The Challenges of Leading a Large School

Principal Laura Tobias can’t be everywhere all the time at State College Area High School, one of the largest public schools in Pennsylvania. State High, as it is known, is walking distance from Penn State and has over 2,300 students. So Tobias came up with an unusual plan. She procured a doppelgänger of sorts: a cardboard cutout of herself.

The cutout isn’t, of course, a substitute for Tobias; it gets passed around the school in good fun. “It’s like Where’s Waldo?, but Where’s Mrs. Tobias?,” she joked. But students have assigned real value to the cutout, regularly taking photos with it, and Tobias wants it to be a reminder that even at a big school, the principal isn’t a scary administrator you only interact with if you’re in trouble. “This is a people business,” Tobias said. “Students and staff need to see and feel your presence and that you’re accessible.”

The “people business”—keeping a steady presence in hallways and cafeterias, at after-school events and meetings—is often the biggest challenge for principals of schools with thousands of students and hundreds of faculty. Principals have a finite amount of time, many responsibilities, and lots of names to remember, none of which diminishes the importance of interpersonal dynamics. Holing up in an office isn’t an option, nor is spending excessive working hours getting to know every student and staffer.

As a result, delegation is especially vital at large schools. Principals can’t micro-manage or get bogged down in details, and they aren’t keyed into every decision. Some assistant principals and administrators are given responsibilities that mirror those of head principals at smaller schools.

To better understand the rhythms of the job for principals at large schools, I spoke with Tobias as well as Tony Koski, who oversees Northville High School in Michigan (student enrollment: 2,477), and Steven Pelych of Creekside Middle School in Indiana (student enrollment: 1,400—the highest for a middle school in the state).

Make Your Presence Known

To maintain a presence, Tobias doesn’t just have the cardboard cutout—she also passes out stickers of herself during school activities. The stickers and the cutout are parts of Tobias’s outreach to students. “I have kids who come up and they’re like, ‘Mrs. Tobias, you’re on my guitar at home,’” she said. Tobias is in charge of the major decisions that impact classes and school culture, but she also wants to personally contribute to that culture. It’s important to her that students know she cares about them—something that might not otherwise come across, given her limited one-on-one opportunities.

Tobias finds other ways to show affection and appreciation. She greets students every morning on the way into school, for instance. During announcements, she tells her students that she loves them. She often works from mobile desks in the hallways, and she stops to take videos with students whenever they ask (and whenever her cardboard cutout isn’t available). And she tells students they can stop by her office anytime.

“A school this big, I might not know every child by name,” Tobias said. “But that doesn’t mean that we stop trying to make those personal connections. Community and culture are extremely important, and I want to make sure that no student falls through the cracks.”

The same applies to faculty. “Maybe it’s the color purple, or they love Dunkin’, or maybe someone got married,” Tobias said. “You have to know your people.”

Working with middle school students, Pelych said that being a steady presence is extremely important to him and that he’s known for “giving fives, knuckle-pounds, and talking to the kids.” He likes to walk around the cafeteria during lunch, when he can check in with students and perhaps play a game with them. He also participates in field trips, which he views as time well spent even when there’s work to be done in the office. Because of his outreach, “students look at me as somebody who’s fun, who they can engage with and trust,” Pelych said.

Koski echoed his peers, citing visibility as a key part of running a large school. He likes to go to lots of sports games, musicals, and club meetings, so he can “at least know kids by face,” he said.

Lean on Your Yearbook

For all three principals, reading (and then rereading) their yearbook is a genuinely effective strategy for remembering names. When he was still getting the hang of the job, Pelych used the yearbook to familiarize himself with the names and faces of administrators and teachers. “Taking the time to have some awareness of who people are was really important,” he said.

Koski still breaks out the yearbook a few times a week as an additional memory device to recall as many students as possible. He admitted that there’s probably a threshold for how many students he can really get to know, which he estimated at an impressive figure of 1,200. The yearbook helps him keep working on that.

Communicate With Intention

When Pelych became principal at Creekside Middle School, he tried to go above and beyond the usual brief introductions. He scheduled face-to-face meetings for his first few weeks with as many staffers as he could—not just administrators and department chairs, but also new and veteran teachers and other faculty members. “I wanted to hear their stories, know who they are, what they don’t want to change, and what they’d love to see change,” he said.

Pelych delivered a consistent message: He reaffirmed to staff that he wasn’t “coming in to blow everything up.” In doing so, he put his staff at ease, which made it easier for him to settle into his role, he said. Since then, he’s applied the same level of intentionality to his messaging, whether it’s in small meetings or email blasts.

“You learn quickly you have to be careful what you say because things can be misconstrued when there are so many people,” he said. “The mechanism of communication becomes very important, and the way you articulate your message is very important.”

Pelych long ago conceded that the emails he sends aren’t going to be opened by everyone. It’s a simple numbers game—teachers are busy and distracted—so Pelych also set up a supplementary staff updates document that teachers and faculty can reference anytime. The document logs all schoolwide communications as they come in, including pressing information as well as volunteer opportunities.

“We’ve been able to streamline communication, which is probably the most important thing for operating a school this size,” Pelych said. “We spend a ton of time talking through what we’re sending out and how things are being communicated.”

Delegate With Efficiency and Creativity

Delegating is a crucial part of any principal’s job, regardless of the enrollment figures at a school. But there are levels to delegating. Principals at small and medium-sized schools have told me they’ve occasionally fallen victim to (well-meaning) bouts of micromanagement—especially early in their tenures. That’s just not a possibility at high-enrollment schools.

Pelych previously oversaw smaller schools, where the structural problems he encountered were quite different; by default, he was very hands-on and was involved in interpersonal problem-solving. “When you’re running a small school, everything runs through you,” he said. “You don’t have a lot of support, like department chairs or a big administrative team, and you learn a lot about a lot.”

Those experiences helped him understand “scalability,” which proved to be quite useful for delegating when he arrived at Creekside Middle. “As you get to a bigger school, you have the ability to manage projects, individuals, or systems based on how you know they should look—but you trust other people to do that work,” he said.

For example, Pelych doesn’t bother with all-staff meetings at Creekside Middle; he considers them a “waste of time.” He keeps big-picture faculty meetings to a monthly cadence, with only core teaching staff and administrators. Every other week, the school has a late start for alternate faculty meetings and department meetings, which are focused on professional development.

Tobias asks assistant principals to lead professional development with her, because they play such vital roles at State High. She wants to be kept abreast of day-to-day operations, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to take charge of every scenario presented to her. “My administrative team is fantastic and handles much of the daily work with attendance and discipline,” Tobias said.

To provide clarity about leadership responsibilities, Tobias matches assistant principals with specific grade levels. So does Koski, who first implemented the concept of grade-level principals—the term he uses instead of “assistant principals”—six years ago. The four grade-level principals at Northville High School advance from grade to grade with their assigned group of students, and then “graduate” back to the incoming freshman class. In doing so, the grade-level principals really come to “own their grade—they know their kids through events, discipline, and social-emotional situations,” Koski said. The grade-level principals meet with Koski daily, so they can talk about “the kids and whatever else is going on,” he said.

Koski believes this system works because of the relationships he and other administrators have built over time. Tobias feels similarly about her own setup and attributes her school’s success to a guiding philosophy: “Do things with people, not to them,” she said.