I have spent the last week thinking about North Paulding High School. This is the Georgia high school that temporarily suspended a student for posting a photo of the crowded hallway there, in which almost no students were wearing masks. This is the high school whose leadership said that mask wearing was a personal choice and they could not effectively enforce a rule on it, despite having a basic dress code.
The first reason I keep thinking about North Paulding High School is that I have been there. I have sat in the principal’s office. When I began in policy analysis and program evaluation, this school district was one of my first clients. I grew to know the long-term superintendent well, and became a huge fan one of the district’s principals.
Of course, that was ages ago.
So, I was quite surprised to see Paulding in the news.
Despite my old relationship with this school district, I was immediately highly critical of their decisions, their excuses and their actions. I am on the school dress codes are usually sexist and hold girls responsible for boys immaturity bandwagon, and my issues with attempts to control teenagers — as opposed to influence to teach them — goes back much further. Of course a school can enforce a mask mandate! Not a lot of sympathy from me, right?
Except…I thought that North Paulding was getting a raw deal out of the coverage.
Sure, they deserved all the criticism they got. No doubt of that! But didn’t deserve all of the criticism. I did not think that this was the only high school in the country doing this. I did not think that it was the only high school in Georgia doing this. Heck, I did not even think that it was the only high school in Paulding County doing this.
Were there others trying to suspend students for bringing light to a situation? Well, I have seen that before. We have all seen school leaders claim that criticism from students — including embarrassing valid criticism — is “disruptive” and therefore may be barred, under the law. We have all seen basic disrespect for student rights. We have seen students try to stand up for their First Amendment right and get intimidated by the powerful into stepping back.
And I do not believe for a second that every other school in Georgia both has a mask mandate and is enforcing it. I do not believe that every other school in Georgia has figured out how high school students can safely pass from one class to another, through the day.
And yet…I believe in object lessons. This might not have been the best one, but there it was.
Sometimes, we are faced with something that did not work out. A minor snafu. And larger fuckup. A huge clusterfuck. Something. Regardless of what it is, I believe in learning from it. Really leaning from it.
Those failures, regardless of their scale, are authentic. They occurred in real contexts, in which real people were doing what they actually do. If the screw up(s) happened, they well could happen again. Whatever lead to the screw up(s)…well, if it is not addressed, why wouldn’t they happen again?
I do not agree with anything that happened at North Paulding High School. And I do not think that coverage was fair. But I think we can all learn from it. This can be an object lesson. We can all think about how and why it happened, but not as some hypothetical example written by some trainer or consultant. No, it really happened. We know what happened. It can be an object lesson.
Our school district might not get exactly to that point, but I’ll bet that your local school district has some of the same issues that led to North Paulding’s embarrassment. I am sure that mine does. My own organization can suffer from some of those issues, too.
We can look at this one example and reflect on what it might tell us about our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities. It can help us to think about where might we might make similar mistakes.
So long as we are willing to learn. So long as we are always looking to learn. The object lessons are available all around us.