Part 5: Toward a Geography of Trust

What drew me to Kathleen Corley’s book, The Magical Place We Call School was the resonance that the title had with the subtitle “Creating a Safe Space for Learning and Happiness in a Challenging World.” The title of the book, taken as a whole, contained both the words “place” and “space,” and they both referred to school. School was both a “magical place” and “a safe space,” or at least that is what to aim for. 

In the last blog about Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village we examined that there was a trend away from the notion of the school as a place and toward viewing it as a complex of spaces, and this trend seemed to parallel a shift from relational trust to contractual trust. So, upon reading Corley’s book I was looking for how she navigates these two terms as they relate to schools, and I was especially interested in adding detail to what is meant by “safe space” and whether or not Corley exhibits the same trend toward a spatial orientation to schools (as opposed to the more intimate orientation of place). 

Corley’s book begins with a preface about a special day in December at Red Cedar Elementary School in Bluffington, South Carolina. It is called “Stew Day.” Families, teachers, and administrators all pitch in bringing ingredients, using the activity to teach lesson plans on growing vegetables and using fractions to scale up recipes. Different communities with the school, such as the Mexican families, motivate the school to add different spices. The day ends with everyone eating together in one large family-style meal. What could be more intimate than this?

Added to this is the first part of the book titled “Building Bridges.” These bridges are of two kinds really, although she is explicit about only one of them. The first is the implicit bridges that Corley, as the principal, tries to build between the families and the school. Stew making is just one example of many. She actually visits students in their homes prior to their coming to Red Cedar, and this begins a relationship between the home and the school that runs through her work as the lead administrator and the school’s culture. The first part of the book focuses on understanding why students exhibit certain (mis)behaviors at the school. She cites many examples of how understanding a family’s situation sheds light on the behavior they exhibit in school. Just several pages into the book we are suddenly immersed in “Mathew’s Story,” in which Mathew pushed a fellow second grader right into an oncoming bus. No one was hurt. The behavior was shocking. Corley was able to tease out the why… it had to do with how often Mathew had switched schools and how painful it was to leave his friends each time, so, in this case he would not make any friends. Corley was then able to work with him but only after the full picture was clear. Once what was going on in Mathew’s life was clear, Corley was able to understand his behavior at school. Thus the first bridge is from the steps of the home to the steps of the school:

Mathew taught me that we, as a school community, need to know about the history of each new student so that we can preemptively head off potential problems and ease the transition into our school. In other words, we have to know the journey all our students have traveled in order to understand the baggage they carry. Otherwise we have no shot at understanding them. Put a different way, it’s not enough to chastise students for poor behavior. You must know why they behave the way they do and address the antecedents of their actions. (31)

This led to Corley citing an educator’s mantra, “Maslow before Bloom.” She writes:

It refers to the work of the pioneering twentieth-century psychologists Abrahm Maslow and Benjamin Bloom. The idea is that educators should meet students’ most basic needs for safety and belonging before turning to challenging academic tasks. 

Bloom ranked the complexity of cognitive abilities from lowest to highest in his taxonomy of educational objectives. These abilities are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. He believed a person develops intellectually through those levels, all the while building the capacity to grow in knowledge, attitude and skills. In the fields of education and psychology, the knowledge and comprehension stages of Bloom’s taxonomy has historically received the most attention. 

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs outlines five tiers of human requirements: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. It is easy to see that it would be nearly impossible for young children to function effectively in school without their physiological needs being met – food, water, shelter, clean air, sleep, exercise, and clothing at the very least. But not every student arrives at our door with even these needs fulfilled. Beyond that, each student must have a sense of safety and stability. The third tier, belonging, includes friendship, family, community, and connection. Esteem includes confidence, recognition, achievement, and respect. The last tier, self-actualization, is something that occurs when all the other needs are met. (30)

The most general tendency would be to associate Maslow with the home, and Bloom with the school. However, in Corley’s school, where the motto is “whatever it takes,” the school would often take on some of the responsibilities that were not being met in the households. Throughout the book, the home was in tension with the school as often as it was in support. Most of the cases and anecdotes discussed by Corley involved fixing a problem at home (providing books for the family, finding other single parents to help babysit each other's younger children, for example), or, if it was unfixable, making adjustments at the school to accommodate the insufficiencies at home (extra meals, tutoring, etc.). 

