Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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Looking Back at a Crazy Job

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I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on my incredibly short, and incredibly long, eight months with St. Louis Public Schools. What began with the strangest job interview I ever had, the weirdest first day on the job, and the ongoing chaos of every single day ended with a very quiet farewell. 

In previous jobs in corporate communications, I’d experienced periods of media blitzes and controversies. But I’d never experienced a job in which every day was a media blitz, every day was a controversy, and I had to work and publicly communicate in a highly political environment where it was difficult to know who was telling the truth, whose information was accurate, and who was trying to help or merely trying to gain an edge on an opponent. 

It’s often difficult to believe today, but I quickly learned that the news media were my most accurate sources of information. Several of the reporters had police radios and picked up reports of problems at individual schools, school bus issues, and conflicts within school headquarters itself that sometimes reached police report level.

With a budget that had been slashed from $1 million to $20,000, and that $20,000 already spent, we had to improvise how we communicated. What has been largely on paper before – newsletters, magazines, internal newspapers – became electronic – the web site, email, and message boards. I had to give myself a crash course in communicating online. I became allies with the IT team. I discovered how school parents and protesters (and they often overlapped) communicated. 

I talked and listened to everyone. I answered every media call. I never turned down a request for a statement. I learned how to piece together statements when no one wanted to go on record. I had to learn quickly how to read between the lines. I learned there was one person I could trust completely, a guy on the staff of the management team that had been brought in to try to rectify the precarious situation the school district was in – too many buildings, declining enrollments, too large an administrative overhead, and was not just facing bankruptcy but, unknown to most, was already in it.

Actions like closing schools, laying off staff, and changing the pension program are the stuff of controversy, outrage, and protest. Those had started in June of that year; I arrived in October, following the resignation of the communications director who had lost the entire staff and budget. My one-half of a headcount and I did what we had to do – improvise, think on our feet, make decisions without the benefit or luxury of time to think them through. 

We also had to deflect interference. The mayor’s office called daily, with instructions what we should be doing for the day. Yes, there was no official connection between the mayor and the school district, bit it happened. I’d listen politely and go back to my work. One School Board member would find a new public relations firm each month that had the ideas and plan that would immediately solve all the communication problems of the district. I would dutifully go to hear a presentation, usually, just a consultant spouting platitudes. I’d thank them and go back to work. Almost all of the members of the Board understood communications and weren’t shy about what we needed to do, and I’d listen politely, wondering how soon that member would be leaking the Board’s confidential information.

This was not an environment that inspired trust.

As I started my eighth month, I was hitting full-on physical exhaustion. And right at that point, I received a phone call, from a good friend I knew at my former corporate employer. The business that the company had spun off in 1997 had finally gone into bankruptcy, and under the terms of the spinoff, the environmental liabilities had returned to the former parent to manage until bankruptcy was resolved. 

The relationship between the bankrupt spinoff and the former parent was not optimum. For months, in fact, it was being fought in the news media. I’d see the reports and shake my head, knowing how much the people in the parent company would hate the publicity. Then I’d go back to whatever crisis or chaos the school district had that morning.

Then came the call. The friend from the parent company chatted a bit and then asked a question. “Have you ever thought about coming back?”

My answer was immediate. “No.”

“Would you like to think about it?”

“Doing what, exactly?”

The job involved the parent company and the bankrupt spinoff. Managing media inquiries, developing positions, help manage the environmental issues that had returned with the bankruptcy, and work with my counterparts at the spinoff.

The fact that I had been on television – a lot – didn’t hurt. They’d noticed, and when they tried to figure out what to do, I kept showing up on television. 

I interviewed. I got the job. 

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

The Scenes That Stick from a Chaotic Job

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I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for eight months. It was the position I worked for the least amount of time in my entire career, the most chaotic job I ever held, and the one that likely remains the most vivid in my memory. 

Perhaps it was the political battles inside the district, the arrests at school board meetings, the ongoing protests, my boss getting doused with a pitcher of water by a member of the school board, the typical chaotic day of an urban school district. It might have been the constat media exposure, starting my first day (eight separate interviews on a teacher sick-out) and continuing until my last day. I did more media meetings and discussions in those eight months than the rest of my career combined.

