How to create the perfect principal entry plan [Part 6 of 6]

A great school year doesn’t happen by accident—this chapter shows you how to design your first 90 days with purpose, joy, and momentum that lasts all year.

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Part 6: Build Your Perfect 90-Day Entry Plan

Remember your vision for Day 91 that you wrote down in Part 1?

Go back to it now that you’ve read more about each of the five buckets, and revise it to include new ideas you’ve learned. Your hopes for how your school will make people feel might be the same, but ideally, you now have more specific actions and ideas to add to it.

In this chapter, we’re going to talk about how to make that vision a reality.

Pacing Your 90-Day Entry Plan

If you try to tackle all five buckets at full speed every day for the first 90 days, you will burn out long before Thanksgiving. Instead, you need to divide those 90 days into meaningful and strategic checkpoints that you’ll be building your plan around:

• Before school starts

• Day 1

• Week 1

• Month 1

• Month 2

• Month 3

• At each of these strategic checkpoints, you’ll be asking yourself:

• What do I want to accomplish in this time period?

• What aspects of the five buckets am I implementing?

• How will I communicate this focus to everyone in the school?

• How will I keep score and measure progress?

This new scaffolding might be an adjustment from what you’re used to. John Unger, principal at West Fork Middle School, shared that at first, it was difficult for him to envision what school should look like 60 or 90 days out—but by starting with specific actions before school started and scaffolding up from there, he was able to scale each of the five buckets seamlessly and communicate the new vision to his team in a way that made sense for everyone.