As we push back from the gate for another school year, we often find ourselves picking out some new things to add to our journey during the year ahead. We get fired up learning about the work of others, having read some book/article/blog post or attended a conference, and before we know it, we're piloting a new program/way to run meetings/assessment tool/curricular component/dress code policy, etc. Trying new things is fun and after all, iteration is built in to the way we do school. It's what helps keep the work fun and interesting for many of us.

Add to this the increasingly competitive market for indie schools, and it can feel urgently important to be sure you're covering all your bases, having one of each, appealing to as broad a swath of the market as possible in order to meet your enrollment targets. There can be a lot of new initiatives and pressure to add programs , features , headcount , buildings , events and more .  It can start to feel like there is some MAXIMUM ULTIMATE education that we're striving to provide.

But I'd like to suggest that we should try doing a lot less adding and a lot more subtracting in schools. Editing is hard and important work and can lead to clarity, focus, and deeper commitment.     

Let's pretend that our schools are restaurants.  I'd argue that our schools should not be an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the mac and cheese has that orange layer of grease sitting on top, and the peas are mushy and brown, but rather something closer to an interactive culinary experience where chefs and diners agree on some key ingredients at the outset and then something novel and delicious happens.   

Here's an example: before I began working in schools, I founded and ran a small daycare called Banana Mashers. We worked with very young children from 10 weeks to four and a half, and it was a marvelous time. In my first couple of years, I was so eager to keep parents (my clients) happy that I wrote these incredibly long and detailed daily reports about what was happening for their infants. There had timestamps and multiple paragraphs and flowery language. After a time, these began to feel perfunctory, and I begin to feel guilty--after all, these folks were entrusting me with their precious tiny humans so I owed them a rich and comprehensive run down on the books, poops, songs, and discoveries of the day.  Plus, the other daycares always provided a daily written log; it was standard operating procedure. One day while dutifully recording the minutia of a child's day (we'll call her Sadie), she awoke earlier than expected from a rest and asked what I was doing. I told her that I was writing about what she had done so far that day and--because she was two at the time, she said, "why?". That's when it hit me : I wasn't actually sure that all the work I was putting in was having the impact I hoped. So I decided to tinker and get some feedback from parents.  It turned out that almost all the parents were scanning these long-winded documents for a few key pieces of information, and felt guilty themselves for not "making the time" to read them more carefully. So we scrapped the narrative reports, and shared only essential info daily.  This freed me up to begin writing more interesting weekly (or bi-weekly) newsletters, which felt better aligned with the process of learning and growing for young children. It also meant that I was doing less work and a better job. So much win .

So here is my advice: figure out who your school is and what you do, then be okay with doing that. It doesn't mean letting yourself off the hook for working hard to learn and grow, or that you shouldn't consider what your families need from you .  Instead it means getting clear about your priorities and letting other things go--or sometimes even burning stuff down!

Here is one helpful tool to help you decide what you can get rid of because it's dead/more trouble than it's worth/a soul-eater.  Ask yourself, "if we blew this up, would we miss it?" In our culture of acquisition, we learn that more is more , so we make Pinterest boards and wish lists of things to buy online, and have a container store for all our things that we bought online. But we are learning about the  risks of overstimulation , and the value of elimination , simplification , and purging ! Perhaps this year, you can be making a SUBTRACTION/DESTRUCTION list, rather than a WISH list.