later told me that she worried most about public meetings – Board of Education meetings, town halls, outreach meetings – because anything could and often did happen. She would look for me making a statement on TV news, and then she knew her husband was okay.

 

The district had all the problems of an urban school system – money problems, crime, declining educational standards and test scores, dropping enrollments, school consolidations. An outside management firm had been brought in to try to transform the district; school closures, budget reductions (the communications budget was reduced from $1 million to $20,000, and that had been spent by the time I arrived).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Wayee Tan via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Beyond the Modern Myths of Ancient Athens – Arlene Saxonhouse at Church Life Journal.

 

Winston Churchill, American Patriot – Michael Lucchese at Acton Institute.

 

“Malefactors of Great Wealth” – Burton Folsom at The Coolidge Review.

 

Writing My Novel on My Phone (and Through Grief) – Ros Hill at Writer’s Digest.

 

The Road Vanished Before We Reached Dinner – Riyanka Paul.

 

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for seven months. I’d gone through the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and I had a first day on the job unlike any other I had had or anyone I knew had had. But I figured that, after that tumultuous first day, things would settle down. 

I figured wrong. 

 

Things would never settle down. Every day would be unlike every other day. 

 

One ongoing source of turmoil was the Board of Education itself, the seven people elected by voters to oversee the district’s operations. Four had been elected on a reform slate. Three had not. Most of the turmoil generated by the Board came from those three. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph of the Headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Advice for Older Writers – Nathan Bransford.

 

“On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic,” sonnet by Charlotte Turner Smith – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30. 

Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting. 

 

Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph via St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

End Game at Appomattox – Mike Phifer at Warfare History Network. 

 

Millennials Tried Being Angry. It Didn’t Work – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies.

 

A Memo in the Wilderness: Why does the Church of England now sound like an HR department? – James Martin Charlton at the Critic Magazine.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had

I was cleaning out some old files when I came across a small blue address book – the kind we used before iPhones had contact lists, or even before we had iPhones. It dates from 2003. When I looked at the listings, I realized I was holding an artifact of my career. 

Between October of 2003 and May of 2004, I was Director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools. The school district, with many of the problems of an urban school district, had been in upheaval since June. A reform board had been elected, and it had promptly hired an outside management firm from New York to design and implement a total overhaul. It wasn’t a simple reorganization; instead, think Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency without the charm.

 

On its first day, the outside firm discovered that the district wasn’t technically but actually bankrupt. Suddenly, change came. Schools were closed and consolidated. Hundreds of staff positions had been eliminated. Operations were outsourced. Chaos and protests were the watchwords. As in, daily chaos and protests.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Chelaxy Designs via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Brutality & Compassion: Howard Pyle’s “Otto of the Silver Hand” – David Deavel at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

What If the World is Enchanted? – Zak Schmoll.

 

The Right Stuff: President Washington Needed a General in 1792 – Bradley Crytzer at Journal of the American Revolution.

On Education: Experience and Ideology (Part 2)

In September 2003, a friend called and suggested I look at an ad in the newspaper. St. Louis Public Schools was looking for a director of communications.

For the three previous moths, the school district had been in about as complete upheaval as could be imagined. The reform majority on the school board hired a New York management consulting firm that specialized in massive restructurings to run the district. The day the firm arrived to take over, the school district disclosed that it had a huge budget deficit (illegal under Missouri law). By the time I saw the newspaper ad, more than 700 people in the central administration office had been dismissed (think about that number for a moment), bus and cafeteria services had been outsourced, school closings were underway, and curriculum changes were being implemented wholesale.

You can imagine the headlines. The protests. Parents up in arms. District employees up in arms. Teachers doing wildcat strikes. The non-reform minority on the board leaking school board discussions to the media. School board meetings that were borderline riots (a “good” meeting, one administrator told me, was one where fewer than five people were arrested).

My entire experience had been in corporate communications. What did I know about urban public education?

I applied for the job. I was one of 10 people selected for interviews. All 10 candidates were told to arrive at the same time. We sat in a conference, and were called out one by one about every 10 minutes. Looking around the table, I could see I was (2) the oldest, (b) one of four whites, and (c) the only male. I was called last.

Three people comprised the interview panel – the administrative vice president to whom the communications job reported, the acting superintendent (from the management firm), and one of the management firm consultants. They followed the standard behavioral interviewing script until, without warning, the acting superintendent threw the script up in the air and yelled, “Why the hell do you want this job?”

My answer must have been sufficient. An hour later I found out I was hired, and needed to be at a teacher focus group that afternoon. The job would start the next morning. When I walked in at 8 a.m., I found out that two television stations and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were waiting for interviews – about the teacher sickout that was underway. When I asked who on the staff could give me information and a position statement, the secretary said the superintendent was at a breakfast and the other key staff people had left the building, because they were afraid I would ask them to be interviewed. “You’ll have to wing it,” she said. An hour later, I was told that there was no communications budget – it had been eliminated as a cost-saving measure (the year before it had been $1 million+).

Every day produced multiple crises. A school board member got into an argument with a high school principal than almost came to blows. Another school board member attached an administrator. A school experienced food poisoning, blamed on the outsourced contractor. And then there were the usual incidents associated with an urban school district.

I think I have some insight into what it must be like working at the Trump White House.

