What June Doesn’t Close
Conflict in Plain English | Bruce R. Arcurio, Ed.D. | ArcSpan Mediation & Conflict Solutions
June has a way of feeling like an ending before it is one.
Three weeks left. The operational calendar is winding down -- field days, moving-up ceremonies, the last round of evaluations. You can see the finish line from here. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, you start the slow exhale -- the one that runs from the last day of school to the first morning the emails stop before 7.
It feels like a finish line. In governance terms, it rarely is.
What June actually does -- if you are paying attention -- is reveal. The 4-3 vote from April that nobody talked about afterward. The executive session in March that ran forty minutes over for reasons that never got acknowledged in public. The communication between the board chair and superintendent that got more careful somewhere around February and never quite loosened back up. Those things did not resolve because the calendar is winding down. They are still there, sitting in the governance relationship, waiting for September to give them an occasion.
I have been a superintendent for nine years. I have learned to read June the way you read a room at the end of a long meeting -- not for what people said, but for what they were holding when they left.
“What June actually does is reveal. The things that did not resolve because the calendar is winding down are still there, sitting in the governance relationship, waiting for September to give them an occasion.”
What the year leaves behind
There are two kinds of things a school year leaves behind.
The first kind is genuinely finished. A difficult decision was made cleanly, communicated honestly, and absorbed by the institution. A relationship that went through a hard stretch was repaired -- not perfectly, but enough. A governance problem that surfaced in October was addressed at the structural level rather than managed at the surface. These things are done. They do not come back.
The second kind is on pause. The conversation that got deferred because the budget crisis made everything else secondary. The board member whose conduct in meetings has been a problem for two years and has never been directly addressed. The friction between the superintendent and a board faction that has been managed -- kept below the threshold of formal conflict -- but never resolved. These things are not finished. They are resting.
The problem is that most leaders treat both kinds the same way. The year ends, and everything that happened in it gets filed under “last year.” The assumption is that the new year will bring a new start.
It will not. It will bring an inheritance.
What inheritance looks like in September
The September board meeting where the tension in the room has no obvious explanation -- until you remember what happened in May. The new board member who was never oriented and arrives without context, ready to be recruited into whichever faction reaches them first. The superintendent who starts the year on guard because last year ended with something unresolved between them and the board, and neither party named it before August.
None of this is inevitable. It is predictable. And predictable things can be addressed.
The leaders who navigate difficult years well are not the ones who had fewer problems coming in. They are the ones who did something specific: they named what the year left unresolved before the summer swallowed it. They did not let the end of the calendar year function as a substitute for an honest accounting.
“The leaders who navigate difficult years well are not the ones who had fewer problems coming in. They are the ones who named what the year left unresolved before the summer swallowed it.”
The diagnostic question worth asking now
Before the year fully closes, there is one question worth sitting with -- not in a board meeting, not in a formal document, but in an honest private accounting:
What from this year are we carrying into the next one, and do we know we are carrying it?
The first part of that question is about content. What is unresolved? What was deferred? What was managed well enough to continue but never actually addressed?
The second part is harder. Do we know? Does the board chair know what the superintendent is carrying? Does the superintendent know what members of the board are carrying? Or has the year ended with both parties holding things the other does not know about, heading into summer with a shared assumption that the slate is clean when it is not?
Unanswered, that question produces Octobers that surprise everyone.
Answered honestly -- even informally, even imperfectly -- it produces something different: a summer in which the people who share a governance relationship know what they are working with, and can choose to address it deliberately rather than waiting for it to find them.
What summer is actually for
I write regularly about the August reset conversation -- the board chair and superintendent who sit down before September to name what the prior year left behind and what the new year needs. That conversation is valuable. But it works best when it does not have to do too much work.
The leaders who get the most out of August are the ones who did a quieter version of this accounting in June -- who let the year close with some honesty about what it actually was, rather than the relief of it being over.
June does not close what was not addressed.
But it is, right now, an open window. The calendar is quieter. The formal pressures of the school year have lifted. The relationships that need attention are a little more accessible than they will be in October, when the year is running again and everything is urgent.
What the year has left behind is still here. The only question is whether you want to know what it is.
Bruce R. Arcurio, Ed.D. is a New Jersey superintendent of schools with 33 years of educational experience and NJAPM-trained civil mediation credentials. He is the founder of ArcSpan Mediation & Conflict Solutions, a conflict consulting practice serving educational institutions, governing boards, and organizational leadership teams across New Jersey.
ArcSpan Mediation & Conflict Solutions | arcspanmediation.com | barcurio@arcspanmediation.com