Pictured above: Head of Moorestown Friends School, Julia de la Torre, with Head of Friends School of Portland, Sara Primo, over Zoom earlier this spring.
Julia de la Torre is Head of School at Moorestown Friends School in New Jersey. She went to college with my dear English teacher colleague who I taught alongside in my first teaching position at Emma Willard Boarding School – twenty years ago. Now that same colleague is teaching English at Moorestown Friends School. When I got the position at Friends School last spring, she connected me to Julia with high praise of her amazing leader, who had also begun her headship with a four-year-old. Last spring, among the boxes and upheaval of packing up my apartment in Philadelphia, I met Julia over Zoom and she spoke candidly and generously with me about how best to prepare for and approach the year ahead. Having emailed back and forth a few times and been on a few large Quaker Head of School Zoom calls together, this June, she Zoomed with me again, one year later. I think you will see from the excerpt below what a mentor and guide she has been for me.
Sara: I have been super interested in the question: As a leader, to what extent are you responsible for the burnout of the people around you? My question would be: how have you navigated a year that has had to involve more burnout than normal because of the cultural moment we’ve been in?
Julia: I think about burnout over the past two and a half years, because I think we have gone through an evolution of what burnout looks like. When everyone went virtual in 2020, the burnout was one of such extreme newness that people had to get used to, but it felt achievable because it was three months. Last year, I felt that the burnout was an indefinite period of adaptation… with no end in sight. And that was a type of burnout that I felt deeply responsible for, even though it wasn’t my fault. I felt like last year I did everything humanly possible to carry the burdens of other people… I felt responsibility to carry people’s pain, their transitions, their burdens – in a way that felt temporary. And at the end of last year, it wasn’t. We kept going. And so for my own self-preservation, I had to treat this year differently. I couldn’t carry people’s burdens and try to solve them, even though I’m hardwired as a leader to try to solve them.
I think as human beings we had to learn to carry disappointment and joy at the same time. I think we had to carry pain and health at the same time. And so this year to me was about how do you carry two things that are seemingly in opposition to each other.
Moving into next year, I can’t take away this tension for people. I am coming to the realization that maybe my job isn’t being a receptacle for people’s disappointment. Maybe my job isn’t just stewarding them through difficult times. Maybe my job is helping them find their own strength. We all have inner strength. I think we are in the business of wanting to solve problems, so we try to. What I need to figure out how to do is shift from me trying to solve problems to empowering other people to solve their problems. There is collective wisdom in our schools; we all experienced an incredible cultural moment we are all learning different lessons from. I have to figure out how to tap into those strengths because a single person can’t solve the tensions.
That resonates with an activity I started the year off during our August Days for faculty and staff. I kept trying to think of the perfect pep talk for my staff, until finally I realized that, after they had done all this work to identify the core values that guide them as professionals, only each individual could give themselves the perfect pep talk. So I modeled for them the pep talk I was giving myself, and then I asked them to write their own advice for the year on a post-it. I want to end the year during June Days with a similar spirit. Though it can be hard to listen for, sometimes only you are the best person to say the exact thing you need to hear.
What question do you have for me?
A first year in any headship is a challenge for a host of reasons. A first year in a pandemic in a new community adds a whole different layer. I’m curious what you came in with as one of your biggest goals and how you think it went.
Two big goals for me (which I actually wrote down on my post-it pep talk to myself I just mentioned!) were to keep things in proportion and to keep humans central. I’m so conscious that I haven’t had to do it alone. I’m so conscious of all the times when things started to get out of proportion and then within a few hours I got help or got input or got clues as to the size things had to be. So I think when you keep things in proportion, you have to keep humans central. Those two goals feel interlocked for me. I know it’s naive to think love can solve all problems; but on the other hand, finding that core of human connection has sustained me and helped me make better choices in intense moments.
Can you tell me one thing that surprised you this year, or an “a-ha moment”?
