Tough budget times call for flexibility and creativity, especially when facing the loss of administrative staff.
by Justin Baeder
Principal, November/December 2011
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Janet was happy that her assistant principal, Tom, had found a new job as a principal, but she knew he would be irreplaceable not only because he was an exceptional individual, but because there was no funding to continue his position. As she thought about the new school year, Janet’s mind fi lled with questions: Who will take on all the work Tom used to do? How will I handle student discipline by myself? How will we meet our students’ needs? How will we survive?

When the budget gets tight, principals often attempt to minimize cuts to the classroom by reducing administrative staff such as secretaries or assistant principals. While such cuts are never ideal, we’re often faced with very real trade-offs, so losing administrative staff might be unavoidable. Like Janet, many principals around the country started this school year with a smaller office team and are looking for ways to cope.

Maintain Focus on Students

If your school has been impacted by cuts to office staff, the result is more work for everyone. But simply reassigning the work isn’t the only solution. Here’s how to survive and maintain your focus on serving students.

Start with the core. Before redistributing the work done by a former staff member, it’s helpful to take stock of what truly needs to be done. Michael Copland, who studies how school districts support teaching and learning, recommends identifying the most important work that needs to be done and pursuing it with greater focus, rather than trying to spread people thinner. “Trying to do the same work with fewer staff isn’t a viable strategy. When faced with reductions, there is a need to clarify roles in connection with the most important work, and in doing so, figure out what can come off the plate to enable that core work to get done well,” says Copland, a former University of Washington professor of educational leadership and policy studies, who is now a senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

What are the core functions of your school, and what support does your office staff need to provide to ensure that those functions can continue? If you start with the premise that ensuring student learning is the core work of your school, ask yourself what support teachers need to do that core work well. Chances are that much of the work that presently occupies your staff’s time crept in gradually. Two interacting forces—the power of tradition and the impulse to try something new—create an ever-growing list of tasks that might not be truly essential to the core work of the school.

Cutting back on unsustainable peripheral activities can be painful, particularly at the elementary level where history and tradition are powerful  forces. If you find it necessary to cut activities that parents, students, or staff will miss, begin the conversation with openness. Be clear about the resource constraints you’re facing, and be transparent about your rationale for cutting these activities while preserving others. You might find that volunteers, donations, or other forms of support emerge to sustain activities that can’t be handled by your shrinking administrative staff.

Divvy up the work. It’s unavoidable that a loss of administrative staff will have ripple effects; everyone will bear part of the burden. If you’ve lost administrative staff, you have probably already begun the process of determining who will pick up various pieces of work that still need to be done after peripheral tasks have been eliminated.

Determine the talents, interests, and strengths that each member of your team can bring to the table. While it’s likely that the staff person you lost was the best match for most of the work, you might also find that other members of your team have an affinity for certain types of work, even if offi cial job titles might suggest otherwise. Tough budget times call for flexibility and creativity. While it might be hard to imagine how other staff will absorb all of the work, divide and conquer isn’t the only solution.

Batch and automate reminders. Administrative staff often have time consuming routines that they carry out each day to support the work of the school. When everyone is crunched for time, one way to become more efficient is to identify tasks that are being done daily but don’t need to happen every day. For example, if you’re losing an attendance secretary, it might not be necessary to send absence letters home every day; this could be done every two or three days.

Administrative staff also take responsibility for and monitor various organizational matters. When there aren’t enough staff to dedicate their attention to all of the issues that need to be handled, you can set periodic reminders to check in. For example, if one of your staff members was great about monitoring trends in office referrals, you can put a reminder on your calendar to examine that trend every few weeks. While this will still take some time to do, you won’t have to devote mental bandwidth to remembering yet another responsibility if you set a reminder on your calendar.

Losing an Assistant Principal

If you’ve been working as an administrative team, one of the most devastating reductions in staffing is to lose your assistant principal. If the assistant principal helped with discipline, scheduling, test coordination, or similar duties, here are a few questions to ask yourself.

Can the task be eliminated? What will happen if we stop doing it? Drastic staffing cuts force us to look for a rationale beyond tradition or habit.

If it’s essential, who else can take it on? Principals and secretaries tend to take on the lion’s share of the work when a school loses its assistant principal, but instructional coaches, the nurse, and other staff might be good candidates as well.

Can the task be done periodically (batched), or does it need to happen on-demand or daily? For example, there’s no reason to spend time every day checking up on playground supervisors if every other day will suffice.

Beyond simply managing the work, though, losing an assistant principal can pose an additional challenge for principals who are used to having a trusted colleague close at hand to help make tough decisions. “It’s important to have people to call and ask for advice,” says Scott Friedman, an elementary school principal in Nine Mile Falls, Washington. After working with an administrative team for years, Friedman has found ways to adjust to being the only administrator in his building. “I try to stay involved in regional principal meetings and form professional relationships that allow me to pick up the phone and ask a question or bounce an idea off of a colleague.” Friedman also stays incontact with other principals online, using Twitter to share ideas and build relationships. Particularly in rural areas, making a phone call or reaching out through social media can overcome the isolation that comes from being the only administrator in the building.

 Losing a Secretary

Losing a member of your administrative support team can be equally devastating. Secretaries, registrars, office assistants, and other front-line employees perform duties too numerous to count. Here are some additional questions to consider as you plan how your remaining staff will handle the additional workload.

Does the task need to be done daily, or could it be done one or two days a week? The maxim “the work expands to fill the available time” is especially applicable to daily routines.If they don’t need to be done daily, set a different schedule for these recurring tasks.

Can the task be done by a volunteer?Many parent volunteers want to give their time to support the school, but aren’t available during school hours. Sorting and alphabetizing paperwork, preparing mailings, and other time-consuming projects involving nonconfidential information can be farmed out to volunteers.

Can the task be automated?Technology might be part of the solution for a variety of secretarial tasks. For example, it is time-consuming to make phone calls about lunch money, overdue library books, or attendance; several automated messenger systems are capable of making such calls. Of course, finding someone else to complete a task doesn’t compensate for the loss of a trusted member of your team. Take every opportunity to let your remaining staff know how much they are appreciated, especially if they’re shouldering an additional burden due to reductions.

Getting Help

Employing a full-time staff member isn’t the only way to get talented people to support your school. If you’ve lost a position such as an instructional coach—or an assistant principal who served that function—you might consider paying for an outside professional to work with your staff on an hourly basis. In my school, we’ve done this successfully with a literacy coach who works half-time in another school and is happy to work with our staff as needed. We’re able to get the support we need while operating within our means.

If you’ve lost secretarial staff, you might consider hiring your best substitute teacher for peak periods, such as the beginning and end of the year, or to help with special projects. Parents also might be willing to help with major projects if they’re given plenty of notice and clear direction.

Making It Work

While it would be tempting to cheerfully conclude that losing staff can be a good thing—an opportunity to become more efficient—the truth is that reductions are painful and unfortunate, both on a personal level and in terms of accomplishing the work of educating students.

Janet’s worries about how her school will make it without an assistant principal are real and have no easy answers. As much as we might want to do more with less, we usually can’t; the reality is that having less usually means doing less. However, if we think strategically, focus on our core priorities, redistribute work thoughtfully, and do it more efficiently, we can uphold our commitment to serve our students even in a climate of reduced funding.

Justin Baeder is principal of Olympic View Elementary School in Seattle.

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