We have seen how the home can help with the Bloom end of the spectrum in Hillary Clinton’s discussion of reading aloud to children at home and, of course, in speaking to children with a wide range of vocabulary. The positive messaging Clinton discussed would also help support some of the Maslow elements, as opposed to constant criticism and negativity, not to mention abuse. The bridge from Maslow to Bloom is at the heart of the Magical Place that Corley believes a school can be. For the Magical Place to be magic, the bridge must be well maintained and kept free of jams. 

Corley was explicit in her use of the bridge metaphor when she discussed the case of Bryson. He was a fifth grader who was running in the hallway, but tried to lie and say that he wasn’t. But she had seen him running. Eventually, he admitted that he had been running and that he had lied about it. Corley led him through a process that required that he not only make amends for running in the hallway, but also that he write a reflection about his lying. Corley writes:

“Hey,” I said. “Why did you just do that?”

Quick to reply, he said, “I wasn’t doin’ nothing.”

I hate that phrase for a couple reasons, which became the gist of my conversation with him. “OK, here’s the thing,” I began. “First, let’s take care of the grammar. I believe you’re telling me that you were not doing anything. If that’s the case, you’d say, ‘I was doing nothing wrong’ or “I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Got that?”

He nodded in agreement. 

“So, you’re saying that you weren’t doing anything wrong, like running in the hallway?”

Another nod. 

I went on. “Next, we have the issue of what I saw you doing. That would be running in the hallway. I’m pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do that at your last school, and you likely know that you should not do it here. Is that accurate?”

He agreed. 

This step-by-step gentle reasoning – another technique for gaining leverage –leads a child to an inclination to comply with the rules. (44)

Corley went on the address the lying as well. The infraction (running in the hallway) was compounded by the bad grammar and the lying. When Corley began by addressing the bad grammar, she brought the infraction down from the realm of the universal code that was broken to a very particular, personal exchange between Bryson and her. By beginning with the grammar, the transgression becomes about building a relationship between the two of them beyond the specifics of the code of conduct. Corley is laying down the framework within which the two of them – principal and student – will interact. It was only after the student was assisted in elevating the formality of his discourse that the actual infraction was then addressed. What interests me in this exchange is the reference to Bryson’s previous school. Corley refers to it in such a way that makes the two schools – Bryson’s previous one and this one in Bluffington, South Carolina where Corley was a new principal –  similar to one another in that they all have a standard set of rules, such as not running in the hallway. The two schools therefore become equivalent places, each with the same rule about the hallways. In fact, I believe at this point, since we are talking about elsewhere in the past, it would be more appropriate to state that the two schools constitute equivalent spaces because they are separated by time and physical distance but equated with a universal code that governs elementary school spaces. Finally, the issue of lying is addressed, and the conversation moves to the personal and the particular… it moves to the realm of trust:

This step-by-step reasoning – another technique for gaining leverage – leads a child to understanding and thus to an inclination to comply with the rules. 

“So why did you choose not to tell me the truth? Lying is the big deal here, not running in the hallway…” (44)

After several more interactions with Corley, Bryson actually coached other students into admitting their infractions immediately rather than lying about them. Corley gives the account of the newer version of Bryson in the following way:

… another fifth grader came bounding around the corner even faster than Bryson had. When the boy saw me, he slowed to a walk, just as Bryson did, in an attempt to feign innocence. 

“Were you running in the hall?” I asked him. 

