Planning Forward: Leading Arts and Athletics with Intention
A teacher grabs a folder and a lanyard from the sign-in table and finds a seat in the cafeteria. You stand at the front with a launch deck. You have a theme. You have priorities. For the next seven to ten days, you will power through workshops on literacy, data-driven instruction, school culture, and classroom management. The tone for the year will be set in this room. You crafted the year ahead in May and June planning meetings, leadership retreats, and curriculum sessions. The shape of the year was decided before a single teacher walked through the door. Academic teams have been planning and preparing throughout the summer. Coaching cycles have been mapped. Assessment windows are locked. The school improvement plan has goals and metrics, and action steps. This is your launch, and it’s personal.
Your arts teachers and coaches are in the room. The content and frameworks are academic, but they participate. They even take notes, because that is what performers do. They engage. They support the vision. And in this case, regardless of the relevance to their work. The coaches and artists in the mix have developed a sixth sense that filters through the haze of academic priorities to pull out what IS relevant, because it isn’t said directly. A coach overhears that the schedule has shifted. The practice block is 30 minutes shorter this year, which might seem small until you try to develop a team inside it. The music teacher opens the events calendar to find that the winter show has been scheduled during a spirit week, and the dance studio, which has been used as a storage room all summer, is stacked high with boxes of supplies and materials that won’t be sorted for weeks.
When a school builds its academic plan for the year, the process is thoughtful and specific. Leaders analyze student data. They set measurable goals. They align curricula to standards. They think about which teachers should be placed where and why. They plan professional development that connects to the instructional priorities they've identified. This is not casual. This is the serious work of school leadership.
When that same school turns its attention to arts and athletics, the planning becomes logistical. Can we align the arts blocks so 4th-grade teachers can co-plan? When do we have the gym? What's the game schedule? Where do we store the instruments? The thinking stops at operations. It rarely reaches instruction, and never reaches vision. Academics are designed. Arts and athletics get managed.
Teachers feel the difference. They feel it in August when the PD has nothing for them. They feel it in September when it’s clear the schedule caters to academic needs at the expense of arts and athletics. They feel it in October when a leader walks into their classroom with an observation rubric unrelated to their content. They feel it all year, quietly, in the distance between what the school says it values and how the school actually plans and executes on priorities.
This is not a call for school administrators to study or master the arts & athletics curricula so they can deliver PD. Teachers in these disciplines build their own programs. They craft their own curriculum. Strong arts and athletics educators will push back against any administrative overreach, and they should. The work is specialized. The content knowledge is deep. The pedagogy is different. But autonomy is not isolation.
The question is not whether these teachers can build strong programs in silo. Most of them do. The question is what gets lost when that is the norm. Coherence gets lost. The chance for your arts and athletics programs to reflect and reinforce the culture you spent all summer building gets lost. And something harder to name gets lost as well. Trust. The belief that leadership sees these programs as part of the school's identity and not just something that runs alongside it.
The conversations that will shape next year are happening right now. Vision work. Staffing. Scheduling. Culture priorities. Goal setting. The people running your arts and athletics programs know this. They know these conversations are happening, and they know they are not in them. The decision to change that is a small one. It does not require a new budget line or a restructured schedule. It requires a chair at the table and the recognition that those designing the programs where students perform, compete, and create are not peripheral to your school's vision. They are integral. Plan like it.
