Headmaster’s Secret Handbook
Why You Shouldn’t Build That Expensive Vanity Project and Why You Will Anyway
There comes a time in the life of the Head of School when they are faced with a Vanity Building Project. Sometimes this project has been on the horizon for a long time, other times it is the pet scheme of a rich donor or board member.
In either case, you may have a gut feeling that the project is a waste of time and money and a distraction from the work of schooling.
And you may have a pang of guilt on your morning drive when you pass the crumbling buildings at Public School Zero where black mold is visible from the road. Does Richard E Rich Academy really need a titanium-plated E-Learning Center? Why do we live in Education Apartheid?
Early on in the long, boring, and expensive process of planning the Vanity Building Project, you may compile a secret Google doc with all the reasonable reasons not to go forward with the VBP (as you call it in your private communications).
Why We Should Not Replace the Old Library With an E-Learning Center
Kids Prefer Real Books
You note in your doc that the students do not want to replace their friendly, musty library with an E-Learning Center. The research shows that kids prefer to read physical books, and are tired of having screens forced on them.
Architectural renderings of the proposed buildings show uncomfortable spikey modern chairs at futuristic computer stations, but students prefer to pile on saggy beanbags on the floor of the Old Library and read dogeared copies of favorite books.
New Construction is Not Green
The proposed E-Learning Center is being pumped as a LEED-certified Green Building, but tearing down the old library and building a new one has a huge carbon footprint.
Construction and demolition create an estimated third of the world’s overall waste and at least 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. And of materials delivered to building sites, as much as 30% end up in the garbage.
Those bean bag chairs will never biodegrade in landfill, and the packaging for the new spikey chairs will fill up a fleet of dumpsters in and of itself.
Maintenance is Not Included in Cost Estimates
You notice that maintenance costs for the new E-Learning Center were included in the first proposal but mysteriously disappeared in the cascade of revisions.
This is a common tactic. Lowballing the cost of replacing screens and updating technology is routine practice. And it is a universal crime to ignore the climate costs of the server farms that hold our data while extolling the benefits of a paperless world.
But it’s also an old development trick to leave out maintenance costs for the Vanity Building Project and later cry poor when costs overrun and routine expenses seem to require a new capital campaign. Who will water the full-height trees in the atrium? Who will staff the smoothie bar? How much do those e-book subscriptions really add up to?
Those old copies of Charlotte’s Web, however, are still good a decade after someone wrote “I Like Luke” on the last page.
Lowering Tuition Would Bring In More Applications Than Better Buildings
The hidden cost of expensive building projects is higher tuition. These projects are designed to attract the sort of rich parent who then goes on to fund more Vanity Building Projects. But if we used our resources to make the school more affordable, we could improve enrollment and make our school a better place.
Instead, the one-percenters on the Board of Trustees have made it their hidden agenda to make the Richard E Rich Academy the bastion of only the super-rich. They don’t care if enrollment drops, they can afford to bankroll the school until their kids graduate.
Building Projects Focus Admin Time Away From Students
VBPs focus admin on construction logistics instead of students. You already spend a lot of time holding the hand of rich donors and powerful Board members. Once the VBP is underway you will be drawing in Reply All email chains about the minutiae of building codes and the perpetual punch list.
All of this will take you away from faculty and students and what used to be the real business of running a school.
You will yearn for the time when you could escape to the faculty corner in the library where a squishy couch and a tattered copy of Field and Stream Magazine welcomed you on bad days. Instead, you are trapped in an email standoff with a testy millionaire with strong opinions about triple-glazed windows and nothing else to do but bombard your inbox.
Why You Will Build That Expensive Amenity Anyway
Despite your better judgment and your carefully worded missives, you will end up agreeing to the VBP and will spend your days and restless nights obsessing over it. Here is why.
Benchmarks in Your Contract
You were so happy to get the job offer at Richard E Rich and escape your job at the suffocatingly small day school where you were underappreciated that you didn’t read your contract that carefully.
The relentlessly long application process involved rubber chicken dinners with a casting call of eccentric stakeholders and nosy trustees. You returned to the campus a total of five times for redundant interviews in which you slowly started to promise more and more.
Yes! You promised to reenter all the alumni into the database with correct names and titles/ partner with the state on the conservation of the toxic swamp/ mend fences with the angry neighbors on the north side of campus by the swamp/ switch back to phonics from the thing you switched from phonics to/ fix the thatch on the back lawn/ reel in the donor angry about the swamp/ force the senile teachers to retire/ unite the faculty bitterly divided over retirement/ fence in the suicide pond and settle the old sexual harassment charges.
In that laundry list of projects proposed by one after another of your self-interested inquisitors, the E-Learning Center did not loom large.
But your pay increase and your tenure at Richard Rich are legally tied to completing the project.
Building Your Resume
As it turns out, you dream of leaving Richard E Rich for a better school long before you are supposed to meet the benchmarks in your contract. But in order to get a better job you need to beef up your resume.
And nothing is more tangible, more concrete than the eco concrete of a pricey E-Learning Center. Those spiky chairs look great on your Powerpoint presentation and will land you the next job just like they did for the architects you hired for the VBP. Never mind that the spikey chairs were too expensive and got replaced by standard office chairs from Staples at the last minute.
Your Prestige Is Tied to The Prestige of The Vanity Donor
Independent school heads are part of a tiny insular community. In order to succeed and be perceived as a “team player” you need to ingratiate yourself with the money men (and occasionally women) who run these schools.
Trustees build their own prestige by building buildings. They pad their own resumes with the VBPs that demonstrate their power and prestige to other Boards, whether on companies or private institutions.
To show your value to the people who will make it possible for you to advance, you have to facilitate their ego-driven facilities projects.
Old School Rivalries
Despite the fact that all the old prep schools are more or less the same, the rivalry between them is crucial to their self-concept. Nothing motivates donors and trustees more than the competition between rich schools to look even richer.
A dangerously expensive race to provide ritzy amenities will eventually wipe out the poorer schools. Puff Chuffington does not want to be outclassed by his old chums from Loomis Chafe Me, Crotchkiss, or Coke Rosemary Hall.
A competitive consumer mentality among the children of the rich who are shopping for prep schools is both a product of and a promoter of the builder mentality. Those unloved campus buildings with their hideous 1970s overhangs and windy plazas are an Instagram embarrassment.
The Sad Truth
Never mind what Richard E Rich really needs is not an E-Learning Center but a new garbage shed. No donors are stepping up to put their names on the dumpster depot.
And you can forget your dreams of purchasing a library cover to hide the ugly facade of the beloved Old Library at a fraction of the cost of knocking it down and building a new one.
It may be cheaper to renovate than to rebuild, but the drive of institutions is to build monuments to themselves not to maintain them.
No one is stopping you though from grabbing one of those bean bag chairs from the dumpster and retiring with a worn copy of Alexander and the Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day while sipping on some avocado juice from the soon-to-be-closed smoothie bar in the new E-Learning Center.
Also Read: Students Don’t Want Fancy Buildings