He began to shake his head, but then Bryson intervened. “Dude!” he said. “Just tell her you were running, because we already saw that you were, and she really doesn’t like that. And if you say it wrong, like with the wrong words, she doesn’t like that either. And, like, don’t lie.” (45)

We see the relational trust that has developed between Bryson and Corley, and how it is associated with what specifically Corley doesn’t like rather than school rules. Bryson has moved the rule out of the realm of the universal set of rules into the particular likes and dislikes of a trusted adult. Corley and the school become inseparable. Corley writes: “…However children present themselves to us, we as teachers and administrators need to build bridges in order to get them from where they are to where we need to go” (45). Thus the bridge goes two ways. First there is the unstated bridge Corley built between herself and Bryson, and then there is the explicit one from where the student is (presumably on Maslow and Bloom) to where they need to go. Her notion of bridges between individuals and between moments in time make the students, teachers, and administrators part of an abiding continuum. This is what she means when she calls her school a “magical place.”

Earlier in this blog, I mentioned the implicit bridges that Corley aims to build between the school and the home. By visiting the home before students attend her school, and by checking in with families, Corley was able to tackle the question of why a child says what it says or behaves the way it does and not simply get stuck on what a child says or does. Again, her anecdotes about working with families (bringing them books, helping to arrange for babysitting, etc.) are part of the relational trust that has been the focus of much of my discussion in these blogs. Corley’s aim to build bridges in order to create her “magical place” is indicative of the fluidity of the boundaries that her school has. Indeed part of the magic is that the school becomes fluid. At times,  it includes both home and classroom, and it thrives when this connection is strong. 

Corley’s use of the modifier “magic” captures the intimate inseparability between people, the place, and time when there is relational trust as a foundation for learning. I believe that many schools achieve this level of belonging through trust, and my former place of employment was one of them. Certainly, in the shift that I have been attempting to characterize noted by the transition from relational trust to contractual trust, I believe that elements of the “magical place” have persisted. Corley writes not only about the establishment of her “magical place” at Red Cedar Elementary, but about the struggles it faced over the last fifteen years, the very years that I pinpoint as when the shift occurred. In an earlier blog, I mentioned that I believed that part of the cause for the shift was COVID, and another was cyberbullying. Corley addresses both of these in her section on “Societal Trends and Events.” To this pair of factors, she wisely adds gun violence. In some ways these trends and events are unique and separate from each other, but in many ways they are related and had the same impact on her “magical place,” to the point where I would question whether she could say her school was the magical place it was prior to the onslaught of these trends and events. 

Corley’s title “The Magical Place We Call School,” in my opinion, while the aim was to reinforce it with the subtitle, might actually be seen to be undermined by the mention of creating “a safe space” for learning and happiness. As I hope to develop over the course of this discussion, the construction of place and space are quite different from one another. There are features of place that may support a safe space, but the opposite may be true as well. While she presents them as reinforcing one another, I believe there is actually an ambivalent relationship between the two, mainly because the two operate within two different kinds of trust, relational and contractual, respectively. Common to all three challenges to her school as a magical place (cyberbullying, COVID, and gun violence) was a new demand imposed on the school that it “guarantee” the safety of its students, its teachers, and its administrators. This is not something that can be solved by relational trust, and, as we will see, this demand has everything to do with the very shift that is at the center of our discussion.

In fact, the three challenges put the very foundations for relational trust at odds with one another – the home and the school. The fluidity between these two spheres becomes hardened and fixed through the establishment of firm boundaries where they had not existed. The home, in its potential for infectious disease, lack of supervision of social media, and varying stances on gun access, safety, and control, when taken together become “a toxic stew” (183) threatening to contaminate the wholesome, hearty stew with which Corley begins her book and which becomes a metaphor for the magic of the school. One of Corley’s anecdotes, in this case about gun violence, is quite indicative of the changes brought about by these recent challenges. While the incident she writes about occurred earlier than the last decade, the effects of gun violence have only gotten more intense and have prompted more decisive changes in school policy regarding on-campus shooting drills. Corley writes:

My initial brush with the threat of school violence occurred in 1991, during my first job as a school principal in Lynchburg, Virginia. Already in place when I arrived was an on-site tutoring program for the poorest students, who lived in a housing project six miles away from the school. But this housing project was plagued by violence and drug abuse. While accompanying some of our staff who volunteered at our on-site after-school tutorial apartment, I observed that the threat of gunfire was present all too often. I will never forget the time when a fourth-grade girl gently but determinedly tugged on my shirt to pull me to the floor because she sensed that gunfire was about to erupt outside her apartment window. She was right. That day at the complex, there was some gunfire, though we wound up unharmed – at least physically. 

