The Balcony View

A couple weeks ago, a reporter from KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids asked me to comment on a new website aimed at helping students report bullying and harassment at school. The website is sponsored by the Eychaner Foundation , which sponsors Iowa's Matthew Shepard Scholarship, as well as a minority scholarship for high school students in DeKalb, Illinois. I wrote about the organization and its founder, Rich Eychaner, in The Principal's Challenge . In addition to contributing more than a million dollars for scholarships in the last ten-plus years, Eychaner and his foundation have contributed mightily to civil rights and tolerance in Iowa and beyond. Before the interview , I needed to get familiar with how the website  works. After a kid makes a report, the school receives an email and letter through the postal service with the report. The website also includes the foundation's privacy policy and how they handle the information. As a former principal, I first thought about how t

A couple of years ago, we revised the curriculum in our principalship program . One of our many goals was to get our future leaders out of their comfort zones and broaden their perspective around issues like culture and poverty. We know many school people are "good at" school because it is a middle class endeavor. Among other things, requiring field-based internship experiences in a non-profit/social service setting seemed like a good way to begin broadening our future leaders' experiences. Yesterday I read a reflection written by an excellent student, Tracy Kelly, an elementary teacher from Woodbine , IA  who had completed her non-profit internship experience at a food bank. She described how, the evening before, the furnace in their house had gone on the fritz and she had recently hit a deer (on the way home from class, of course). These frustrations added to the every day stress of a teacher, wife and mother. She described a couple of teenage boys who seemed a litt

In the spring of 1993, I was a year out of college and trying to come up with a suitable answer to "What do you want to do with your life?" I was a new husband and college graduate with the ever-marketable sociology degree working for the Missouri Department of Mental Health in Kansas City. A few months ago, I described  here  how I knew I needed a change. I had some work to do in order to become a teacher and coach. First and foremost, I needed to complete a number of classes to earn my certification to teach. One spring day, I walked into Mason-Halpin Fieldhouse on the campus of  Rockhurst College  (now University). I asked the secretary if Frank Diskin, the Director of Athletics and men's basketball coach was available. He was. I sat down in Coach Diskin's office and explained a bit of my history and that I now wanted to teach and coach. Told a bit about my good fortune of having played for  Eldon Miller  at  UNI . Talked a bit about my new wife and growing up