What has surprised me this year… You know, we haven’t been able to gather in the meeting house as a whole community, as a whole division. What I’m realizing is that those spaces where we were looking at each other and making eye contact and all in the same room reflecting together, those had more meaning than I realized… I used to think you could have worship anywhere, but I actually think being in a space where benches are facing each other and being in a community moment together provides the foundation for all the other ways we keep humans central. Without it, I am actually seeing an erosion of that. I see people hold doors less for each other. So I think: OK. Keeping humans central doesn’t just mean keeping humans present. Coming out of this, how do you make up for lost opportunity and compensate, and rebuild. With humans physically present, how do you help them to become emotionally and psychologically present with each other? That’s one of my hopes for next year. Have you seen that?
I think for us it’s way subtler, how Meeting for Worship has changed during the pandemic. We have the luxury of this outdoor courtyard, which holds us almost like in a huge bowl. And it has felt very grounding to gather together as a school out there for Meeting for Worship. We had a series of smaller meetings in the meeting room (for 5th and 6th graders) and then I think two meetings in the meeting room for the whole school. I am not sure we are there, in terms of stillness as a skillset. Spiritually, it felt incredible. But on the other hand, watching students get better at sitting in stillness on those benches – we have a ways to go. I think holding and answering that question of “What does it look like to nurture the spiritual life of young people?” is one of my hopes for next year.
Do you have greeters at Meeting for Worship? People who stand at the door and say hello and shake hands? We do that. We have a greeter assigned to each door, oftentimes students assigned. That simple gesture of, as you come into the meeting house, you are shaking hands with an individual and making eye contact AND you are crossing a threshold that when you are in this space on the other side of that handshake, you are settling into a different way of being. Again: that has not existed in the way we have done worship for these two years. And I am starting to believe that these seemingly small details of our routine and day-to-day life that made us the community that we are, the absence of them, has prompted us to look at how we intentionally rebuild community absent those things, until we can get those things back.
So as I go into next year, and I think about burnout for everyone, for teachers, for students – we have this belief that if we go on vacation, we’ll feel restored. I’ve actually learned I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think time away provides the kind of spiritual restoration that we need, the rediscovering the human side of who we are and others. That happens in community, that doesn’t happen in absence of.
Anything you tried out this year that you will continue with next year?
I tried out a monthly meeting, on the last Tuesday of every month, where parents, admin, teachers, and advisory board members could come to share initiatives related to racial justice – aspirations, progress, but also barriers or blocks. And actually give and receive feedback. It’s called Racial Justice Accountability Working Group. It felt a little risky, the idea of asking to be publicly held accountable, or the idea of asking monthly for direct feedback about the pace of institutional and personal progress. I am someone who loves a social justice book group even though I know it’s cliche to say that as a white person, and so I had this early fear of getting stuck in book group mode. Or I had fears that people would drop off and stop coming. But we didn’t get stuck, and it didn’t fizzle out. For me, a highlight meeting was a teacher having her curriculum workshopped by parents, as she took a National Parks unit and redesigned it with an indigenous rights lens. I would say that though it is still in its early stages, the group is a success and will continue on – and hopefully keep evolving to meet the school’s needs in this department as they keep changing.
I love that. I think what I love most about what you’re saying is that most people will say to a new head, ‘Take the first year and take it all in. Just listen and learn and get to know people and build relationships.’ And I think that’s great. And I have no doubt you’ve done that. But what I like better is that in doing this experiment, it prompts a vulnerability for you and for others – that leads to a deeper kind of relationship… You can do all of the social gatherings humanly possible in the first year as a head of school and not actually get to know people. You have good reason for that to be a proud moment. Doing that experiment, showing that the school is a learning institution that’s growing and changing, which we all hope to be as schools, and to model how those conversations can go when collectively we get to better answers than alone… that’s not just forward movement for the school and for you as a leader, but it’s also a chance to have deeper connections and relationships, which is the goal of a first year. So: smart move!
Well, it also keeps humans central! Which is what we’ve been talking about… and which I expect will continue to be my bedrock goal moving forward.