I visited most of the schools in the district. I was constantly talking with teachers, principals, central office staffers, parents, and news media. I attended school board meetings packed with 400 people inside and more than 2,000 outside. I saw teachers who were performing daily miracles with no resources, and teachers who were showing up simply to get a paycheck and a pension. I attended public meetings of the teachers union, because it was inevitable I’d need to respond for the district.

I learned a lot. Perhaps I learned too much. But one lesson that stuck with me was to be aware of a certain phrase. If you heard anyone say “But it’s for the children,” you knew that it wasn’t about the children at all, but about some other agenda. (I’ve also learned the same is true for the school district I live in; this may be a universal truth.)

So when I see what just happened during the Betsy DeVos confirmation hearings in Washington, I have a reaction based on the experiences in my own school district, which I described last week, and the experiences I had with St. Louis Public Schools.

When its contract expired, the management firm wasn’t rehired. The harsh things it did – school closings, layoffs, contract outsourcing – likely saved the district financially. A couple of years later, the Missouri Department of Education removed the district’s state accreditation and appointed a board to run the district. Within just the past few months, the district once again became accredited.

Charter schools (and a voluntary transfer program involving the suburban school districts) have had an impact on St. Louis Public Schools. Yes, they’ve siphoned funds away. But they’ve also forced the district to compete, consolidate, and improve academics.

Children in the inner city deserve far better school systems than they’ve been given.

Related:

On Education: Experience and Ideology (Part 1).

Fear Was Not Part of the Job

A little over a decade ago, I spent nine months as director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools. I was hired three months into a massive reorganization. The district had hired an outside management firm from New York to essentially take over and close schools, downsize the work force, outsource, consolidate – all those things people in corporations are familiar with. But an urban school district?

The problem was obvious – a school district built to educate 150,000 children was now educating something south of 40,000. I say “something south” because no one really knew; in fact, the number was likely closer to 30,000 than 40,000. And the district was going broke, while all the usual measures of education success also looked close to educational bankruptcy.

My first day on the job, actually, my first 10 minutes on the job, the secretary told me that Channel 4 and Channel 5 has film crews outside waiting for a statement from me.

“A statement?” I asked. “On what?”

“The teachers are protesting the end of being able to bank your sick days,” she said. “They’ve called in sick.”

“Who here can I get information from for a statement?”

She looked embarrassed. “Well, the acting superintendent is at a breakfast. The assistant superintendents left the building. They were afraid you’d ask them to go on camera.”

“So who’s left?” I asked, reality slowly entering my brain. I was half afraid she was going to say –

“Just you,” she said.

I quickly scoured the building for anyone who might be hiding. Then I walked outside to the news media, introduced myself, and gave a statement. Guessing at what the policy would likely be, I made the statement up on the spot. As it turned out, I had gotten it right.

I called that moment God’s grace on Day One of the job. I experienced God’s grace every day, multiple times a day.

We had people working in the central district office who refused to visit the schools, especially the high schools. “It’s not safe,” they would say. “People have been attacked in those schools.” When I pointed out that we sent children into those schools every day, they would glare angrily.

In addition to the reorganizations and school closings, and a lot of community anger and protests, we had the usual problems of an urban school district in serious distress. We had incidents of violence. We had gun incidents. We had schools so fearful of the violence and drugs in surrounding neighborhoods that you had to buzzed through the doors after showing your face on video monitors. We had large protests at school board meetings; the first board meeting I attended had 400 screaming people and three arrests. “It was a good night,” my boss told me. “Only three arrests this time.”

School board meetings were at night, and usually at a middle school with an auditorium large enough to hold 400 people (the yelling and screaming was optional and normal). We are not talking neighborhoods like the one where I lived in a comfortable and highly regarded suburb. We’re talking neighborhoods when you could walk outside the school board meeting and sometimes hear gunshots.

I arrived at one board meeting to find almost 2,000 people in front of the school. That was 2,000 angry people, angry that the auditorium was already filled with 400 equally angry people. I stood my my car in the parking lot, and realized I was going to have to make my way through those 2,000 people to get to the door. And here I was, instantly recognizable to almost every single person in the metropolitan area as the face of St. Louis Public Schools (I was on television news a lot) (I was on television news almost every night of the week for months, and sometimes even weekends).

And the odd thing is, even standing in that parking lot, I can’t remember a single time I experienced fear, not once in the entire nine months. Perhaps I was been naïve or simply didn’t know enough. But I was often in schools in what even the police considered unsafe neighborhoods. I would walk outside the central office into screaming protests. My boss was assaulted in her office right next to mine (by an elected member of the school board), and I was right next door at the time and rushed out when I heard the commotion.

It wasn’t that I was brave or courageous (foolhardy, perhaps, but not courageous). But I never felt fear. And I think I know why.

“The truth is that the Spirit of the living God is guaranteed to ask you to go somewhere or do something you wouldn’t normally want or choose to do,” writes Francis Chan in The Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit. “The Spirit will lead you to the way of the cross, as He led Jesus to the cross, and that is definitely not a safe or pretty or comfortable place to be. “the Holy Spirit of God will; mold you into the person you were made to be. This often incredibly painful process strips you of selfishness, pride, and fear.”

No fear. It is why I had no fear. I knew that, for those nine months, as hard and difficult as the job was, I was where I was supposed to be.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Forgotten God. To see more posts on this chapter, “What Are You Afraid Of,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.