One glorious June day in Seattle, children's laughter and teachers' voices interrupted my computer work in my office. I paused to listen.
I had been principal of Montlake Elementary School for six good years. Despite mistakes, the community, staff, and children had been patient, and we had made important changes together. Students were now grouped according to interests, special projects, or skills rather than the date of their birth. Teachers worked in teams, planning, organizing the curriculum around themes, and improving their own teaching skills and strategies. Handicapped and gifted labels had disappeared, and class sizes had been reduced by 10. Yes, Montlake and I had both changed.
Now I was leaving the school and the people I loved to take up a different challenge. The voices beyond my office walls held a special poignancy.
As I turned back to the computer and the struggle of reducing the complexities of a school to a few words for the new principal, two students walked into my office. “Can you come see what we're doing?” they asked.
Yes! Eagerly! I loved sharing the kids' work.
The students led me outside, and there, in a circle on the playground, sat all the students in the school. In the circle's center stood a high stool with a “red carpet” (red butcher paper, of course) leading up to it. I was escorted to the seat of honor, a little embarrassed and completely surprised. Smiling faces looked up at me. Children's voices whispered in anticipation. One of the teachers stepped forward and made a short speech of explanation: they had planned a special good bye.
Each class was grouped around the butterfly houses that I had thought they were carefully tending for the science extravaganza we were holding in a few days. We had watched together as awkward caterpillars had gone into their cocoons and later struggled out as beautiful butterflies. We had worried about the sugar water we fed them and about the occasional butterfly that didn't unfurl its wings properly or kept losing its balance and falling into the sugar water.
Many times I had thought of the analogy between the butterflies and our work in the school. What happens to those of us who don't quite develop that last wing or who keep falling into the water? And what about the metamorphosis of the school itself? After all our falling and struggling, were we strong enough for the next challenge?
By the time each class had recited a poem it had written, shared a story, or given an original salute using the theme of growth and change and leaving, I had stopped struggling to hold back the tears that spilled down my face.
As the kindergarten class finished its poem, all the classes opened their butterfly houses, and the entire school began to sing the Whitney Houston song, “One Moment in Time”: Each day I live, I want to be, a day to give the best of me. I'm only one, but not alone, my finest day, is yet unknown....all of my dreams are a heartbeat away, and the answers are all up to me....
Two hundred fifty children's voices rose above the chain link fence, the portables in need of painting, the scruffy tetherballs, and the faded lines marking the baseball diamond. Two hundred fifty butterflies left their narrow houses, fluttering freely over upturned, smiling faces.
After the kids had gone home for the summer, and the bright artwork had been removed from the walls, I walked the halls, a ritual I had started my first year as a principal. Change, growth, and leaving. We let go of what is for what may be. Even as we relish new adventures, we grieve for what is left behind. But even empty hallways are filled with dreams, with children's laughter, with possibilities.
Since I left Montlake, I have fallen into the sugar water many times and have had to crawl out and dry my wings. But some things never change. I still cry when I see butterflies dancing freely on a spring breeze.
