Over the past two decades as a school principal, I have seen many of our principal colleagues and friends just ‘disappear’. During the early stages of my career, I was so busy learning the role it hardly occurred to me that the circumstances of their departures may have been what you could describe as ‘difficult’. Some would leave principalship and pursue other jobs in the MoE, or NZEI or take up tertiary education roles. Others would change careers entirely or just retire. A few went back to being DPs. Others just vanished. I now have a personal list of around 20 colleagues who no longer hold a principal’s position, most of whom are no longer working in education. The national list will be orders of magnitude higher than this but the figures are hard to pin down. This article aims to highlight the costs you may have to bear one day to save your job when your board goes rogue and wants you gone.
The first thing you have to be aware of is that falling foul of a rogue board can happen to you, whatever your age and stage. The adage that you are only as good as your last board meeting is true and I thought, as I grew more experienced, that such a thing could never happen to me. But it did. A combination of making difficult, professional decisions for my school, awkward timing of board elections and unexpectedly working with several very strong-minded personalities meant that I suddenly found myself in a maelstrom and a battle for survival that I barely won. If you get that feeling in your gut that things are starting to go pear-shaped, you must listen to that feeling, call for initial legal advice immediately and get a file opened if necessary. In our roles, we tend to try and work things through and hope for the best outcomes. My advice is to do all that too but also prepare for the worst-case scenario. Don’t leave that early step of seeking initial legal advice too late or you might find yourself so far down a track that nothing can then be done from a legal perspective to support you. The initial call to the legal helpline is free for PASL members – this is an essential add-on to your NZPF membership. It might just save your career.
The second thing to be aware of would be the ‘red flags’ or trigger points that set in motion a series of events that, when moving at pace, are very hard to stop. This is especially the case after a board election cycle when you are likely to have inexperienced board members who lack training or are business-orientated types who do not understand governance and management boundaries in schools. Our former ‘disappeared’ colleagues have experienced many different trigger points. These may have been significant events that included making difficult staffing decisions, taking disciplinary action against a staff member, dealing with vexatious complaints from former staff or parents, or managing a damaging social media campaign. On the other hand, they were also as trivial as insisting on a school sun hat policy, disagreeing about the colour of new classroom carpets or dealing with bullying allegations made by one board member’s child against another. Whatever the cause might be, the outcome for many of us is common. The principal is singled out, scapegoated, put under pressure and forced to leave their school. This might be achieved through mutual agreement (however reluctantly), or by threats, but an exit of some sort is often the line of least resistance for you to take. I once sat supporting a colleague in a local cafe and heard their union support person state bluntly that the best option was for the colleague to leave their school and start again elsewhere, even though they had done nothing wrong. It was the perfect example of taking the line of least resistance. A confidential payment is highly unlikely to sufficiently compensate you for your loss of position or career. There might not be much to show in the bank after decades of service to Education.
So when the heat comes on, you have to make a decision: stay and fight or just leave. You need to think about this carefully. If you stay and fight for your job, career, reputation and livelihood there will be a cost and it will not necessarily just be financial. However, if you do decide to leave, after a few weeks or months you may regret throwing the towel in too soon. Before making such a decision you must weigh your specific circumstances and predicament. You have to gauge the level of support for your decision from your spouse/partner and close family. Ask yourself if your staff trustee, senior leadership team, teachers and school community are behind you or not. Look carefully at your own physical and mental health and think about the toll a fight will take. Most of all, before you make your decision, seek legal advice. Whilst family, friends, colleagues and union advisors will all have a view on what you should do, your lawyer acts only for you. The strongest card to play is the NZPF/PASL scheme or your own lawyer. In my case, Fi McMillan and her team at Anderson Lloyd who act for the PASL scheme, could not have advised me more clearly or advocated for me more strongly.
The third thing you need to know is how to survive if you decide to stay and fight. When your board has ‘formed a view’ that you are to be replaced or worked out of your position, they may or may not be following advice from NZSTA. They may even disagree with NZSTA advice and get their own lawyers. In my case, the board went ‘lawyer shopping’ through three different sets in the end. There are likely to be secret board meetings that you will be excluded from. There will be whispers in the community and the car park – despite the ‘confidentiality’ of the process – and your staff may begin to see the strain, the mental and the physical toll a prolonged process will take on you. All the time you have to remain positive at work and be seen to be ‘working with‘ the board at all times and conducting business as usual in your school.
