School royalty. Lords and Ladies of the school house. The concept of school royalty seems incongruous with public education. Yet, schoolhouse royalty does exist and it exists in every school. Ask any person who has spent significant time in a contemporary school organization and that person can tell you who the royal people are. Do you know them?
By definition, royalty can be conferred by the rank, status, power authority connected with a monarchy. Excluding students and staff with the family names of “King”, or “Duke”, or “Royal”, this type of royalty does not exist in our schools. Short of “the royal family”, there are some who think of themselves a royalty. Every school may have their prima donna children or the “entitled” sons and daughters of affluent residents. But, these are not the real school royalty. Also, school royalty are not elected or appointed, such as members of the Board of Education or school administration. Royal is not the person; it is about the person.
School royalty can be discerned by identifying those who receive the “royal treatment” of the utmost respect and esteem because of what they do and not because of who they are. Royalty is earned by the exceeding excellence of one’s work and bestowed by those who understand the difference between just accomplishing the work and accomplishing more than the work.
School secretaries, head custodians and the school cook have the longest legacies of royal treatment. Not all secretaries, head custodians and cooks are created equal; there is a world of difference within each group. However, children, parents, and teachers know which secretaries love their school and which love their jobs. Mrs. P loved her school. She had a good life outside of school, but when she was in her school, she was a surrogate parent for every child, an aide to every teacher, a resource for every parent, and her principal’s “back up.” On your worst day, she gave you her best smile and an ear to onload your woes into so that when you felt better you could then do what needed to be done.
Mr. Y’s kids attended his high school; he was the building engineer. He once confided that every day he attempted to treat each student as his child, every teacher as his brother or sister, and every parent as his mother and father. He succeeded so often that students, faculty and parents spoke of the high school as “his school.” When he received a phone call at home on Sunday because a child forgot a homework assignment in her locker, that child not only said “thank you, Mr. Y” when he met her at the school door, she hand delivered home baked cookies each day for the following week.
Mrs. K ran the food service. More important than her knowing the ingredients of every recipe was her knowing every child by name. Going to the cafeteria was more than going to lunch for most children, it was being greeted by name and talking with a woman who would stop the serving line until you looked up into her smile. And, this went on year after year. If a child was ill, she knew it and she welcomed him back to school. If a child picked at her food, she prepared different foods to find what she liked and then served it regularly. Kids loved her baking almost as much as they loved the baker.
Today there is a new member of the school royalty. You can tell by the way others treat him. He seldom stands still because his daily “to do” list grows by the minute. He is always on the move and when he comes to you, you immediately feel a sense of relief because he is able to fix most problems and make the things you rely on work. His title is “technology specialist”, but he is part screwdriver repairman, part architectural wizard, and part empirical visionary.
In the last century, school technology was the stepchild of the school librarian or media specialist. If you could make clear transparencies, coordinate the filmstrip and tape cassette of a DuKane projector, and keep your new collection of floppy disks in order, you were the school’s tech person. Today’s tech leader is scary, because he speaks “geek” with student gamers, can find lost files in the Cloud, reset the school’s clocks, schedule the exterior door security locks from his notebook or tablet, search the hallway and campus cameras for small time miscreants, and foresee the future of a three-purchasing cycle in which most of today’s computer system already is obsolete.
These people are school royalty and they deserve a very royal treatment. They are not placeholders of inherited insignificance, but the everyday Joes and Janes whose work makes every boy feel like a prince and every girl like a princess.