Paul Harrell

Somebody once asked me how I built an athletic program instead of just a good season. Honest answer? I never did. I wish I had. I moved too much. It is one of the things I never got to do.

That regret is the reason True North exists. I build processes for schools now because I never got to build my own program in one place. Fifty years of starting over at school after school taught me something a long tenure never could: how to walk into a school I have never seen and know within a week what is actually wrong with it. Not what the board thinks is wrong. Not what the survey says. What is wrong.

You know what? The pattern is almost always the same. And it is almost never the thing they called me about.

When a school calls me, I ask for three numbers before anything else. Your last two years of 990s. Your student retention percentage. And your faculty and staff retention percentage. Not faculty. Faculty and staff.

Those three numbers show me a school that is healthy or a school that is upside down. People think a school is doing great, but if faculty turnover is too high, if there is a revolving door of staff, that school is in a death spiral. Maybe it is the head. Maybe it is something else. But that is the tell.

I built a free self-assessment around those numbers and the two other checks I run on every school. Get the School Health Check and run it on your own school this week.

I spent most of fifty years in and around classrooms. Calculus was my favorite. It was an art. Did I understand it all? No. Did the lessons get better every year? Yes.

Here is what those years taught me about teachers, and it is the center of how I coach heads of school now. When you stand in the back of a classroom, you will see one of two things: love pouring out, or ego pouring out. Tell them to choose love. Good teachers die because they are not appreciated, because they are micromanaged, because somebody tried to put them in a box. There are no boxes for teachers.

So I tell heads: you are the roots. You provide the nutrients. The teachers do the work. Encourage them, do not just evaluate them. If you walk into a class and see something wrong, do not correct it right there. Ask about it later, out of love. Every person in a school, from the newest teacher to the board chair, wants to be led, wants to get better, and wants to know that what they do matters. A good head teaches that it matters.

After fifty years, school leaders keep asking me the same three questions. How do I get out of this? How do I develop myself and get better? And, do I even want to do this? It is hard. It does not pay that well.

Those questions are why head of school coaching is at the middle of True North. The job is lonely by design. You cannot share most of it with your spouse, and you cannot share it with your staff. So here is the sanity order I give every head: God, family, job, intact, no matter what. If you have problems at home, fix them at home. Problems with faith, go see a pastor. Problems with the job, talk to people about it out loud. And know this: nothing can be fixed at four in the morning, except you get more tired.

Somebody on a plane asked me what I do. I serve God by helping people who want to be helped. I serve students who want an education and cannot speak for themselves.

True North works with Christian K-12 schools on marketing and enrollment, strategic planning, boards, money, hiring, and turnarounds. It is all one practice, run from truenorthchristianadvisors.com and led by the person whose name is on the door. I work with heads of school who are carrying the job alone. You are supposed to know every answer, be the smartest person in the room, and never be out of control. The truth is all three fail you at some point. Leading a school can be lonely. I offer an experienced listening ear and thoughtful support for the decisions you face.

Here is what I want said about True North when it is all over: they had a heart for people, and they never let it go. They were fair, knowledgeable, honest, and they always underpromised and overdelivered.

The board chair who stood beside me through the hardest year of one turnaround wrote about it in her own words, and that letter is published with her school's permission on the Turlock Christian School case study.