A lot of scenes have stuck with me; a few even got worked into my five Dancing Priest novels. 

One came very early. I’d quickly gotten to be good friends with one of the three people from the outside management team hired to fix what had become a huge, and bankrupt, mess. This guy was brilliant, the kind of person who gives consultants a good name. One evening, he rode with me to my first School Board meeting (the one with only one arrest). And he said something that floored me. When the 10 candidates for the position were being evaluated, the people doing the evaluations came across my religious affiliation. At the time, I was attending an Evangelical Free Church in St. Louis County. They had looked into the church. We were still in the parking garage when he said it. I looked at him and said, “But that’s illegal. You can’t do that.”

He agreed. It turned out to be important, he said. The evaluators saw it as a positive, because there were so many practicing Christians at headquarters and in the individual school administrations, and they figured I would be better able to work with them.

It rankled, but it turned out to be true. The word was actually spread as a kind of rumor or gossip about the Christian guy in communications. People who might have kept me at arm’s length (“part of that horrible group wrecking everything!”) did give me the benefit of the doubt. People would talk to me when they wouldn’t be as forthcoming with Board members, the management team, or helpful advisors from the Mayor’s office.

Another scene concerned a single school. Someone had organized a site visit by administrators to an elementary school in north St. Louis. It was not an upscale area; in fact, the neighborhood included a considerable number of abandoned buildings. 

The entrance was a steel door; entry required approval by video and the familiar buzzer sound of the door being unlocked. A tall fence surrounded the property. The first-floor windows were barred. The second-floor windows were blocked with barbed wire. The building looked like a prison, but it was more of a fortress against break-ins and vandalism. 

The annual student turnover was 110 percent. The school served an area dominated by transients and the homeless, who would enroll children for a few months (or even weeks) and then move on. The student body was mixed, with no racial group predominating. 

When the visit ended, I left shaken. How do you teach when your classroom was constantly in flux? And yet, for many of these children, this might be the best experience of their young lives, because they at least got to eat lunch.

Photograph by Chuttersnap via Unsplash.

A third scene involved another School Board meeting. I had been working at the district since October; this meeting was in March. I remember it because it was still cold. I don’t remember what the controversy of the day was, because there was always a controversy of the day. But for this meeting, it had attracted people who were angry. The members of the Board and ket staff people had been bused in, escorted by police and taken through a back door. The middle school auditorium where it was held could hold 400, and you had to pass through an x-ray check. The room was filled.

I didn’t rate police protection or the bus ride, so I drove and parked at the very back of the school’s parking lot. The lot itself was filled – about 2,000 angry, chanting people. I stopped for a moment, knowing that to reach the entrance, I was going to have to navigate that crowd. And it was almost entirely a Black crowd, and I was going to look more than obvious. 

I stood at the back of that chanting, shouting crowd, and I decided to make my way through it. I might have been praying.  As I said “Excuse me” and began to make my way through, something unexpected happened. People recognized me (thanks to all those media interviews). The chanting stopped, and the crowd literally parted to let me walk through. People nodded in recognition. No one smiled; there were no warm greetings. But they parted and nodded, a sign of respect. 

I still don’t know how that happened. As I walked up the back steps to the door, I turned and looked back. The crowd was still watching. I nodded. The police officer at the door looked at me and simply said, “Wow.”

Wow was right. And I was over-wowed.

Related:

Communicating Through the Chaos.

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other

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I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for seven months. I’d gone through the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and I had a first day on the job unlike any other I had had or anyone I knew had had. But I figured that, after that tumultuous first day, things would settle down.

I figured wrong. 

Things would never settle down. Every day would be unlike every other day. 

One ongoing source of turmoil was the Board of Education itself, the seven people elected by voters to oversee the district’s operations. Four had been elected on a reform slate. Three had not. Most of the turmoil generated by the Board came from those three. 

One constantly leaked confidential board information to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, especially if it might embarrass or “expose” the reform members. One day she went further. She showed up at a middle school with reporters in tow, announcing she was firing the principal. I had to drop what I was doing and rush to the school, deal with the reporters, and explain that Board members could not fire staff members. But she got the coverage she wanted on the 6 p.m. news; she wasn’t happy that I did, too.

