We Ask Schools to Tell Their Story, Then Side-Eye Leaders Who Tell Theirs

At one point in my district, whispers and complaints came back that I was “too famous.”

I led technology for a small district in rural northeast Indiana. We didn’t get the calls the biggest districts get. But by the time I left, I had chaired the Indiana CTO Council and was serving on CoSN’s national board.

None of that happened by staying quiet.

If you lead in a small district, you’ve probably watched leaders from bigger systems get the invitations, the pilots, and the seats at the table, and wondered how anyone gets there from where you sit. Mostly, they tell their story (on top of the visibility large districts bring). And the minute you start telling yours, someone in the hallway starts wondering what you’re after.

We don’t treat that the same way when a district does it. Picture a conference session on school storytelling. A district leader walks the room through how her team turns everyday wins into posts, newsletters, and board updates. People take pictures of her slides. Someone asks for the template.

A month later, she posts the same framework on LinkedIn with her own name and story attached. The comments stay quiet. The hallway doesn’t. What is she going for? Where is she headed next? How long will she stay?

Same framework. Same leader. The only thing that changed was whose story it was.

The French teacher with a PR campaign

Long before anyone called it branding, I was running a one-woman PR campaign for my French program. I had French 2, 3, and 4 crammed into one period at a rural high school in Bryan, Ohio, and if I didn’t tell people what those students were doing, nobody would.

The hallway bulletin boards mapped every city in Ohio with French-speaking roots, along with our biggest trading partners (many of them in Canada). We cooked something for every unit. French 3 and 4 took an annual pétanque field trip wearing class T-shirts the students designed themselves. And every year, I sent letters to the middle school full of photos and quotes from my current students, so eighth graders could hear about French from someone their own age instead of from me.

Nobody whispered about that. A teacher talking up her program was just being a good teacher. It meant more students signing up, and more kids in a small town believing the French-speaking world had room for them.

Somewhere between the classroom and the district office, the rules changed.

In Isn’t That Just Bragging?, I wrote about the humility trap that keeps leaders quiet. This post is about what happens when they speak up anyway.

One double standard, two suspicions

We tell districts to tell their story. We hire communications directors, coach principals to post wins, and build whole conference strands around it. Every one of those sessions makes the same case: people support what they understand, and silence leaves room for someone else to tell your story for you.

Then an individual leader does the same thing, and two suspicions show up. Either she’s marketing herself, or she’s chasing something bigger. Usually money. Sometimes a bigger district. Either way, the assumption is that the story is for her.

Both suspicions come from the same double standard. We trust the institution to share its story for the right reasons, and we doubt the person who does the exact same thing.

Was it helping our schools?

I’ll be honest. Underneath “too famous” was a real question: how was any of this helping our schools?

It was a fair question with a long answer.

Being known in the field meant preferred pricing and better support from vendors who knew we’d talk about how they treated us. It meant early access to new products and features, and first word on grants and opportunities. It meant learning alongside some of the best leaders in education and bringing those ideas home to our community. Any district would want that. For a small district that doesn’t get the calls the largest districts get, it changed what was possible for our students and teachers.

And yes, I left. I sit on the corporate side now, which is not lost on me. That opportunity came because people knew my work, so I won’t pretend visibility had nothing to do with it. That’s the double edge. The same visibility that brought so much back to my district also opened a door I never set out to look for.

A door opening is not the same as a plan to leave.

The myth of edu-fame as an exit plan

Plenty of visible leaders do end up in larger districts or on the company side. Visibility creates options for anyone who has it. What we miss is everything it brings back while that leader is still in the seat, because it rarely looks like a headline. It looks like a better contract, a grant someone heard about early, or a teacher trying something new because her director met the person who built it.

When we treat every leader who shares as someone halfway out the door, we teach the rest of them to stay quiet. Quiet leaders bring home a lot less.

The whisperers aren’t villains

Most of the speculation comes from a decent place. “How long will she stay?” is often a worry about losing someone people value. Staff have watched good leaders leave before. Wondering where you’re headed next can be a compliment wrapped in nerves.

That doesn’t make the whispers easy to hear. It does make them easier to answer. Keep sharing, and keep showing who benefits.

This week’s proof

Last week, my friend Stacy Hawthorne’s new book, Purposeful Technology, Powerful Learning: You Can’t Ban Possibility, came out. It has a whole chapter on my former student tech team, the High Tech Hornets.

Those students are in a published book because we kept telling their story. Their work is now reaching educators I’ll never meet, at a time when so much of the conversation about students and technology is about what to take away.

This week, my podcast conversation with Jeremy Hill and his student tech team went live. Same lesson, different district. Jeremy shared what his students were building, and now more leaders get to learn from them.

In both stories, the students are the ones who got seen.

One question before you hold back

If you’ve been sitting on a story because you’re worried about how it will look, try one question before you decide: Who benefits when I share this?

If the answer includes your students, your teachers, your community, or another leader trying to solve the same problem, share it. That’s the same reason we ask districts to tell their story in the first place.
The framework works the same when your name is on it. So does the good it does.

The Quiet by Default series: Part 1: K-12 Technology Leaders Are Built to Be Invisible · Part 2: More Than a Job Title · Part 3: Isn’t That Just Bragging? · Part 4: you’re here