It has become a truism in education today that change is constant. The state and even the national education systems are constantly changing.  Change is different in today’s society: it is continuous, wall to-wall, non-stop.  At PISD, we hardly finish tackling one problem and are faced with another.  This year for example our faculties are faced with rising state standards, changing demographics, and many other moving targets.

The board and the superintendent as leaders of the district can be compared to that of someone conducting an orchestra.  We must keep track of many different instruments, each playing different sequences of notes and stopping and starting on its own terms.  While you keep a sense of the whole piece, you have to shift your attention from one section to another. It is important that we hold in our minds the overall design of the melody and harmonies, for unless we do that, every little change or every complaint will sound like a new and unrelated melody that just happened to come along, without any relation to the rest of the music.

The first thing that we must have is a design or plan to handle this nonstop change.  We have established plans for almost everything at the school.  A facilities plan, a transportation plan, a maintenance plan, a bond management plan, a food service plan and an educational plan. It is our duty as leaders to remain consistent to these plans which provide reliability for our employees.   Inside each of these plans we have allowed for flexibility and these plans are constantly changing and we are adapting.  We must not, however, just change things for change sake even though sometimes the going gets rough.