Another Board member had been a perennial candidate for every elected office in the city of St. Louis and had managed to get on the school board because of a lack of challengers. He called me one day and asked me to set up a press conference; he was going to demand that the acting superintendent resign. I explained I couldn’t do that.

The third was likely the most intelligent member of the board. It was amazing to watch her focus like a laser on misstatements, inconsistencies, and contradictions form the administration. She also didn’t leak to the media; she said whatever she had to say publicly. 

But there was a problem. One day, I was sitting in my office when I heard a splash. I saw the board member, who thought she has disguised herself by wearing a baseball cap, rush from my boss’s office next to mine and carrying an empty water pitcher. She had thrown the water on my boss at her desk. 

I called security. They responded immediately. So did the police, because the board member had barricaded herself in her small office. The administrative area was evacuated. It took several hours, but the police eventually prevailed and removed her for charging and booking for assault. Yes, I had to hold an impromptu press conference to explain what had happened. I also had to give a witness statement to police. There had been rumors she had a bomb; she didn’t. 

It was the reporter for Channel 5 who explained why the Board member had done it. She’d been inspired by a scene in The Wizard of Oz, and she believed my boss had become a witch. The reporter did not make that up. It was true.

A second source of turmoil was the public anger over the district’s restructuring. Downsizing had occurred across the district, with hundreds of people losing their jobs. The third floor of district headquarters in downtown St. Louis had been full of people six months before. Now it was empty and unused, except for the broadcast studio and the Board’s conference room. A major chunk of the second floor, the area adjacent to where I worked, was also empty.

Several schools had been closed, angering parents and teachers like. School bus routes had been consolidated and removed from influence by the Board and top district officers. Food service contracts had been consolidated and removed from political oversight. The nepotism rule was being enforced. Full-time activists were drawn to the turmoil.

All of it would coalesce around Board meetings. Thy were held at a middle school near downtown, because it had been built with the largest auditorium. Every Board meeting saw a filled room – 450 people who were not shy about screaming. Another 500, often more, would be outside in the parking lot.

I had attended school board meetings in my own suburban school district. Feelings might run high at times, but meetings usually stayed calm. 

Not with St. Louis Public Schools 

I sat next to my boss at the first meeting I attended in October. The room was packed. The crowd had to be continuously warned to calm down or be expelled. Board members yelled at each other, and at members of the crowd. People were often shouted down. It was a circus of noise. One activist charged the stage where the Board was sitting, and was wrestled to the ground by the police, handcuffed, and arrested, literally two feet from where I was sitting. 

When the meeting ended, my boss smiled. “You must be a good luck charm. This was a good meeting.”

Shocked, I stared at her. “This was a good meeting?”

She nodded, smiling again. “We only had one arrest.”

The third source of turmoil was the normal workings of an urban school district. All the reporters covering the district had police radios. There would be reports of weapons on campus, gang fights, campus intruders, school bus incidents, and other problems. 

Once, I was at a meeting hosted by the school district and held at the high school that specialized in information technology. Hundreds of people were attending a presentation by the State Board of Education. I received a text message – food poisoning at an elementary school near the city’s old and famous food market. The incident was odd because only one class had been affected, and the children had eaten different things in the cafeteria. But the teacher had also been affected, and that moved the situation from possible hysteria to serious issue. The food service vendor was sending people to collect samples and provide a statement to the media. 

The vendor’s representatives showed up, collected samples, and promptly slipped out a side door. They would not be providing a statement. Reporters turned to me. I had to invent a response on the spot, explaining what we knew and didn’t know and expressing our surprise that the vendor had not made a statement as promised. 

The vendor was not happy with my response. That made us even. I wasn’t happy with their response.

Like I said, no day was like any other day. No such thing as a “typical day” existed. I might try to plan, but I always had to be prepared to junk the plan and go by the seat of my pants. That was the only typical thing about the job.

Related:

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building. All photographs via St. Louis Public Schools.by St. Louis Public Schools.

