Episode 277: Why Your School Feels Fine in September (And Falls Apart Every March)

 

Listen on Apple Podcast | Listen on Spotify

You know that feeling in September.

Shoulders back. Voice steady. Staffing chart already printed and laminated, honestly. You’ve hired differently this year. You’ve had the hard conversations. You’ve done the planning. And there’s this quiet, solid certainty settling in — this time is going to be different.

And then it’s March.

Five teachers out. Four who’ve quietly quit in spirit if not in writing. A sub who canceled at 6:45am. Four parents who want meetings — today, if possible. Enrollment numbers that don’t add up no matter how many times you run them. And somehow, somehow, you’re covering the classroom, making snack, riding the bus, fielding texts, and wondering how you got here again despite everything you did to prevent it.

Here’s the thing no one wants to say out loud:

What worked in September was heroics. Not infrastructure.

And until you understand the difference between the two — really understand it — March is going to keep breaking you.

The Heroics Trap

Heroics are efficient in September. When your energy is high, your tank is full, and your willpower is carrying you through the friction of a new school year, you can absorb a lot. You can cover classrooms, hold the emotional weight of your team, solve problems in real time, and make it all look almost sustainable.

The problem is that heroics have an expiration date. And that expiration date arrives somewhere around mid-February, right before flu season peaks, when the accumulated weight of the invisible labor — emotional, relational, logistical — finally hits a wall.

Heroic leadership sounds like:

• “I’ll just cover it.”
• “I’ll remember.”
• “It’s fine, I’ll handle it.”
• “We’ll power through.”

Infrastructure sounds like:

• “What’s the standard here?”
• “Who owns this?”
• “What rhythm protects this from drifting?”
• “What’s the consequence when it does?”

One of those requires you to be fully charged. The other one doesn’t.

The Skills That Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Here’s where it gets a little uncomfortable, and it’s worth sitting with.

The skills that carried you to a certain level of success — the hustle, the willpower, the “I’ll just get it done” energy — are not the skills that carry you to the next level. More than that: at the next level, those same skills become a liability.

There’s a real example of this playing out right now with a school owner who’s been building toward nine locations. She wanted to move one of her strongest directors into a regional role. When asked how this director operates under pressure, the owner’s answer came quickly: “She just gets it done. She powers through, she stays late, she is so loyal.”

That answer? That’s the problem.

At one location, “she just gets it done” is an asset. At nine locations, it’s a structural risk. A regional director whose defining strength is personal force doesn’t build infrastructure — she becomes the infrastructure. And when she’s stretched thin, the whole portfolio feels it.

The job of a regional director isn’t to get it done. It’s to assess capacity across locations, manage competing priorities, present trade-offs rather than just solutions, and build systems that hold even when she’s not present to enforce them. “Powering through” doesn’t scale. Infrastructure does.

This isn’t a judgment. It’s a pattern worth naming — because most school leaders are running their entire operation the same way that director runs her location. And wondering why March keeps arriving the same way.

The Gottman Reality Check

Here’s a reframe that might change how you’re thinking about your school’s problems.

Research from the Gottman Institute — forty years of studying relationships — shows that roughly 69% of problems between partners never actually get solved. They just get managed better.

Sit with that for a moment.

Now ask yourself: how much of your leadership energy is spent waiting for your problems to disappear? Waiting for the right hire who will finally solve the coverage crisis? The staff culture shift that will eliminate burnout? The enrollment breakthrough that will make the margin pressure go away?

You’re not going to solve your coverage problem permanently. You’re not going to eliminate conflict or chaos entirely. But you can build school leadership infrastructure that manages those realities instead of letting them manage you.

Stop waiting for the perfect solution. Start building the structure that holds the imperfect reality.

The 5 Elements of Real Infrastructure

Real school leadership infrastructure isn’t a binder. It’s not a checklist or another professional development retreat. It’s a living operating model built around five elements that work together:

1. Standards What does excellent look like here — specifically? Not a vague aspiration, but a clear, observable description of what you expect. If your standards only exist in your head, they’re not standards. They’re hopes.
2. Ownership Who is responsible for this? One person, named, accountable. “Everyone is responsible” means no one is responsible. Ownership without accountability is just a suggestion.
3. Rhythm How often does this get checked, revisited, or returned to? Ownership without rhythm drifts. The rhythm is what makes the standard sustainable — it doesn’t depend on someone remembering, it depends on a predictable return point that holds the system in place.
4. Guardrails What prevents the drift before it becomes a collapse? Guardrails are the structures that catch problems early — before the 5am text, before the enrollment lag, before the parent meeting that could have been avoided. If your only guardrail is you noticing something is wrong, you don’t have guardrails.
5. Consequence What happens when the standard isn’t met? Not punishment — clarity. People need to know what drift costs, and they need to experience that consequence predictably. Without consequence, standards are optional. With it, they become real.

If your school is missing any of these five elements in a key area, what you have isn’t infrastructure. It’s a system held together by your personal force — and that’s exactly what collapses in March.

Two Things You Can Do Before Summer

This is not a call for a full rebuild. Not a new retreat, a new curriculum, a fresh start. If you’re in March right now, you don’t have the capacity for that — and honestly, you don’t need it.

You need to tighten the pressure points. Here’s where to start:

Install one predictable rhythm of return. Pick one area that consistently drifts when you’re stretched — enrollment check-ins, coverage conversations, one-on-ones with your team — and put a non-negotiable return point in place. Not because you’ll always have energy for it, but because the rhythm holds you when you don’t. Weekly or monthly, anchored to your calendar, not your mood.

Stop rescuing one recurring pattern. There’s a situation in your school right now where you always jump in to fix, remind, or save — and everyone knows it. Pick one of those. And don’t. Let the standard hold. Let the consequence do its job. Let your team feel the natural outcome of drift instead of being shielded from it by your heroics. This is how ownership actually transfers.

Just those two things. One rhythm installed. One rescue withheld. That’s a meaningful shift before summer even starts.