45 Retirement Wishes for a Principal (Name a Decision, Not a Quality)

Name a decision, not a quality

You were an inspiring leader is not a message. It's a job title with an adjective stuck on the front, and by the time the card reaches the middle of the staff room there will be six of them sitting in a row.

Decisions are the actual unit of this job. A principal builds a timetable that suits four hundred people slightly badly instead of forty people very well. They lose a budget argument and then choose which thing dies. They deal with a situation involving one family that nobody in the building will ever hear about, and then carry it around for eleven years. None of that goes on a plaque.

So the line that gets kept is the one that names a call they made. You kept the music programme the year something had to go, and I have a fair idea what that cost you. You moved the start time twenty minutes later and took eight months of complaints for it, and my son has eaten breakfast every day since. Those are cards. You have been such a wonderful leader is fine, and it's also what the plaque already says.

You're allowed not to know the details. I don't know what you gave up to keep that programme, but I noticed it survived is an honest sentence, and it lands harder than most of what will be written in that card.

One rule to hold on to for now: write about the work, not the person. Everybody at the assembly will do the person. The work is the part nobody names. (I say principal throughout because that is the word most people type. If yours is a head teacher, a headmistress or a rector, none of this changes.)

From a teacher who worked under them for years

You have watched a whole arc of decisions, which almost nobody else signing this card has. Pick the one that changed your working week and say what it changed. Cover arrangements. Planning time. Whether you got backed up in the room with an angry parent, or found out afterwards that you had not been.

It's tempting to write as though you were their student. You weren't. You were staff, and staff gratitude sounds different: it's about conditions rather than inspiration. If the person retiring taught rather than led, the material in retirement wishes for a teacher fits better than this page does.

• Twenty-two years and I never once had to guess where you stood on a parent complaint. You backed us in the room and told us privately afterwards. The order of those two things is the whole job.
• You protected our planning time every single year the district came looking for it. Nobody outside this building knows what that was worth.
• I was in the meeting where you argued for the aide funding and lost. I never told you I was glad you argued.
• You told me my ninth grade unit plan was not good enough. Eleven years in, and you were the first person to say it out loud.
• Sixteen years. Not one broken promise about cover.

From a teacher they hired

A hiring decision is a decision, and it is one of the very few a principal makes that the person on the other end can actually see happening. If they picked you out of a stack, say so. It is the most concrete thing you have.

This card is easier when you're newer, because you aren't dragging nine years of small grievances into it. Use that while you have it. The three year teacher often writes the warmest honest thing in the pile.

• You hired me with a two year gap on my resume and never asked me about it again.
• You gave me the job over people with more experience, and then spent my entire first year making sure I knew why.
• Three years in, I still repeat the sentence you said in my interview about what a school is actually for.
• You took the chance. It worked. Thank you.

From the office, the custodians, the kitchen and the aides

"I knew about three weeks before the staff did." Office people always do, and they are also the people who somehow end up being handed the card when it is already three quarters full.

That's backwards. The front desk saw the parents who arrived shouting and left calm. The custodian knows which nights the office light stayed on until eleven. The kitchen manager knows who came down and served when they were two staff short in January. Between them they hold more of the real job than the teaching staff does, and in my experience they write shorter and better sentences about it.

I said at the top to write about the work rather than the person. The best line in the last principal card I saw came from a custodian and had no work in it at all: you said good morning to me first, every morning, for nine years. No decision. Nothing you could put in a newsletter. He kept that card and I know which drawer it is in. I haven't worked out a rule that covers both of those, and I'm not going to pretend I have.

• You learned all our names in the first two weeks and you used them in front of parents.
• When the pipe went in February you came down to the boiler room instead of emailing about it, and you were still there at eleven with the rest of us.
• Twelve years on this desk and you are the only one who asked me what I thought before changing the front office hours.
• You paid the overtime. On time. Every time.
• I never once had to chase you for a signature, and after four principals I can tell you that is not normal.

The people who knew the job best often found it hardest to work for them

Somebody in that staff room spent nine years disagreeing with this person and is now holding a pen over a blank card, trying to manufacture a warmth they don't feel. That person is also, awkwardly, the one best placed to write something true. Being close to the job is not the same as being fond of the person doing it, and a card signed by fifty people will contain both kinds of signature whether anybody admits it or not.

I worked the front counter of a middle school in Sedalia, Missouri for a bit over two years. The principal, Ardis Hollowell, was not easy. She was short with people before nine in the morning and she rewrote things you had already finished. One spring she redrew the morning bus loop so that a single stop moved four blocks east, which made two other routes about eleven minutes longer, and the phone did not stop for a month. I transferred somewhere north of thirty of those calls to her office. She gave a reason to none of them. The reason, which I got from the transport clerk two years after I had left, was one seventh grader who had been standing alone every morning outside a house he had good cause not to stand outside of. She took a month of parents shouting at her rather than say that out loud, because saying it out loud would have identified him inside a day.

I still wouldn't call her a pleasure to work for. I'd write her a card.

So if that's roughly where you are standing: don't perform. A retiring principal has read a great deal of hired warmth and can see the seams from the doorway. Write the respect you actually have, which is usually about competence, or stamina, or one specific call they got right when you were certain they were wrong. One sentence naming the friction, one naming the respect, then stop. This is not the place to relitigate the phone policy.

