Sometimes Change is Not Necessary

May 23, 2024- Thursday 

Today is Thursday, May 23, 2024. For most people it is just another day in the week. For some teenagers, today is the last day of school for them. Possibly their last day of school ever because they are graduating from high school. For me, today is another day in another week of retirement but emotionally, it is a little more than that.  

I had four largely wonderful years of high school. The sophomore year was a bit of a struggle but not enough to dim my whole high school experience. I enjoyed going to high school. I had very good friends in high school. Like many schools, my high school had some great traditions and many of the students worked to make sure those traditions lasted.  

Today, my high school is closing. It is not being moved to another, more modern campus. It is to be closed and extinguished. The name will be gone. The traditions will be gone. My hook into the city’s well-being will be gone. I will have my memories and I have my yearbooks that chronicle all of the great things about my high school but there will be no continuation of those connections because of change.  

I spent the vast part of my professional career being a change agent in the workplace. I worked in areas that required frequent change because of new revelations in science and in technology. We had to acquire a mentality of change to provide quality service to those we served. Change was simply a job requirement. One thing I never forgot through all the years of change was whether the upcoming change was necessary or not. We had to guard against the whole idea of change for change's sakes. 

That is what is happening at my high school. Based on the information provided by the school system’s board, the closing of the school as a high school was not necessary. It looks like the school board is making the change for athletic program reasons. If someone is involved in Texas high school sports, one must realize it requires change to keep up with the other high schools that allow athletics drive their school's directions.  

Those involved in high school athletics must know they will continue to change and some of the changes will be major upheaval. Athletics drive decisions much more than mathematics, science or technology. So many athletes feel they will play as professionals if they have access to the best of facilities and coaching. The reality is very few will ever play professionally in any type of sport but that is what is driving major decisions and driving the change mentality.  

Will the facilities of the new high school be better than the previous ones? Yes, they will but it would be very easy to simply transfer the school’s identity and traditions rather than extinguishing them. That approach would have required some guts on the part of the school board but not really that much. Instead, they found a chicken’s way out and extinguished the identities of not just one school but of three schools.  

Change is inevitable but change is not always necessary. Sometimes stability and tradition are worth something. Now, the school board’s decision has extinguished my connection to the city. I know the school board could care less about how I feel about their decision to extinguish my high school. The lesson it does reinforce in my life is this, one must continue to evaluate change because not all change is necessary.