Stories from the Field
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Getting the Support of Unruly Parents
One day when I was an assistant principal, the teacher who handled discipline at the school came rushing in flustered and upset, requesting my immediate assistance. As we walked to her office she explained that a mother had come in ready to fight her because she had given her daughter a detention. Sure enough, when we entered the room, the mother was hostile and verbally abusive to everyone within earshot. I invited her to sit down next to her daughter and listened while she angrily vented, particularly about the teacher. When she finally took a breath and gave me the “stare” as if to say “What are you going to do about her” (the teacher), I took a deep breath and gave the usual company line about how we all wanted what’s best for the child and how the teacher was a fair person, doing her job. The mother didn’t seem to be buying it until I said, “You know, we are all in this together. We are trying to prepare citizens who will be able to go out and get a good job and have a wonderful life. The behavior your daughter exhibited would be cause for her to get fired in the workplace.” My words were truly inspired from somewhere other than from my own mouth. The mother looked at all of us, took a deep breath, and with tears in her eyes turned to her daughter and said, “They are right, Baby. That’s why your mamma can’t keep a job, cause of her temper. I want better for you.” We all worked out a mutual plan from that point on with responsibility for improvement now back in the student’s court.
The lessons that I relearned that day were (1) all parents want a better life for their children than they have; (2) sometimes parents cannot express themselves in a socially acceptable way, but if given time and an attitude that “we are in this together,” they will be allies on behalf of their children; and (3) leadership conveys the notion of “inescapable network of mutuality” to all stakeholders within our schools.