As things got worse at this apartment complex, I received many phone calls from our volunteer tutors’ husbands. They all had just one question for me: “Can you guarantee my wife’s safety?”

“No,” I answered. “I am sorry, but I cannot guarantee that. I wish I could.”

Needless to say, our army of volunteers dried up. Our less-than-adequate alternative was to hold the tutoring sessions at school. (179-180)

As mentioned above, this anecdote takes place prior to cell phones, COVID, and the real onslaught of school shootings. Corley points out the increasing frequency of shootings by providing statistics: “There have been 2,032 school shootings in the United States since 1970. Alarmingly, 948 of them have taken place since the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012” (176). She adds that 169 children have died in school shootings between the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 to the twenty-one people killed at Robb Elementary in 2022. This portends the direction that the schools are heading: away from the bridge building between the home and the school discussed earlier toward an increasing separation. What becomes common to both the school and the home increasingly are the feelings of depression and hopelessness or perhaps even emotional numbness, especially if they are experiencing ongoing physical or emotional trauma in their homes. Thus, according to Corley, “the nation’s children have very good reason to believe that there is truly nowhere they can feel safe” (177). In the face of this tension, Corley states: 

And that’s when it became crystal clear to me that school should be the kindest, most caring, most supportive place a child can be. Above all, school has to be the safest possible place. So even though that housing development was riddled with domestic violence, drug use, and guns, I did everything within my power to make our school a secure space. (180)

In this paragraph, “kindness, care, and support” are now distinguishable from “safe.” The term “place” is used with kindness, care, and support, and then once again with “safest possible,” but is then discarded when put in relation to the violence, drugs, and guns of the housing development. The term “secure space” ultimately trumps the previous terms as if kindness and caring can exist in a place (with its fluid boundaries and trust) but cannot be safe in the way that a space with secure perimeters (boundaries) can. There is a hinge in Corley’s discussion, leaving behind much of the very qualities that have made her school the magic place of her title and heading into a much more transactional, contractual, boundaried, and regulated view of schools. 

Corley writes about the regular drills and the daily practices that have been implemented at Red Cedar. The goal of “safety,” is, however, never completely obtainable. The school has installed an intercom system at the front doors, surveillance cameras inside and outside the school, two-way radios that can coordinate with first responders' radios, and parking lot monitors. And every single day in every classroom and office, the doors are locked and checked by the staff continually, which, of course, has put a “wrinkle” in the friendly, open school culture. The aim of the culture, while still friendly, has shifted its primary goal from feeling welcoming, promoting a sense of belonging through kindness and caring to the ever diminishing target of attempting to make the students feel safe when safety will never be, Corley admits, something that can be guaranteed one hundred percent (190).

The intention that was once behind the caring and kindness (while persisting undoubtedly in certain degrees with many caring individuals) for the students is redirected in varying degrees into defining, securing, and monitoring a distinct set of scaled spaces, which include classrooms, offices, common areas, and, of course, the perimeter of the school itself. The bridges (especially between home and school) of the first half of the book are replaced with draw-bridges, which can be made uncrossable barriers at will. This is understandable given that the home is the source of disease, social media, and weaponry; to put it simply, the home is now the source of violence posing a constant potential for a threat on the school. 

Notice how Corley writes about cell phone use outside of school:

To say the least, bullying is an unfortunate misuse of a miraculous machine, one that is indispensable for communication and entertainment. But sadly, some elementary-age children are also using smart-phones to share nasty comments, the latest dangerous TikTok challenge, and even nude photos they find on websites they should not be able to access. To be sure, parents need to step up and educate themselves about what their children have on their phones, because all they’re doing when they buy cell phones for their kids is handing them the equivalent of a loaded gun. (147)

Corley supports her assertions with various anecdotes of harmful chats that have lead to suicidal ideation. After any national school shooting occurs, Corley convenes the faculty and staff to review the known facts of each case:

