High School Principal

If you’re a High School Principal, there’s a whole lot going on at your place of work. The pressure is on, as students get ready for their adult lives. Some students are applying to college or applying to jobs. Some students are becoming serious Athletes, Artists, or leaders. Some students are forming lifelong friendships or experimenting with sex or drugs.

Everything in high school feels just a little bit closer to the real world—it’s not unlike running a business. As a High School Principal, you work with Teachers on academic curricula that include rigorous college-prep courses and developing professional skills such as public speaking. In terms of the budget and extracurricular activities, you work with students who want to start their own activist groups, and Coaches who want to send their teams to state tournaments. Proms and musicals are not small affairs for a High School Principal either.

Discipline is not about little children calling each other names on the playground; instead you might be dealing with young people—half of whom are taller than you—who are skipping school or smoking cigarettes. But the plus side is that you can have mature conversations with students and try get to the bottom of complex issues.

Graduation rates, SAT scores, and college acceptance stats may start to keep you up at night. But if you get to know the students and remember your own youth, you’ll realize that your leadership and hard work is offering young people some of the greatest memories and challenges of their lives.