Do School Administrators Care Anymore? What One Parent Learned After Her Son’s Scary Incident
It was 1:17 on a Tuesday, I was matching sock after sock from the weekly laundry, when my phone buzzed with the caller ID “Lincoln Middle School Nurse.” I’d gotten enough calls from there to know my heart was about to drop into my stomach. It dropped lower when she said my 12-year-old, Jax, was sitting in her office breathing into a paper bag, still shaky after getting shoved into an open locker by the bike rack. His inhaler had slipped out of his hand, fallen into a recent rain puddle pooled under the rack, and he’d stood there gasping for 10 minutes before a student teacher walking to her car spotted him.
I left work immediately, drove 10 minutes over the speed limit to the school, signed in at the front desk, and waited 20 minutes. The only admin in the office was covering the front desk while helping a lost sixth grader find his math textbook, so no one could walk me back to meet the assistant principal right away. When I finally got in the room, Ms. Henderson, the AP who handles discipline, gestured to a plastic chair across from her desk, but her eyes stayed locked on her laptop while I talked through what the nurse had told me. When I finished, she leaned back, glanced at the clock on the wall, and said it sounded like horseplay that got out of hand. The other boy hadn’t meant to shove Jax that hard, and Jax hadn’t reported the incident right away, so it was hard to enforce any real consequence. She was sorry it happened, but they couldn’t monitor every corner of the campus every minute.
I left the building with my chest tight, pulling out of the parking lot and thinking the same thing so many parents I know have thought: Do these people even care anymore? My kid could have ended up in the ER, and they were acting like my concern was just another inconvenience to check off a list.
A week later, I had to come back for Jax’s annual 504 plan review. I showed up 10 minutes early, standing in the hallway drinking terrible vending machine coffee, when Mr. Torres, the head custodian who I knew from chaperoning the fall dance, stopped to chat. I told him what had happened with Jax, and he shook his head. “Honey, Ms. Henderson hasn’t had a full day off in six weeks. Our secretary quit back in January, district won’t approve a new hire, so she’s answering the phone and scheduling parent meetings on top of all the discipline. We lost two paraeducators to the high school last semester, so she’s covering lunch duty twice a week too. She cares, she just can’t breathe either.”
When I walked into the 504 meeting a few minutes later, I actually looked at Ms. Henderson’s desk for the first time. A stack of unprocessed discipline forms sat higher than my hand, a half-eaten granola bar with crumbs crumbling off it sat next to her keyboard, and three overlapping sticky notes with scribbled reminders stuck to her monitor. When I brought up the bike rack again, she sighed and admitted she’d had a work order for the broken camera out there sitting in her inbox for three weeks—she just hadn’t gotten around to pushing it through approval. That’s when I started to rework how I approach school admin, and what I’ve learned has changed every interaction I’ve had since.
I used to walk into meetings with a long list of all the things that had gone wrong, all the policies I thought should change. Now I stick to three small, concrete habits that work far better than venting or demanding action.
First, I bring one specific, small request instead of a list of complaints. After that first meeting, I sent Ms. Henderson an email that didn’t open with a rant about dropping the ball. It said: “Jax gets off his bus at 2:45 every day and walks his bike out of the gym bike rack between 2:50 and 3:00. Could you ask the teacher on after-school duty to walk past that spot once a day for the next month? I also attached a note from his doctor that says any untreated asthma flare up carries a risk of hospitalization, so this is time-sensitive for us.” That was it. No extra drama, no 10 bullet points of changes I wanted. She got back to me the next morning, said she’d talked to the duty teacher, and pushed through that camera work order the same day.
Second, I always copy the person who actually has time to follow through. Admin are swamped with system-level tasks, so for anything that affects my kid’s daily routine, I add his 504 counselor or homeroom teacher to the email. They see my kid every day, and they almost always have more bandwidth to check in than an overstretched AP. In this case, the counselor checked in with Jax every Friday for a month to make sure no one was bothering him by the bikes—something I never would have gotten if I’d only emailed the AP.
Third, I schedule meetings for when they’re not already stretched thin. I used to take whatever slot they sent me, even if it was right in the middle of their only lunch break on a Friday. Now I ask if I can come 15 minutes before school starts, or stay 15 minutes after dismissal, when there are no kids running around and no phone calls ringing every two minutes. The second meeting I had with Ms. Henderson was at 7:30 a.m., and we had 15 minutes of uninterrupted conversation. She even told me her own oldest son has asthma, so she got exactly why I was scared. I never would have known that if we’d met during her rushed 30-minute lunch.
It’s not all fixed, of course. Last month, Jax came home saying the after-school art program he’d signed up for got canceled because the district didn’t approve the stipend for the teacher running it, and no one sent any notice to parents. I stood at the kitchen sink that night frustrated, asking the same old question: do they even care anymore?
But I don’t stew about it the way I used to. Most of the admins I’ve met went into education because they care about kids. They’re just outnumbered, understaffed, and pulled in 20 different directions every single day. Asking if they care usually doesn’t help my kid. Showing up with one small, clear thing you need does. It’s not a perfect fix, and there are still weeks nothing gets done. But it’s gotten me a whole lot further than leaving a meeting angry, wondering if anyone is even paying attention.
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