And if there's genuinely nothing there, sign your name and pass it on. A signature is not a failure. Four sentences of borrowed feeling is worse than a signature, and it is the single thing in this card that everybody can spot at a glance. The same trap sits inside a retirement card for a boss, except a boss has usually not spent thirty years being the one who has to say no.

• I disagreed with you about nearly everything and I would still put my own kids in a school you ran.
• You made the calls nobody wanted and you never once asked us to like them. I came round on the timetable eventually. It took four years.
• We didn't always get on. You were straight with me every single time, which is more than I can say for most people I have got on with.
• I thought you were wrong about the phones. My students have read more this year than in any year I have taught. I'm not going to pretend I saw that coming.
• Hard to work for. Easy to respect. Go well.

From a parent

Most parents met the principal two or three times, usually because something had gone wrong. That is not a weakness in your card, it is the material. You saw them on their worst sort of day, doing the part of the job that never gets described anywhere.

If you only ever passed them in the car line, keep it to one sentence and resist padding it out. Everybody can tell the difference between a parent with something to say and a parent filling the box.

• We met twice, both times because of something my son had done, and both times you talked about him like a person rather than an incident.
• You rang me back the same day in October when I was not being reasonable, and you let me finish.
• You kept the after school club going when the funding went. That club is the reason my daughter has friends.
• Four years, one crisis, and you were exactly where you said you would be.

From a student

Students mostly know the principal from assemblies, the corridor, and being sent to the office, which is a strange basis for a thank you card and also a completely honest one. Say the real thing. The office ones tend to be the best.

• You were the only adult in this building who didn't sound annoyed when I got sent to you.
• Thank you for letting me eat lunch in your office in ninth grade when I couldn't handle the cafeteria. You never made it a big thing.
• You knew my name and I am not one of the loud ones.
• Good luck. Sorry about the fire alarm.

From a former student writing years later

These come late. A week after the assembly, sometimes a year, usually by email and usually out of nowhere. They get read twice as well, because a former student holds the one thing nobody still in the building has, which is how it turned out.

• I'm thirty-one and I still use what you said to me in the corridor about how to apologise properly.
• You suspended me in 2009 and you were right to, and in the same conversation you told my mother I was not a bad kid. I have thought about that a lot since I had my own.
• I didn't thank you then, because I was fifteen, and fifteen year olds don't thank anybody.
• You won't remember me. I was the one who set the science lab curtains on fire in the spring of 2011. I run a lab now, which I find funny and you may not.

From the board, the superintendent, or another principal

Board and district messages list the tenure, then the initiatives, then the word tirelessly, and end up reading like a press release somebody signed at the bottom. Name one thing that was difficult and say plainly that it was difficult. Another principal can do this better than anybody, because they know precisely which parts of the job are unpleasant and how few people ever get told about them.

• You took a school on its third leader in four years and gave it eleven years of the same name at the bottom of the letters.
• You are the person I rang the first time I had to exclude a child, and you stayed on the phone with me for fifty minutes on a Sunday.
• Twenty-nine years. Two districts. One standard.

From the deputy who is about to inherit the job

This is the hardest card in the pile and the shortest one to write, because you are the only person signing who knows precisely what you are thanking them for. Do not write a tribute. Write what you learned from watching and what you are going to need. A farewell message to a manager has the same shape, minus the part where you take their office.

• Six years watching this job up close and I'm still not certain I want it, which I suspect is the correct way to feel about it.
• You never let me watch you decide alone. I know what that cost you in hours.
• I will ring you the first time I get it badly wrong. Please answer.

Short lines for the card the whole staff room signs

A card going round eighty people needs lines that survive being the fortieth one read. Short, specific to this building, no adjectives doing the heavy lifting. If two people above you have already written thank you for everything, write something with a noun in it.

There is also a space problem. When the card is passed by hand, the people at the end of the loop get whatever margin is left, and the end of the loop is usually the site team. That is one honest argument for doing it as a group card with multiple signatures instead, where nobody has to write small.

• Thank you for the timetable. All of them.
• You built this. Enjoy the Tuesdays.
• Nineteen years, one building, no shortcuts.
• Whoever gets your parking space has a lot to live up to.
• From the whole science corridor: thank you for winning the ventilation argument.

Lines that get read out at an assembly

Anything read aloud to six hundred children has to work at volume and survive being heard exactly once. One idea, numbers left in, and cut anything that needs a pause to land. Naming specific staff is fine. Staff room in-jokes are not, and neither is anything that requires the audience to know what a budget line is.

• You have been the principal for every year I have been at this school, so I've never known it with anybody else in that office.
• On behalf of the staff: you never once asked us to do something you weren't already doing yourself.
• Thank you for the last eleven Septembers.

Turn it into a group card

A principal's send off has a scale problem most retirement cards don't. Staff, the office and site teams, the board, a couple of hundred families, and every student who ever got sent to that office all have some claim on it, and no physical card in a manila envelope holds that.

A kudos board with unlimited signers takes the volume without a phone tree or a card doing laps of the building for three weeks. One link, sent wide, each person writing their own line in their own time. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, set delivery for the morning of the last day, and let a former student who heard about it from a parent add something from three states away.

If you want the general shape before you start, what to write in a retirement card covers the career arc version that works for any long service send off.

Practical bit, then. Before that link goes to the staff distribution list, walk it down to the front office, the custodial closet and the kitchen, and give those people two days on their own with it. They are the ones the distribution list always misses, and they have the best material in the building.