Why Good School Programs Disappear When Their Founders Leave (And What Actually Stays)
Last month, I was volunteering at my elementary school’s fall festival, holding a lopsided paper plate with a burnt chocolate chip cookie and a crumpled map for the cake walk, when I wandered past the edge of the playground and remembered the garden. Three years ago, I spent a Saturday pulling weeds and hauling lumber with 4th grade teacher Ms. Elena, who’d written three separate small grants to get the student garden off the ground. Back then, every kid planted a tomato or pepper seed, and every fall we loaded boxes of produce into a van for the local food bank. It was the school’s darling program—local news did a story, the PTA bragged about it in every newsletter. Today, the wooden beds are half rotted, the fence is knocked down on one side, and dandelions grow waist high. Ms. Elena moved to Oregon two years ago to be closer to her aging mom, and the garden went with her.
I ran into Ms. Lopez, the current 4th grade teacher, by the lemonade stand, and asked her what happened. She wiped sweat off her neck and shrugged, said it wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. Ms. Elena was the one who wrote the annual grant for soil and seeds, who organized the parent volunteer work days, who stayed after school every Wednesday to pull weeds. When she left, no one else had that kind of extra time. Ms. Lopez does after-school tutoring two days a week, has a 2-year-old at home she has to pick up from daycare by 4:30. The custodian already has a full route that keeps him busy from before sunrise to after school dismisses, and the PTA shifted their fundraising energy to the new accessible playground the school had been waiting for a decade. The garden just got squeezed out. It was always a side project that lived only in Ms. Elena’s extra time.
I remembered last spring I was volunteering in Ms. Lopez’s classroom, helping with reading groups, and I noticed the three colored mason jars on the shelf by the door: blue for “I’m great”, yellow for “I’m okay”, green for “I need a minute”. Every morning, kids drop their named popsicle stick into the jar that matches how they feel. That was Ms. Elena’s thing, I said. Ms. Lopez nodded, said she covered Ms. Elena’s class for a week when she had a family emergency, and liked it so much she made her own when she got the 4th grade job. Then the 3rd grade teacher down the hall saw it, made one too. Now half the primary classes at the school have them. No one sent out a memo, no one voted on it, it just spread. It didn’t need a grant or a committee to keep going.
It made me think of another example from my oldest’s middle school. Two years ago, there was a beloved counselor named Mr. Ray who’d built a popular peer tutoring program that paired 8th graders with struggling 6th graders. It worked really well—kids got grades up, made friends across grade levels, and it took pressure off the overloaded teachers. Then Mr. Ray retired last year, and by the start of this school year, the program was gone. No one had time to coordinate the matching, the 2-hour training for tutors, and the monthly check-ins that kept it running. But the small thing Mr. Ray started that’s still there? He kept a box of extra granola bars and a pack of disposable deodorant in the main office for kids who forgot their breakfast or had PE before lunch. Now every office in the building has one, and the PTA just adds the supplies to their annual order automatically. No one even remembers who started it. It’s just how things are done.
I’ve started thinking about what school culture actually holds onto, after seeing this pattern play out a dozen times over the last 7 years of having kids in public school. We put all this energy into building big, shiny programs that look great on school websites and in district newsletters, but those programs almost always run on the passion and unpaid extra time of one person. When that person leaves—for a new job, to move, to retire—the whole thing falls apart, because it never got woven into the regular, existing work the rest of the staff are already doing. It was always extra, something added on top of already full plates. The small, low-lift things that fit right into the cracks of the already full day? Those are the ones that stay.
If you’re a teacher or a parent who wants to make a change at your school, this matters a lot. I used to think you had to build something big to make a real difference. Now I see it’s the opposite. If you want to start something new, don’t build a program that requires 5 extra hours a week of your unpaid time. Tuck it into something people already do. Want to get more books into kids’ hands over summer? Don’t start a whole new one-on-one matching program you have to run every year. Work with the front office to add a free book to the end-of-year report card envelope they already stuff every spring. That takes 2 extra minutes per kid, no extra coordination, and it’ll keep going when you move. Want more consistent mental health check-ins for kids? Don’t push for a whole new period that requires rearranging the entire bell schedule. Start the popsicle stick jar. It takes 5 minutes a day, no extra budget, any teacher can keep doing it when you’re gone.
Last week, I walked past the old garden again after picking my kid up from school. A group of 5th graders, the ones who were in Ms. Elena’s 2nd grade class when she planted the first beds, had pulled all the weeds out of one raised bed and planted pumpkin seeds they’d saved from Halloween last year. They’d propped up the broken fence with a couple of old sticks, and asked the custodian to add a quick water when he sprays the playground. It’s not the 8-bed program with the grant and the food bank deliveries we had three years ago. Maybe the pumpkins will grow, maybe they won’t. Maybe the kids will lose interest over summer, and the dandelions will come back. But the idea that kids can grow things, and share what they grow with people who need it? That’s already stuck. And the little habits—the check-in jars, the extra granola bars, the pumpkins in one weedy bed? That’s what school culture actually keeps. It’s not the big programs we brag about. It’s the small things that don’t need a founder to survive.
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