Do School Administrators Care Anymore? A Parent’s Look At What’s Really Going On
The linoleum outside the principal’s office still sticks to the bottom of my sneakers when I think about that afternoon last October. It was 3:17, 12 minutes past the time we’d scheduled our meeting, and I was picking at a loose thread on my jacket while staring at a half-eaten Goldfish cracker that had been sitting on the waiting room chair for at least two days. My 10-year-old son Leo, who has dyslexia, had been sent to the office three times in two weeks for “talking back and disrupting reading time.” I’d brought a copy of his IEP, a page of notes from his private tutor, and a knot in my stomach that wouldn’t loosen. When Ms. Henderson, the principal, finally rounded the corner, she was scrolling through her work phone, one hand holding a half-empty cold coffee, and apologized quickly: she only had eight minutes before she had to cover bus duty, because one of the other admins had left early for a family emergency. I felt the question bubble up hot and sharp before I could stop it: Do you even care anymore?
I didn’t say it out loud. I just followed her into her office, where papers were piled so high I could barely see the top of her desk. A sticky note on her monitor read “district budget meeting Friday,” a printed memo about new mandatory reporting rules was tucked under her keyboard, and a lopsided drawing a kid had made her was taped to the side of the file cabinet. She sat down, skimmed my IEP copy, said she’d look into it, and her phone buzzed with a reminder about the buses. I left that meeting furious, fuming the whole drive home, texting my parent group about how no one in that building cares about our kids anymore.
A week later, I ran into her at the grocery store at 6 pm on a Tuesday. She was in the cereal aisle, her 7-year-old daughter sitting in the cart screaming because she wanted a unicorn cereal that was out of stock. Ms. Henderson had dark circles under her eyes, recognized me, sighed, and apologized again for the rushed meeting. We ended up chatting for 10 minutes by the produce section, while her kid kicked the side of the cart. She told me that day I came in, she’d already handled a report of a kid living out of a car, a teacher who’d had a panic attack and needed to take emergency leave, and a parent yelling at her for 45 minutes because the homecoming dance tickets were too expensive. She said she’d gotten to work at 6:30 that morning, and she still had 17 incident reports to finish that night before she could go to bed. “I became a principal because I wanted to help kids,” she said, wiping flour off her jacket that her kid had spilled. “Some days I don’t do anything but put out fires. I go home and I can’t even remember the last time I actually sat down and talked to a kid about how their day was.”
That conversation clicked something loose for me. For years, I’d heard other parents ask the same question: Do school admins even care anymore? I’d said it myself a dozen times, when emails went unanswered, when a policy that made no sense got pushed through, when my kid came home upset and no one seemed to have time to fix it. But that chat in the grocery store changed how I approach things now.
It doesn’t mean I just sit back and accept when something’s wrong with my kid’s education. But I’ve changed a few small things that have made a huge difference in getting what we need. First, I never send a long email listing every problem I have. Now, I lead with one specific ask, and keep it two sentences max. Instead of writing a 4-paragraph email about how Leo’s accommodations aren’t being followed and how that’s affecting his mood and why the teacher isn’t doing her job, I write: “Hi Ms. Henderson, I need 15 minutes of your time next week to check in on Leo’s reading accommodation, can you send me a slot that works for you?” It’s way easier for a swamped admin to respond to that than a wall of complaints.
Second, if I don’t hear back in 48 hours, I just resend with one line added to the top: “I know you’re swamped, just bumping this up.” I don’t add a passive aggressive note, I don’t cc the district superintendent right away. Nine times out of 10, the email just got buried under 60 other emails, and that nudge is all it takes to get it to the top of the pile.
Third, I only bring one problem to a meeting, not five. When we rescheduled our meeting that fall, I didn’t bring up the unfair dress code, or the lack of recess time, or how the homework load is too heavy. I just brought up Leo’s reading accommodation, and asked if we could do a quick 10-minute check-in with his teacher and the school reading specialist to adjust how his assignments are printed. That took 20 minutes total, we got it sorted, and Leo hasn’t been sent to the office for disruption in three months. It didn’t fix the whole system, but it fixed what we needed fixed.
I’m not saying there aren’t admins who don’t care, of course. There are people in every job who check out. But most of the time, the disconnect isn’t apathy. It’s capacity. Districts cut budgets, leave positions unfilled, pile on more mandates and more paperwork every year, and admins are left trying to do three jobs with half the staff they need.
Last month, I got an email from Ms. Henderson saying the after-school reading program Leo was supposed to start was pushed back three months because the district cut the para position that was supposed to run it. I was frustrated, I texted my husband about it, and I caught myself starting to think the old question. Then I remembered that chat in the grocery store, and I remembered that she’s just the person stuck delivering the bad news, not the person who made the budget cut.
We found a free volunteer reading tutor through the local library for now, and that works. It’s not perfect, and there are still days I leave a school meeting feeling annoyed and unheard. But I don’t ask that question out loud much anymore. Most of the time, the answer isn’t no. It’s that they’re too tired, too stretched, too busy putting out one fire after another to show they care the way we want them to. And small, specific asks get us a lot further than starting from the assumption that they don’t.
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