How I Came to Social Media

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It was work that originally led me to sign up for Twitter and other social media platforms. For a number of years, social media became my work. Even when I retired, I was still managing the company’s social media platforms.

From 2003 to 2004, I spent nine months working in communications for St. Louis Public Schools, which was in dire straits. Enrollment had declined to an official 40,000 from a peak of about 100,000, and the district was still operating school buildings, a headquarters building, and an administrative staff that supported a 100,000 enrollment. A management firm was hired by a reform school board to take over and do the painful stuff that had to be done. The management firm was in place all of two days when it discovered that the district was bankrupt.

The firm wielded the ax. School buildings were closed. The central administration was slashed to the bone, and even some of the bone was removed. The communications staff was reduced from 13 positions to one half of a person. 

I was hired at the tail end of the staff reductions, but more turmoil was ahead. The total communications budget was $20,000 (down from $1 million), and it had been spent by the time I arrived in October. We had a web site in dire need of overhaul. We had constituencies that had to be communicated with. Protests were daily. I wasn’t in my office five minutes when I was informed that the media had gathered, waiting for a statement on the wildcat teacher sickout. (Fifteen minutes after that, I was making a statement in front of the assembled reporters from newspapers, television, and radio.)

We did the only thing we knew to do. We went electronic, including a variety of email newsletters. They were designed carefully and with a lot of forethought. In fact, given how intensely disliked the management firm was, we prominently displayed “Not for External Distribution” at the top of the newsletter for administrative staff and school principals, knowing full well that it would be immediately forwarded to news media, friends, protest groups, and everyone else. It might have been one of the most effective communication tools the district had at the time – the internal newsletter we hoped everyone would leak.

This was the time when I discovered message boards and other kinds of communication tools that were being used by people opposed to what the district was doing (leaking worked both ways). 

Totally unrelated to what we were dealing with was a student up at Harvard who was setting up a dating site called Facebook. And a guy born and raised in the St. Louis area was working on a micro-media tool that eventually became Twitter.

I went back to the corporate world which, I discovered, was unaware of the existence of electronic communications outside pre-approved programs blessed by the IT department. I’d been hired specifically to deal with a bankruptcy issue affecting the company, but questions were arising about what people could see was happening online. When our department boss asked at a staff meeting if anyone knew what a blog was, people looked at each and shook their heads. I was more than familiar with what they were because of my experience with the school district. I explained what I knew. I became the immediate in-house expert.

Twitter launched in 2006, and I held off signing up until I could see what implications it might have for the company. In 2008, I signed up, embarking on the wild roller coaster ride that social media had already become. I joined Facebook a week later, and not long after I started my own blog, in addition to one for the company.

Next week: A Year Away from Twitter / X

Top photograph by Sara Kurfeß via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poet Blogs the Layoff

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Layoffs were coming. The big announcement from the CEO was circulated by email. It was a masterpiece of vagueness. It didn’t say how many people would be affected. It didn’t say when the affected people would know. It did say there would be a severance program, although it included no details. 

In short, the important things people wanted to know weren’t communicated. I’m sure management congratulated itself on communicating, but the rumors had already been circulating and people were already far beyond “layoffs are coming.” What people also knew was that the people being laid off might be the fortunate ones. Those who remained would likely be reorganized, with more work and fewer people to get it done.

Having been through this before at another company, I had a better idea of what would happen and what people really cared about that colleagues who hadn’t been through it, especially younger colleagues. A small group came to me and asked if I would consider blogging about my past experience on the company’s intranet. I said I’d think about it.

My first thought was a selfish one: would I be drawing a target on my back? My answer was, maybe. I’d certainly be drawing attention, but that could also work another way: “He helped people understand the layoff, so they got rid of him.” That wouldn’t bode well for trust in the company’s management. I talked to a few people, including my boss. The poet in me won out, and I decided to do it. 

I drafted three posts: what happened to me when I had been laid off; what kinds of questions did I get from colleagues, friends, and family; and what happened once when a close friend and colleague was laid off and I wasn’t. 