In November 2021, we discussed the case of Ethan Crumbley, the fifteen-year-old student at Oxford High School in Oxford Township, Michigan, who fatally shot four students and wounded seven other people, including a teacher. On the day of the attack, school personnel had good reason to believe the boy was dangerous. They told his parents to seek counseling for him within forty-eight hours or they would call child protective services. In the meantime, they recommended that the boy be removed from class and taken home, but the parents refused. Backing down, the school officials simply allowed the teenager to remain on campus. Two hours later, the shooting started. (193)

Corley’s discussion with staff and teachers centers on the question whether that would have happened at Red Cedar. She is confident that had the parents not wanted to remove the child, her resource officer would have along with his backpack. The student would have been brought home or taken to law enforcement. However, even prior to that, Corley believes her school would have been looking for warning signs. Depression, anxiety, aggression, and emotional turbulence would have been taken seriously and are dead giveaways. Keeping the students safe, therefore, requires constant scanning and monitoring of those very students. Signs of unhappiness can be linked to a poor grade on a test as well as a sign leading to large-scale violence.

Corley’s school thus constantly updates and revises protocol regarding the school’s response to active shootings. The process has been actively ongoing, as constantly changing as the COVID procedures at the various stages of the pandemic. Much of the COVID protocol fell on the school nurse, especially in the complicated, multi-tiered return to school after the period of online instruction:

Through this entire ordeal, our counselor and social worker did everything they could to support our staff, who had to teach in this “new normal” while keeping track of their own families’ health. It was a monumental challenge. 

Our school nurse, Bethany Bryne, was an angel on earth, the rock of our organization. But as stable and clear-eyed as she always had been, her burden went from difficult to barely manageable. 

Her first priority was student health and safety. Typically, before the pandemic, sick children would go to her office for care. If someone called her on our two-way radios to say that a student needed a temperature check and that the student was coming down to see her, she would acknowledge the call and wait for the child. But during the pandemic there were new protocols. If a student walked down to the nurse’s office, he might encounter other children in the hallway, potentially infecting them too. The student would wait in an office adjacent to their classroom, and Nurse Bryne would make “house calls” instead. 

Her job was not only becoming more labor-intensive but also expanded to include contact tracing, a huge challenge. A parent would call Nurse Bryne to say that someone in the household had contracted COVID-19. She would then record the information and ask questions about who might have been in close contact with that person or need to be quarantined. Always empathetic and a great listener, Murse Bryne had to cope with the emotional reactions of somewhat freaked-out teachers while managing frightened parents, explaining the infection’s symptoms and how best to recover. You can imagine that these exchanges were quite time-consuming and elicited a surprising variety of responses from parents. Some were deeply worried and fearful, while others were quite cavalier. Some angrily debated with her. Or, I should say, they attempted to do that. She didn’t take the debate bait. 

Through it all, Nurse Bryne was absolutely fantastic, and it was her emotional stability that helped us keep a steady hand on a constantly changing situation. For example, she remained calm whenever a flurry of medical updates was handed down from the government to our school district like stone tablets – albeit tablets made of soft, porous stone. First, quarantines and isolations were to last for fourteen days, then ten, then five. Each time the length changed, Nurse Bryne explained what it meant and the possible rationale behind the change, then comforted the people who went from quietly listening to catastrophizing the new information. (168-169)

While the school – its staff, teachers, and Corley herself – were originally hailed as angels, the return to instruction quickly deteriorated into an anxiety-provoking situation as the school attempted to enforce the changing protocols within the opposition of many families, which ranged from refusing to keep children at home any longer to adamant anti-vax stances. Ultimately, when it came to safety from the virus, the school was “in the dark” as to how much of a threat each household posed.

