What One Student Taught Me About Trust

A senior once sat across from me, frustrated. Three different adults had given him three different deadlines for his college applications.

"If you all can't agree on when my stuff is due," he said, "how am I supposed to trust that you know what you're doing?"

He wasn't wrong.

A student reads our inconsistency as evidence, not inconvenience.

When the adults in a building can't align on something as simple as a deadline, a student files that under a much bigger question: can I count on this place. Every mixed message becomes a small data point in an answer he's forming whether we notice or not.

Leaders and support staff often treat alignment as a courtesy — something considerate to do for each other. It's the actual infrastructure students are testing, every day.

If your students are getting three different answers to the same question, that's the trust deficit, showing up in real time.

Office hours are open if you want to talk through what that looks like in your building.

— The Principal School Counselor™