Before the bell rings on a Monday morning, Upper Campus Principal, Greg Eiserman walks through the halls whistling when he comes across an open classroom. He pokes his head in to look for a teacher, but they’re not there. He walks over to their desk, pulls a sticky note out of his pocket and writes them an uplifting note to start their day.
This is Eiserman’s first year as the Upper Campus Principal. As he continues to settle into a role with a much larger staff, he is focused on creating a better staff and principal relationship by showing them that he has their back.
“My primary focus on a day to day is with our staff,” Eiserman says, “ … our staff needs to feel supported. It’s a very hard time in education to be a teacher and just to work in education in general.”
Eiserman believes that when a teacher feels support from him, it will help them be more confident in their teaching skills and be there for their students. And when teachers are more willing to go an extra step for their students, it helps them get a better education.
By being there for his teaching staff, Eiserman is able to provide problem solving skills that can relieve a lot of the pressure that the staff can feel from time to time.
“This job is not easy,” science teacher Samantha Donelson says. “Sometimes I feel like teachers carry so much figurative weight. However, when you have a building leader who makes you feel heard, valued, appreciated and supported, this job feels less heavy.”
Some of the ways that Eiserman has been the cheerleader that the staff needs is through a variety of initiatives that he has started over the years.
One of his more well known initiatives throughout MCHS is Thankful Thursdays, which was made popular at the Freshman Campus and brought over to the Upper Campus this year.
“Faculty and staff would nominate their peers when something good was going on in the classroom or building to give them a shout out,” Freshman Campus Administrative Assistant, Patty Rowe says, “which in turn brought us all together.
Along with this, Eiserman sends encouraging emails to the staff on Fridays, frequently drops into classrooms leaving notes for teachers and organizes monthly activities for the staff to do.
While these efforts may seem small, they have greatly improved the community building between Eiserman and the staff.
“We have internal surveys and data that we let our staff fill out,” Eiserman says, “and one of them that I look at religiously and think about all the time is staff principal relationship.”
Eiserman continued to say that over the last three years this data has dramatically increased showing the true impact that these initiatives are having on the staff’s comfortability at MCHS.
Hurrying back to class, Donelson walks back into her empty classroom with a stack of papers fresh from the copier. She goes to set them down on her desk when she sees a bright green sticky note sitting on her desk that says, “keep up the good work!” She smiles, sets the note aside and gets ready for a great day of teaching at MCHS.