Leadership Lite
School Administrator, September 2020


A Nose for a Serious Need
When the Ennis Independent School District in North Texas announced it was closing school buildings to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, communications officer Bill Honza created a short video showing the district’s police dog, Enli, still on duty inside schools.

Enli’s usual job is to find narcotics on school property, but Honza says in narrating the action, “she also has a unique talent at finding another hard-to-find item” that can draw big bucks in a transaction.
The video shows Enli sniffing her way around an empty classroom, walking past a file cabinet, then returning with a tail wagging to alert her handler she’s on to something.

The officer opens the cabinet’s bottom drawer and finds ... a roll of toilet paper.

SOURCE: KXAS-TV, Fort Worth, Texas
A Call for Congestion

Samantha Fuhrey, superintendent in Newton County, Ga., had a grand plan to bring together the entire school system under one roof to kick off the school year with a positive message and a call to action. Everything appeared to be in order, from a quality keynote speaker to the seating at the venue, Springfield Baptist Church in Conyers, Ga.

But on the morning of the event, organizers realized they had overlooked one key component — the fact all attendees, most traveling alone in private vehicles, were heading to the same destination simultaneously.

Recounted Fuhrey: “It seemed like all 2,800 people arrived at the same time blocking roads and causing gridlock on the highway and all of the side streets in the community. People had to wait more than 45 minutes to get into the venue, and we had to cut down a fence surrounding a softball field in order to have places for people to park! Local law enforcement had to assist us in order to get traffic moving again.”

Newton County continued to run its back-to-school event for everyone, but now everyone rides on school buses to the event.

Rapping on the Road

The music of a professional rapper, known as Lil Nas X, inspired the superintendent of the Swartz Creek, Mich., schools, Ben Mainka, to record a welcome back-to-school video on YouTube. Mainka teamed up with principal Jim Kitchen to create a parody of the rap-per’s country number “Old Town Road.”

In their video, which was posted on the district’s Facebook page in the leadup to the school year a year ago, the two school leaders donned cowboy hats and sang from the rear seats of a traveling school bus.

Life With No Gridiron?

One newspaper pundit likened a year of high school with no football to the Fourth of July without fireworks.

The school board in St. Louis, Mo., took the bold stance of forbidding the sport at its high schools for the entirety of 1911 after 18 deaths and 159 serious injuries were reported among prep players just a few years earlier.
Apparently reassured that protective measures were in place, the school board resumed football a year later.
 

Short, humorous anecdotes, quips, quotations and malapropisms for this column relating to school district administration should be addressed to: Editor, School Administrator, 1615 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314. Fax: 703-841-1543. Email: magazine@aasa.org. Upon request, names may be withheld in print.