Join the Club

“All means all” is easy to say. It fits on a poster. It sounds good in a mission statement. It belongs in a strategic plan, a welcome letter, a classroom doorway, and a graduation speech. The real question is whether it lives in our daily practice. During Pride Month, schools and communities have an opportunity to pause and ask a deeper question: When we say every child belongs, do we mean every child as they fully are? Not every child arrives at school feeling equally safe.

When I used to observe sample lessons from teacher candidates, I always watched for something that was not written into the lesson plan. I watched for presence. Not performance. Not volume. Not charisma in the showy sense. Presence. Sometimes the lesson itself was not the strongest part of the interview. The objective might have needed tightening. The pacing might have been uneven. The materials might have been ordinary. Yet, there were moments when a candidate walked into th