Again, the expectation that the school guarantee the safety of its students proved to be far beyond what was possible in Corley’s mind. In one heated exchange with a parent who compared the austere school policies with the more relaxed atmosphere of the local grocery store, Corley fired back, “Here’s the part that you're not getting. I am responsible for the well-being of everybody who crosses the threshold of this school. A grocery story, on the other hand, is not responsible for the customers’ health. They’re only liable if a customer slips on a wet floor” (171). This exchange is interesting because it compares the school, once considered by Bryk and Schneider to be the locus of relational trust, to a business, which is where contractual trust between the store and the customers would be more likely. Recall that one of the main theses in this discussion is that we are witnessing a transition in schools from relational to contractual trust. Here, an argument could be made that the school is still distinct from a corporate chain in its higher level of commitment to its students versus the grocery store’s liability to its customers. Corley’s “whatever it takes” attitude could be construed to mean that she is willing to go beyond her role as head of school, and, we assume, likewise her colleagues, to help the students. Therefore, we might ask whether or not we are witnessing a reinforcement of relational trust on Corley’s part, and, in turn, that of Red Cedar. 

After finishing Corley’s book, I don’t doubt for a second that she has all the best intentions in the world for her students. I believe she is operating from a place of caring and kindness in the same way that the effective teachers observed by Bryk and Schneider were operating. There is, however, a difference. The difference was alluded to earlier when we discussed a shift in the object of intentions that is taking place. Whereas Bryk and Schneider wrote about individuals being recipients of the good intentions of teachers and administrators, here, even in the very language that Corley uses above, we see that the object of intention is the space of the school itself. The goal of “safety” rather than “comfort and care” is much more concerned with spaces, distances, boundaries, and barriers. Whether quarantine, six-feet apart requirements, locked doors, closed blinds, tables as barriers, phone-free zones – the protocols created for safety are aimed at managing access to a constellation of different, increasingly delineated and defined spaces that make up the school. Such thinking extends to people in that, as we will be exploring in a future blog, they are re-imagined as having boundaries that must be carefully observed and maintained in the same way that the doors of classrooms must be constantly checked and rechecked. While individual teachers, staff, and students might have once been the guardians and creators of school culture, there is also a tendency, as exhibited by Corley, to use the word climate to refer to the “feel” of a school, as if the space not only receives the intentionality on the part of its safe-guarders but becomes imbued with that intention in the form of feeling various degrees of safety. 

To be quite frank, Corley, while she has no problem characterizing the positive culture of her school, which is based on individuals’ willingness to go beyond their prescribed roles (relational trust), she does however, struggle with the term “climate.” The book ends with  a robust discussion of the “anything it takes” mentality, based around an anecdote Corley tells about a different school many years ago when a teacher did not rush to aid a crying kindergartner and, instead, announced, “Not mine,” and resumed her photocopying. Corley writes:

This story leads me to my main point: positive culture is critical to every school’s success. For me, it’s what makes a school special – or not. It’s the organization’s core beliefs as they are put into practice. In a positive culture, there is a sense of camaraderie that will permeate everything and everyone associated with the school. Such a culture feels energetic and upbeat. You can see that teachers and students work well together striving to achieve common goals. (201)

So far in Part Four, “Maintaining School Climate and Culture,” Corley has not even mentioned “climate” or how it differs from “culture.” Her first mention of “climate” relates to the scores that Red Cedar received on the assessment of school culture called Upbeat. She states: “I’m proud to say that the school climate and culture scores at Red Cedar Elementary are consistently high” (206), but she does not differentiate it from culture. Finally, on page  208, she writes: 

Note that I’ve focused much more on culture than on climate. Climate is a somewhat fleet sort of thing. It’s about the way we feel, which can ebb and flow to a certain extent even in the healthiest of school’s culture is far more pervasive. It’s who we are and what we prize, and it’s what we will go to the mat to protect and nurture. 

Looking at her distinction between climate and culture, it isn’t quite clear how the word “feeling” is used because it is used to define both. Corley seems more devoted to the more long-term, identity-based, foundational tenets of the school. It is the tradition, the history, the continuum within the intentions of founding and current leadership. In fact, it invites the question as to why Corley included “climate” if she is just going to brush it off and dismiss it. Importantly, however, she did include it. 

