The Magazine That Keeps a Spare Copy of the Spare CopyADMIN SURVIVOR
Volume 2 · Issue 1Staff Meeting · Feature 4 of 7
Administrator + Teacher Perspective

Welcome Back: Please Review These 46 New Procedures

A staff-meeting satire about back-to-school procedures for arrivals, attendance, devices, visitors, dismissal, and every laminated document in between. It argues that useful procedures name who does what, when, and where to find help—and remain clear when a tired adult needs them under pressure.

A few updates becomes a ceremonial reading of every laminated document in the building.

Published · Updated

The female principal presents beneath a storm of procedure sheets while tired teachers sit around a table and the male principal carries binders
The meeting began with a welcome and ended with a document nobody had seen before.

The first staff meeting has a familiar opening: welcome back, hope everyone had a restful summer, here are the emergency exits. Then the phrase “just a few updates” enters the room and quietly removes the afternoon.

The female principal moves through procedures for arrivals, dismissals, attendance, devices, visitors, hallway movement, substitute access, lost water bottles, and the new protocol for finding the old protocol. Teachers nod with the determined stillness of people conserving battery.

Nothing says “fresh start” like a binder labeled FINAL_FINAL_REVISED.

Good procedures are short enough to use under pressure. They name who does what, when, and where to get help. They do not require a staff member to remember a seven-step flowchart while a bus is idling and a child is asking whether a fire drill counts as attendance.

Cut the decorative language. Put the essentials where people can find them. If a procedure cannot survive a tired adult reading it at 7:58, it is not finished; it is a memo wearing a costume.

Procedure Triage
Keep: clear, necessary, practiced.
Rewrite: “in a timely manner.”
Archive: anything that begins “as we all know.”