Who Is That Ritual For, Anyhow?
In what has sometimes seemed like the never-ending year, we have arrived in May. It feels nothing short of a miracle. I would invite you to think back to August of 2020, but it might cause heart palpitations, so instead, let’s all just be grateful for this moment.
In schools, the May calendar often looks like a fountain pen has exploded carelessly all over the page. Not a day goes by without two or three events celebrating, recognizing, closing and saying goodbye. Sometimes we are already welcoming new members of the community who will join the following year. Rituals for students, such as prom, senior week, step-up days, and field days. Rituals for teachers, such as teacher appreciation week, faculty farewells, and final meetings. Rituals for parents, such as school benefits, awards ceremonies, and graduations from kindergarten, middle school, and high school. Some rites of spring, like maypole dances, just show up every year and it’s unclear who they are for. It can feel like a slog through the month, with every day feeling like three days packed into one, thus earning the expression “The Hundred Days of May.”
But last May we found ourselves in an unusually quiet month - at least on the event front. While you might have been scrambling to figure out how to re-open school in the fall, the May calendar was mostly just scratched-out reminders of what might have been. We were in the thick of sheltering in place. It was a scary time and nobody felt much like celebrating. Our energies turned to how to creatively graduate students virtually or at drive-in lots. No proms for seniors. Departing teachers and staff and retiring heads and principals quietly drifted away. No pomp and circumstance for anyone. Our singular goal: end the year as safely and as quickly as possible.
May 2021 has a different energy. Senior proms are back on in some parts of the country. In-person graduations are promising. I even have a live school reception on my calendar for late May - the first non-family gathering of more than three households I will have attended in over 15 months. Small signs of a re-awakening, recovery, and re-engaging. And we are teetering between feeling hopeful and exhausted.
Over the next couple of months, however, if you are on a senior leadership team, you will be tasked with putting together the calendar for next year – which includes next May. You have probably already started this process, but there is still time to hit the pause button and ask yourselves. “Which rituals and traditions need to stay and which need to go?” How do you want next May – and really the entire flow of the year – to look and feel for you? For your students? Your professional community? Your families? Does every tradition need to come back? What about the traditions that are, at their core, sexist, racist, biased and exclusive?
And there is the Unspeakable.
Rituals and traditions are crucial to organizations and groups of people. They help to establish culture, build relationships and foster a sense of community and belonging. They welcome people into the village. Unless they don’t. And here is your challenge as you go into calendaring meetings this spring and summer. Will you have the courage to look at your rituals and traditions through the lenses of all of your stakeholders and ask, “Should this remain?” I was speaking this week to an experienced school leader about this quandary, as she and her school were gearing up for this exact conversation. “Our school is at an inflection point after this past year,” she said. “We are thinking about the kind of school we want to be.” But also she expressed that the pull of the status quo is magnetic, and she continued to say, “There is comfort in familiarity. Even if it is dysfunctional.”
If you have a ritual or tradition at your school, not everyone is going to love and appreciate it. But regardless of what the ritual is, it should be intentional and inclusive - and ideally not dysfunctional. Our rituals are artifacts of our culture. When we talk about systemic change in schools, especially about racial and gender equity we need to be willing to design rituals, traditions, and events that are welcoming for underrepresented families and staff. And ditch the ones that only satisfy the most represented groups.
And it isn’t always easy because we get attached to traditions. And in schools, any event that happens two years in a row becomes sacred. At my child’s school it was the Mothers’ Tea and the Fathers’ coffee. These sweet events, held on two different spring days, were opportunities for parents to come to campus and spend time with their kiddos. Moms sipped tea, ate cookies, and were presented with flowers and picture frames. On a different day, dads came to school, drank coffee, and sang “Take me out to the Ballgame” with their kids. These two days were benign and beloved for many families.
But as the school welcomed more and more families in which parents played less traditional gender roles - there were plenty of stay-at-home dads and moms who worked - and more same-sex families where a child might not have a mom or a dad to attend one or the other event - the school realized that the tradition was not serving, and even excluding, some families and students. Besides, in what century are baseball and coffee for men and tea and cookies for women? “Take me out to the Ballgame” is totally appropriate to sing during the seventh inning stretch of a game, but why that song at a parent-child event? Times had changed, and with them, so had the school community.
The school re-designed the event to become the Family Celebration. Naturally, some parents who had experienced the previous event were unhappy. The event had worked for them and this change meant a loss of a moment they enjoyed. Three years later, of course, nobody knew the difference, and the result is a more inclusive experience that benefits students, families and the staff; they only have one event to plan!
As you begin to fill in next year’s event calendar, consider a few questions to ask.
Who is it for? If you can’t quickly identify who the event is for, it may not be for anyone. Is the event meaningful to families from all different cultures, religious backgrounds and family structures? If the event never came back, who would care?
What is it for? Is this event developing skills in students, fostering connections for families or deepening relationships among the staff? What is the purpose of this tradition or ritual? If you can’t clearly articulate the purpose, maybe it needs to be creatively destroyed.
Who can be a part of this tradition? Who can’t? Is this only accessible to families who don’t work? Is it open to non-traditional family structures? Does the event cost money? Is that price a barrier for some members of the community to attend? How else might this tradition exclude participation? Who is being excluded?
Do we need this event? What would school look like if you just didn’t have this event? What is the underlying need this event is attempting to address? Are there other, better, ways to meet that need?
What is the ROI of this event? The investment of time in a school is usually the greatest investment. And we always hear from our community cries of “we don’t have enough time.” So is this event taking up that value resource? Is it worth the time investment of both the planners and the participants?
If you want to go a step further, imitate professional designers and create a series of parent, student and staff personas that make up members of your school community. Walk through those events through the lens of those personas. Do they still make sense? Are they inclusive? Are they exclusive? Do they foster meaningful relationships and connection, and not just for the dominant and mainstream members of the community, but for those on the margins.
You now have almost two full Mays where many events have been cancelled. Many members of your community have no recollection of those events - maybe they never experienced them or even knew they took place. Leverage this moment as you create your calendar for next year and use discipline, discernment and some creativity to create an inclusive, intentional and manageable calendar for your year.
