Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Each time I have experienced a transition in my career I often ask, "Should I stay or should I go?" There were always a million reasons I could think of for staying, but in the back of my mind I always knew that the next opportunity was going to push me out of my comfort zone and help me grow. Eventually, choosing to leave always seemed to work out for the best, even when there were days where I questioned my thought process and rationale for leaving.

When I made the decision to accept a district leadership position a couple of years ago, it was because I had just finished a doctoral degree that was very much aligned with the transformation and innovation that this job required. Most of my mentors warned me about the difficulty this job would entail, but I have never been one to shy away from a challenge. The new job was designed around a project that was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity for an educator! The project, if successful, had a really good chance of preventing the achievement and opportunity gap from forming in the first place. Then, COVID struck and what was going to be a normally difficult position turned into an insurmountable challenge. Around this time I began to feel very tired, but I chalked it up to being tired from all of the work our team was doing to design this very innovative school in the middle of COVID. Never did I imagine that my exhaustion was due to the breast cancer that was forming and later diagnosed.

"Should I stay or should I go?" In this case, I did not have a choice. Cancer was making me go. So, for the first time in my career I took a year off from work. My full time job became survival. I am an eternal dot connector and thrive on reflecting, so I began to pass the time during chemo and radiation treatments connecting how the education sector overlapped and differentiated from the medical sector. How did hospital teams operate in comparison to school teams? How did medical teams help their patients thrive as compared to how teachers help their students thrive?

I survived breast cancer and I couldn't wait to go back to work and be around students, teachers and principals once again, but things had changed. The district leadership team had undergone a transition and the innovative elements and teaming that had attracted me to this district were no longer there. "Should I stay or should I go?" was pondered once again.

According to EdWeek, I was not alone in pondering whether I should stay or go. EdWeek found that 1 in 10 public school principals left the profession between 2020-21 and 2021-2022. Principals who left cited that they needed more support from their school districts, connection to peers, and a sense of community with the teachers to help them face post-pandemic challenges at school. The interesting part, is that the principals who left in higher rates were not the new principals, but rather principals who has been in their careers for more than ten years.

I ended up deciding that I was not ready to leave education, but I did need to leave the school district where I worked. What made this move scary, was that this time I did not have another job to transition to. Luckily, I had the resources to make a decision to take a self-imposed sabbatical while I figured out my next step. For this sabbatical I set some ground rules for myself:

1. Set up a schedule for learning about the latest trends in education leadership.

2. Take lots of notes on what I am learning or unlearning. Reflect on how this learning aligns with the work I have done as an educator. How might this learning influence what I want to do after my sabbatical?

3. I can work during this sabbatical, but only on projects I truly feel passionate about. All other projects will be declined.

4. Use this sabbatical to fully heal from my cancer journey. I was in such a hurry to get away from hospitals and doctors' offices that I probably went back to work before I could fully heal.

5. I will create a blog to keep myself accountable. Hence, the creation of Sabbaticalize to capture my learning, reflections, and musings and share them with aspiring education leaders, school principals, and district leaders.

6. I will give myself up to six months for this self-imposed sabbatical. At that time, I will decide what my next step will be.

So, I hope you will join me on my journey so we may sabbaticalize together and come up with ways to transform schooling and outcomes for the students in our public school systems.

Here's to Sabbaticalizing,

Adriana Chavarín-López