Sticky Issues
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Sticky Issues Archive >
In this section, principals tell how they handled a challenging situation, how some policy that was in place actually worked, and the lessons learned from dealing with these Sticky Issues. Send your stories to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Monetary Advantages or Loyalty to the School Families?
For years the community in which my school was located had been litigating with a local manufacturing company over contaminated air quality and pollution in the neighborhood. A disproportionate number of residents had died of cancer, and residents were alleging that the company’s output was the cause. One of the community activists was a regular volunteer and advocate for our school. The community often used our building at night to have the numerous planning and briefing meetings regarding their lawsuit against the company. Often my students would attend the meetings with their parents and were quite knowledgeable about the legal proceedings against the local company.
About the time a final petition was to be decided upon by the courts, a public relations officer from the local company called me to ask if they could “partner” with us and if there was anything that we wanted at our school. She suggested that we draw up a “wish list” and that the company was prepared to essentially make all of our dreams come true.
Now I thought, where have they been all these years? Why are they coming to us now? Of course it was obvious to me that they were attempting to buy some goodwill and community support prior to the big court date. I hated to turn down much needed funding, but my integrity and that of our school position was at stake. My official response was, “Thank you for your generous offer, however, we are aware that you are in litigation with many of the families of our students. For that reason, we are not willing to develop a partnership with you at this time. If and when the litigation is settled, we would be happy to enter into a conversation with you about how you can assist our school.” I called a quick meeting with the staff to let them know the situation and to see if we had consensus on the position I was taking. Everyone agreed.
Word got around to our volunteer activist and to others in the community. We had good community relations up to that point, but there was no question after the fact, that we were the community’s school. Whether it became a point of getting parent support to send our students on trips, responding to pick up students in an emergency, keeping watch over our summer garden, or just getting support when we had an unruly student, the parental and community support never wavered.
Epilogue: The company never called again during my tenure!
