“Attaching Stories to People”: Dr. Fine’s Superpower as a Principal

I’ve never been to the principal's office before. During my first visit, the unmistakable feeling in my stomach was the specific strain of dread I’ve come to associate with administrators. I’m not too sure when this fear started, but now that I’ve met our new principal, I do know when it’s ending. 

While tucked in the far corner of the HS Office, sitting in the new (squeak-less!) wheelie-chairs in his large office, Dr. Darnell Fine expresses his hope in a more centrally-located office than years past. Though the floor-to-ceiling windows are neat, he wants the location of his office to be representative of his open-door policy. This is his “classroom,” as he sees it, and wants students to “feel safe enough to say, 'Hey, can we have a conversation? I want to talk about this.'".  

I’m here to learn more about his hopes for the high school as he takes on the role of principal. After our talk, I leave his office with an (uncharacteristic) pep in my step and—even wilder—a sense of optimism for the remainder of my days at SAS. I realize that we must grapple with the strength of Dr. Fine’s hopes against the weight of our fears. 

Dr. Fine is a familiar face to many in our community; he started out at SAS as a social studies teacher in middle school, eventually becoming the deputy principal, before joining us here in high school. In the extremely likely chance you’ve interacted with Dr. Fine since the beginning of the school year, you might’ve clocked his insane ability to remember anyone’s name. He describes the trick of his secret superpower as “attaching stories to people” through experience and interaction; it’s about “figuring out what students care about and really remembering them” for it.

Dr. Fine notes “a sort of fear” that students have expressed towards administrators, which he discovered in a number of focus groups with recent alumni. That fear, he says, can create “a relationship dynamic that isn’t totally healthy” between students and leadership. It’s the fundamental fear of not knowing where you stand, if your voice is valuable, or if the adults in the building see you. Dr. Fine acknowledges “a lot of trust that needs to be rebuilt based on some of the systems we were adhering to as a school last year.”

“We can't tell students we care deeply about [them] and then ignore them when we see them in the hallway,” he says. Similarly, “we can't tell students we deeply care about [their] learning” when “we're not in classrooms actually seeing what the learning looks like and asking them questions.” As students, we won’t see that the adults in the building actually care about what we are doing if they aren’t showing up for us. He gets it. His hope is the kind of hope that “really affects change,” and the first step toward that change is to get to know students as people.

But SAS is a pressure cooker, where students must contend with what he calls a “tyranny of metrics.” We sometimes feel overwhelmed by mounting expectations from ourselves and our educators. Dr. Fine is calling for a shift in our values; he wants to cultivate a “culture of belonging” for both students and faculty, championing “psychological safety” for our educators and the freedom for students to “express their full selves.” He envisions a culture where our self-worth, and the self-worth of our teachers, isn’t “contingent on college admissions,” a culture where the adults in school are “proud of students, not simply because they get good grades.” As a graduate of Brown University, Dr. Fine understands the grind and value of ambition, but never “at the expense of our well-being and our health and our self-esteem” as individuals and as a community. 

The hope Dr. Fine brings to our school addresses our fears and works to overcome them. It’s a future we can all work towards.  He likens our situation as students to decolonization in India (bear with me now), explaining how “workers would throw down their tools and just not work, if they weren’t being responded to in a human way.”. “If the students ever decided that they were just going to have a sit-in in the hallway and not go to class,” he says, “the very foundation of our institution crumbles.” Students should hold high expectations for our leaders, who are here to “serve students,” and“be here for students,” and understand that they care about us.