The board may decide to do a staff culture survey or try to undertake an external appraisal or performance management process with an appraiser of their choice. They might start to block initiatives you have underway in your school or make unreasonable demands of you. They may even declare to you that it is time for some ‘blue sky thinking’ . . . In my case, I twice received letters from the Presiding Member demanding I submit a retrospective leave request to the board for an overseas holiday I took during the term break. Pressure can be applied to you directly or indirectly and in many, creative ways.
The strain of all this is likely to build quickly and time dilates somewhat. Events of a single day can seem like a week ago and it can become increasingly hard to keep on top of your job while fielding extra board ‘requests’, attending strained board meetings and responding to the complex legal issues that will inevitably arise. You can only do this by keeping a daily record of all calls, emails and conversations relevant to your circumstances. Make a Google doc on your personal computer and type in events daily. Do not wait until the weekend – you will forget. BCC/Copy emails to yourself; it is very hard to reconstruct a sequence of events even after a short time as so many other things will happen in a day that blur your recollection. Documents created for the purpose of seeking legal advice for you personally are privileged, and not subject to any OIA or Privacy Act request you may receive. Do as much work, proofreading and preparation as you can for your lawyer. It will help keep the legal costs down because those costs will rise surprisingly quickly. Anderson Lloyd will keep you advised of that side of the equation but you will find that $30,000 of legal advice can disappear very quickly.
In addition to all that, inform the MoE through your Education Advisor that things are not going well in your school. Your school is now at risk because you are at risk. While the board may just see you as a disposable and replaceable ‘CEO’, you are not only an employee of the board and deserving of all the rights of any other employee, but you are both the principal and the educational leader who cannot be replaced easily and without disruption to your school. This is the very time you need to put yourself first.
A fourth thing is to look after your health and well-being. Find time to debrief with your spouse/partner or a trusted colleague regularly. You cannot take on your board on your own although they may also try and smother you with the confidential nature of being part of a complaints or disciplinary process. Be aware that this conflict may go on for months. Your sleep will suffer even more than usual; you may eat poorly and drink more alcohol; you may not have time for exercise. All these factors compound over time. Take medical advice – an empathetic doctor can work miracles and support you during periods of immense strain. Despite all this, you can still win but you also must decide what a ‘win’ actually looks like for you. Is it maintaining your job or your health? Can you deal with the reputational damage of having an Advisor, LSM or Commissioner working in your school? What if all this stress just sucks the love of the job out of you and in the end, even when you win, do you want to stay? Board members can just resign and walk away with impunity having spent tens of thousands of school dollars trying to get rid of you. You still have to steady the ship, smooth things over in the community and with your staff. You may also have to contend with working alongside costly, external statutory appointees who might be excellent but can also be largely ineffective and are barely accountable to anyone but themselves. At the same time, you still have to do your daily job as a principal, as if that was not hard enough in itself.
Having read all this, my final piece of advice is that you can still do this: you can beat your board when it goes rogue. Most of us earn our jobs by being caring, professional, hardworking individuals. We possess inner strengths that remain untested but we also value fairness and often stand up for others. As school principals, we are not perfect and we make mistakes and no one expects to be defended against the indefensible. However, if your board is determined to force you out without due cause from the role you won, from the school you love, hang on to the fact that you actually can win. Do your homework now. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. If you are a beginning principal or much more experienced you are still vulnerable; just look at the Principals’ Facebook page or around your own local association and see how many of your colleagues are in real trouble. Watch some of Brené Brown’s TED Talks about getting ‘out of the cheap seats’ and into the Arena and read Tsung Tsu’s The Art of War about fighting smart as well as hard. Talk to your colleagues, your union’s PSO or one of the ‘disappeared’ you might also know. Most importantly, talk to your lawyer if you get that ‘feeling’ . . . You might just need them all on your side if you are going to survive your board gone rogue.
The author of this article remains a serving principal and may be contacted confidentially via NZPF/PASL.