Week 5 at Higher Achievement

So far this summer, a lot has felt pretty chaotic and unorganized, but nothing has been as bad as last week. Last week was the big culminating event for Higher Achievement, where all the learning centers in Richmond come together to compete in a variety of events. This event has been going on at every Higher Achievement site in every city since the beginning of Higher Achievement, so I would have thought that by now they would have figured out how to run the event smoothly, however, that was not the case. Kids were all over the place, not all groups of kids were being supervised, and the volunteers were not told the right places to be, so therefore, some events were severely understaffed. After the event, I had found out that the director of all of Richmond programs is new this year, so it makes sense that things have been pretty chaotic. Because my site supervisor is also new this year, I had always thought that our site was a little unorganized because he was still figuring things out, but as it turns out, things at the way top are unorganized, and it has been trickling down. This was the most apparent at our staff meeting on Friday, where we went over information about the two night overnight field trip next week. As of Friday, nothing had been planned by the Richmond director for us or any of the centers to do on the field trip, and we are supposed to be leaving on Monday. Because everything at the top is unorganized, all the individual centers are also unorganized, so the teachers who are responsible for the students on this field trip are going to be unorganized as well. This hierarchy and trickle down effect I have been witnessing, especially last week, really shows how important leadership is. In my Theories and Models class, we talked a lot about whether or not leadership actually matters, and whether or not the actual person who is in that role matters. After my experiences last week with the entire Richmond Higher Achievement program, it has become apparent just how much leadership does matter, and I think the actual person matters as well. Especially in a big company or organization such as Higher Achievement with many different programs, tiers, or departments, if things are not being run smoothly at the top level, then everything underneath can severely suffer.