The “fleeting” quality of climate would lead one to believe that it is changing from moment to moment whereas the culture is abiding. Thus “climate” is linked to time much more strongly than culture, which seems to gather the time of the school’s existence. When we think about how Corley writes about the culture, attaching epithets ( such as “we do whatever it takes”) and even “branding” to it (“that’s a Red Cedar thing to do!”), we might think once again of our association of relational trust with the school as a place. The school name itself becomes a metonym for positive behavior, and the intentions are not dictated by roles, job descriptions, or protocols. The school itself (as a place) becomes the defining feature of all of those present within the community, and once again, the community extends beyond (and in spite of) the locked doors of the classroom, the electric doors where visitors have to be buzzed in, the check in booth in front of the parking lot. The feeling of Red Cedar, with its positive culture, is one of abiding fulfillment, where, and now I am adding something of my former school ten years ago, alumni come to the door of the classroom and still belong, and the young students are reminded of a longstanding history in which they are the beneficiaries of inherited traditions. These visitors are pleased to find those things that have not changed over the years, and amused by things that have. 

If the arrangement and distribution of terms we have been making holds up, then school culture belongs at the end of the spectrum that is occupied by place and relational (and organic) trust, whereas climate would seem to relate more with space, contractual trust, and safety. I would argue that Corley’s frustration over being asked to guarantee the safety of the students, teachers, and staff relates to her reluctance to discuss climate because in its “fleetingness” it becomes that vanishing horizon of not being able to ever guarantee the safety and the health of everyone. And yet the expectation is that the school try, and this expectation forms a constant doubling as individuals navigate their way through the school day alternating between orienting to the school as a place with a rich and vibrant past and then abruptly being faced with a locked door, an intercom, a mandatory lesson plan for safe spaces in advisory, a lockdown drill. Rather than finding a connection to the school’s heritage, in these moments, the school is connected (while simultaneously being distinguished and set off from) the immediate neighborhood, the town, the state. Another school on lockdown because of police activity or a crime committed in the area immediately affects the spaces, behaviors, and protocols of other schools around it.  Here is when the national news of a school shooting or a suicide caused by cyberbulling intrudes and changes what may have been warmth in the school climate by invoking the questions of safety, toxicity, volatility, and anxiety. 

Just before the final chapter of the book, Corley directly mentions “branding” and the value it has in fostering an image of the school both outside and inside. In an earlier blog, the third in fact, we discussed how telling a single story about a culture or a people can completely rob them of their dignity. The author of the book Distrust and Educational Change, Katherine Schultz, linked the deficit narratives told about various school systems to justify improvement programs to strong feelings of active distrust for those promoting those improvement programs, and mentioned how perpetuating deficit narratives elides the rich and vibrant histories that may exist at the schools in question. Here, Corley finds the intentional branding of a school to be a preemptive move on the part of the school to publicize multiple positive stories about the school. Finding “branding” to be one of her top considerations as a principal, she writes:

Picture an old woman leaning on her cane. Imagine that old woman shaking her finger at a small group of young principals, offering a warning: “Someday, who knows when, three students will get sick on some spoiled mike at your school. If you have never paid attention to branding – to marketing your school with intentionality – years from now, when your school’s name is mentioned, some people will say, ‘Isn’t that the spoiled-milk school?’” Now lose the can in your mind’s eye, and you’ll see me talking to anyone who ought to listen. (224)

The brand that is the school brings several of our geographic concepts together in one. First of all it privileges place as the bearer of all of the qualities – presumably good ones – that are being promoted. It uses the idea of the school as a place full of relational trust as a selling point like a corporate product, but then engages with families, students, teachers, and administrators contractually, the particulars of the school and its history made sellable by the guarantees of safety. Corley acknowledges that the idea of branding to a school is recent, and doesn’t have the history of marketing goods. I would argue that the adoption of a brand for a school is the easiest and happiest compromise that can be made in the shift to contractual trust as the the basis for all relationships in that it invigorates and revitalizes the nostalgia for an earlier time in the school’s history before social media, COVID, and gun violence while still attempting to meet the challenges these trends and events pose with protocols and codes, which dictate the conditions for all interactions. Thus through branding her school based on its culture, Corley is able to sell the idea of the school as “a magic place” while guaranteeing that it is composed of “safe spaces” for learning and happiness in this challenging world.