Who needs admins?

I do. Or more technically, I need one good one. The revolving door of principals at Mt Eden is starting to get out of hand. Yes, we lost the old one. Again. I'm starting to get abandonment issues. Here's the quick rundown:

1st principal: incompetent - fired
2nd principal: came out of retirement, competent, already planned a month and half long cruise
3rd principal: there to stand in place of the 2nd principal while she enjoys her cruise
2nd principal: finally back and we finally see some competent principal-ing - told she had not been out of retirement long enough and would no longer be paid. We found out Friday afternoon via an email saying she would not be in on Monday.
4th principal: one of the assistant principals stepped up- seems to be doing a competent enough job, but is walking into a true mess and is pretty inexperienced. We are currently searching for a permanent replacement, which will lead us to 5 principals in one year.

I never knew how important a principal was until one started actually doing stuff. It was brief, but there was an undeniable change. We actually started enforcing the school rules and suspending students who were troublemakers. There have been red checks (to keep students from wearing red) and tardy sweeps (we get to lock out the tardy ones!). The students all noticed a change and there was a small but noticeable difference in everyone's attitudes. So I was bummed on Friday when I found out our shiny new principal would be leaving. We found out yesterday that the competent assistant principal would be taking over, and so far, she's been very active in trying to keep up the momentum. And we've gotten rid of the incompetent assistant principal. There's some sort of legal action against him for assaulting one of our campus supervisors. He was demonstrating how *not* to hold a kid and gave the campus supe a bunch of bruises. I think it was probably some sort of accident, but I don't care too strongly because I'm glad he's gone. He really did nothing. He barely did the bare minimum. When there were problems he was supposed to deal with, he would lock himself up in his office. When he got students with referrals, absolutely nothing happened. I don't think he even bothered to check the "counseled" and "cautioned" boxes on the referral sheet. Those words have ominous meaning to every teacher at Mt Eden because that was really code for "we said 'don't do that anymore' and sent them away with no repercussions."

So anyway, we're left with pad assistant principal's competent temporary replacement, the good assistant principal standing in for principal for now, and the mediocre assistant principal in the same spot she's always been in. We have an assistant principal vacancy, but it should be filled soon. Until then though, things are going pretty well and running smoothly. Well, not exactly smoothly. It's a long uphill battle to turn this school around from the horrible condition it's gotten into. We still have daily fights, which I am happily shielded from, being out in the portables. I walked onto campus for a short time immediately after school (I'm almost never on the main campus during heavily populated student times) and got to see another fight today, but the difference this time is that I saw all of our admins outside dealing with it and several campus supervisors chasing down students and catching them. They're really quite fast. I think the whole thing diffused fairly quickly. They dealt very efficiently with another problem yesterday or Monday involving students from another school trying to get onto our campus and start something. I think the details are supposed to be confidential, but the students were really in danger and we dealt with it before there was any real threat. So hooray!

So things are improving a bunch at work. There's still all kinds of chaos, but everywhere it feels like improvement. Overall, it's a pretty good feeling, I gotta say.