Remember Who You Are

It's a Wednesday afternoon and I'm standing on the sideline of my daughter's field hockey practice.

Nothing special is happening. Cones on the grass, a coach's whistle, a dozen kids learning to move the ball without looking down. A few parents along the fence. And I'm doing the thing I've done at almost every practice this fall: counting who isn't here.

Not the kids. The adults. Specifically, the educators I know are sitting at a kitchen table right now, or in an empty classroom, finishing the IEP that didn't fit into the school day. The ones who will hear about today's practice at dinner, if they make it home for dinner.

I've told this story before, so I'll keep it short. Years ago I was leading special education for a district, and I spent a night at my own kitchen table trying to figure out which of my providers were drowning and which just looked fine on paper.

I couldn't tell. We had caseload numbers, plenty of them. What we didn't have was any picture of workload: the actual hours this job takes, spread across actual people. So I was guessing. With people's careers, and with kids' services.

That night is the real reason PULSE exists.

I watched the Lion King the other night with my family. There's a scene where Simba, a long way from home, sees his father, Mufasa, in the clouds and hears four words: “remember who you are”.

I've been thinking about that scene since watching it last week. Building PULSE has been the hardest thing I've ever done, and somewhere in the building I started to forget that I'm a coach and a mentor before I'm anything else. I've coached my whole life. I captained a Division 1 team. I led people through hard years in schools. That's who I am, and it's who I'm walking back toward, in public, starting now.

Standing on that sideline is part of how I remember.

This week I read a highly insightful piece by Renee Beauregard-Bennett, a district leader in New Hampshire, about a ballot question there that would cap how fast local school property taxes can grow. She isn't telling anyone how to vote, but her insight is on-point. What stopped me was her description of how budget pressure actually lands inside a school system.

It isn't one dramatic cut. It's a position left unfilled. An intervention offered a little less often. A counselor with a heavier caseload. A family that waits longer for an answer. Each one looks survivable on its own, and she calls the sum of them what it is: death by a thousand cuts. She also names what every director already knows: once the fixed costs are paid, "Often, the largest remaining expense is people."

Here's what I kept thinking. Every one of those cuts shows up as workload. And workload is the one thing our budgets don't measure.

When nobody can see workload, every cut looks like it costs nothing. The position goes unfilled, the spreadsheet balances, and the hours move to someone's evenings, usually the most conscientious person in the building. Next year, because she absorbed it, the need looks smaller than it is.

If I could wave a magic wand, this is what I'd change: I'd want every funding conversation, from a school committee meeting all the way up to a state funding formula, to start from what the work actually takes: hours, not headcount. That's the long game for PULSE. One district's honest picture of its workload is useful to that district. A few hundred of them start to look like evidence strong enough to change how special education gets funded.

We're not there yet. But that's the direction, and it's the same direction the sideline points.

Before your next budget conversation, pick one position that might go unfilled, or one service that might shrink. Write down where its hours will actually land. Whose caseload, whose prep period, whose evenings.

Bring that list into the room. It won't win every argument. But it changes the question from "can we absorb this?" to "who absorbs this?", and that's a much more honest place to start.

If you've watched a budget cut land on your team this way, or you've been the one absorbing it, I’d love to hear about it.

-Eric

P.S. Renee's full piece is worth your time, so I wanted to link it again here: The Death of a Public School by a Thousand Cuts.