“The Backbone of the School” Is Not a Compliment
Do you know who it is in your school?
Think about the person who always figures it out. The one who remembers the procedures nobody documented. Who smooths conflict before it reaches the office, catches the falling pieces before leadership ever knows they were falling. The one who stays late when the timeline is unrealistic, translates when communication is fragmented, and quietly owns the processes nobody officially assigned.
We celebrate these people. We call them dedicated. Reliable. We call them the backbone of the school.
Early in my career, that person was me. I was coordinating initiatives, supporting colleagues, and managing details that weren’t officially mine. I carried a lot of emotional labor without fully realizing how much. When I finally told my principal I was exhausted, she smiled and said, “Cathy, you’re the backbone of the school.”
I felt proud. My work was noticed. What I didn’t see yet was the harder question underneath that moment.
Why was one teacher serving as the backbone of a school?
A backbone holds up a structure that can’t support itself. When we describe someone that way in an organization, we’re not actually describing their strength. We’re describing a gap the system has learned to fill with a person.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. When expectations are unclear, high performers don’t usually wait for clarity. They create it. They build the spreadsheet, send the follow-up, draft the protocol, and stay until it’s done. And because they do, the system never feels the strain. No visible breakdown. No friction. No pressure to redesign.
The school appears stable. But it’s stable because people are manually stabilizing it, invisibly, and at great personal cost.
This is why rhythms are one of the two key structures in my framework. A school with genuine rhythm doesn’t require any one person to hold the beat. The structures carry the pace and the rhythm sustains the structure. They’re reciprocal. People bring their energy to the work, rather than spending their energy compensating for gaps.
When a school runs on a person instead of a system, the rhythm disappears the moment that person does.
There’s something else worth naming at this time of year. Summer tends to be when the compensatory heroes finally show it. The tightening, the quieting, the withdrawal that has been building since October becomes visible now. It’s tempting to read that as disengagement, or attitude, or burnout in the individual sense. Teachers and leaders unplug and hope that rest over the summer will fix it.
If nothing changes, however, that reset will be completely undone by Halloween. This pattern of going to and beyond capacity, resting, and repeating is like stretching a rubber band to its limits again and again. Eventually, you’ll lose your ability to come back to shape, or you’ll snap.
That cycle is worth interrupting.
Three questions worth sitting with this summer:
- Who are the people your school quietly depends on?
- What work are they carrying that should belong to the system?
- If they stopped compensating tomorrow, what would become visible?
Include yourself when you answer those. Leaders absorb ambiguity too, often more than anyone.
Healthy schools don’t require heroics from their best people.
If this resonated, the Rhythms Reset Planning Guide is a good place to start. It’s a free resource designed to help leaders build the structures that carry the school, so the people don’t have to.