Poetry at Work

This was a big deal inside the company. It had never been done before, and HR was nervous. The lawyers wanted to approve every word, and I refused on the grounds that it had nothing to do with what was happening and going to happen, but instead talked about what happened to one person (me) at another company. 

The first post was published. The first day, more than 10 percent of the employee population read it. It had set a record for the company’s internal blog. The next two drew even bigger numbers. In the communications void before the actual storm, I told people what they could expect, what they should know, and how they should treat fellow employees who would be laid off.

I had people I’d never met come to my office to thank me. I had countless phone calls and email. A switchboard operator called to determine where to direct a news media inquiry, and she thanked me for my posts. I heard that many people printed them and brought them home to their families. (The company invariable forgets about the family, who will be as much affected by a layoff as the employee.) And the company received kudos for allowing the posts to be published.

The posts weren’t easy to write. My own experiences were still painful; you don’t forget these kinds of situations. But you do what a poet does – and take an event or experience and turn it into something universal, something that help people see the experience in a different if personal light. 

I still consider those three posts to be among some of the very best work I ever did.

From Poetry at Work: “A close friend at work learned he was losing his job. We met in the corporate cafeteria the next day. He walked over to me, lunch tray in his hands, and stood there. ‘Are you sure you want to be seen with me?’ he asked. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. His entire department had stopped speaking to him. He had to stay in the office for the next 45 days while being shunned. I was stunned. So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I stood and hugged him. He cried. What a scene that made, right there in the cafeteria.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Matt Noble via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of the Organization Chart

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I was sitting with a woman in the Human Resources Department. There had been a reorganization of our department, part of a general reshuffling across the company, and I’d been assigned to sit with her to work out the new organization chart. 

You would think this was something of a useless exercise. Shouldn’t it be a simple matter of “here’s the boss, here are his or her direct reports, and here’s who reports to them.” But it was anything but simple, and I was to get a lesson in the Byzantine art form of corporate organization charts.

First, she pointed out, not all of the boss direct reports had the same title. Some were directors; some were managers. Next, there were directors and there were directors – a title wasn’t necessarily indicative of grade level, and grade level was everything. The chart had to indicate that by a subtle positioning of the boxes, with some slightly more elevated than the others. The same thing applied to the managers. Then there was the problem of some managers have more people reporting to them than directors did. 

And then for the mass of people in the department, those with no one reporting to them (aka the people who did the work), the grade levels were all over the place. That had to be accounted for, without making the chart itself look like a mess.

Poetry at Work

Organization chart-making was an art form. It was like highly formalized poetry, simultaneously including massive complexity displayed as simplicity. Because we had more than 80,000 people in the company, the Human Resources Department had a team of people devoted to the care and maintenance of organization charts. That’s all they did. And reorganizations were their worst nightmare.

A decade of reorganization after reorganization, along with asset sales and layoffs, led to the only possible response. Organization chart-making was decentralized to various business and administrative units; centralization of the charts disappeared. We had moved from high formalized poetry where everything had to rhyme within the correct meter to the universe of absolute free verse. Everything became a jumble. Without the inviable hand of that old HR team managing the charts, what few charts were produced effectively misinformed everyone.

As cumbersome and time-consuming as they were to create and maintain, the old organization charts did manage to account for management exceptions, problems, and quirks. Yes, management should have figured out how to handle personnel problems, but we’re talking about human beings here, with their frailties, willfulness, and pride (some managers never, never made mistakes, and they were ready to tell you that). 

The traditional organization chart didn’t so much accommodate that reality as figure out a way to record it. And the new world of no organization charts couldn’t last for long; people crave order and stability. This became worse when organizations embraced the matrix structure, which is stubbornly resistant of explanation by chart.

Like a poem, an organization chart is a human-constructed artifact. Change a word, or change a box, and the entire meaning can change, and often does. But also like poems, organizational charts have influences, histories, and embedded complexities. Not to mention ambiguities.

From Poetry at Work: “It makes a kind of sense, this organizational free verse, but many of us remember and still long for the time when we knew where responsibility and accountability lay – expressed by the formal poetry of the organization chart.”

Top photograph by Alex Kotliarskyi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

This article was prepared for the Literary Life Book of the Month discussion group on Facebook.