Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
