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Principals are loaded down with all types of administrative duties, tasks, and paperwork.  But if you perform these during school hours, research demonstrates that your influence on teaching and learning will be missed.  The challenge is twofold.  First, remove as many of these items as possible from your personal involvement.  Second, if the item is too important to delegate, make sure you perform it outside the school day so that you don't interfere with your time devoted to classrooms and… Continue

Some principals inherit jobs that do not belong on their plates.  I have started a new job only to find out that the head custodian did not handle the distribution and management of keys, or the food service manager expected my office to oversee the free and reduced lunch list!  In those situations, I empowered support staff with the ability to make decisions and feel some sense of authority.  But bottom line, the principal must delegate these types of tasks, along with clear expectations for… Continue

Staff can absorb your time and unless it relates directly to your efforts to improve teaching and learning, meeting with them during the school day takes you away from classrooms.  I experienced the expectation that if a teacher had a personal issue, he/she wanted to meet with me during his/her conference time.  But that meant I was giving up precious time to be out in classrooms in order to handle the person's personal issue.  Instead, I set an expectation that if a teacher or staff member had… Continue

Some principals inherit campuses where parents have been accustomed to arriving on campus and interrupting or disrupting the day's agenda.  This takes time and I worked with the P.T.A. to write and share reasonable guidelines for parents to expect when desiring a conference with the principal. We live in the days of cell phones and email, so it is very important to not set an expectation that parents will be able to hear back from you, especially during the school day when your focus must be on… Continue

One of the largest time consumers can be special education annual review meetings or special IEP updates.  The issue is whether the presence of the principal is absolutely necessary.  It has been my experience that most of them were not.  Some districts have a policy requiring the principal to be present, so in those cases, I made sure the special education person in charge of the meeting had a way of bringing me into only the most essential part of the meeting.  But in districts where I was… Continue

Principals are expected to be at athletic and other after school events.  It is political.  But it also wastes a lot of your time, when you should be meeting with teachers and working on issues that are central to improving teaching and learning.  So what I did was have my secretary gather all of the schedules of events for the month, and then find dates when multiple events were on campus at the same time.  Then she would but these on my calendar so that I could visit each event for a awhile… Continue

Tired of spending so much time reading, answering and deleting emails?  Give your secretary access to your email account and train the person to read, sort, delete and save mail, the same way you like your physical mail handled.  It saves lots of time to be able to come back to the office after a full day in classrooms and teacher meetings.  A good secretary can eliminate a lot of email overload and sort your important mail into files that make your time devoted to this much more efficient. … Continue

Don't spend your workday filling out purchase orders for staff or for your own office.  A well trained secretary can handle all of this and reduce your involvement to leaving a folder of orders, signature ready on your desk.  This is about giving up control and trusting someone else to do this task.  Tell us your ideas on how you reduce daily time devoted to budget, student activity accounts and purchasing tasks!
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Don't waste precious time monitoring the cafeteria and hallways.  Hire some parents on an hourly rate to supervise the cafeteria.  They require some training, but armed with radios and a clear expectation that all children respect and follow their direction, it really works.  Budget sources for this?  Work with central office on reducing costs in other areas of your budget to free up dollars.  Sometimes I have eliminated a campus position when someone on staff retires, with the agreement that I… Continue