#OwnYourEpic

I recently attended the Nebraska Council of School Administrators (NCSA) Administrator Days held in my home town. It is an annual pilgrimage for all school administrators to kick off the school year and is a great time to reconnect with peers from all over the State and see the amazing things they do in their schools. One of the main themes of this year's conference was telling your school's story and making sure that others know about all the awesome things your school does.

As an English teacher turned administrator I've always been fascinated with the hero's journey. More recently, I began a hashtag on Twitter called #OwnYourEpic. The basic premise of this hashtag is that every single one of us is on a hero's journey. We all go through trials and adventures, we learn from them, and we meet some truly awesome people along the way. #OwnYourEpic is about making decisions and choosing your path. You alone need to travel it, but along the way, you will meet a number of characters that will fill out your life story. The great thing about #OwnYourEpic is that YOU are the author of your own story. You get to decide the theme, plot, and characters that will make up your journey. YOU own the story and will ultimately decide where it goes.

As a member of a school community (student, parent, teacher, administrator) you need to #OwnYourEpic and tell your story about the awesome things going on in your school. I'll be the first to admit that life is cruel sometimes and occasionally,  we like to blame others for the circumstances that we find ourselves in. The reality is that we decide how things are going to play out because we are the authors of our own story. We get lost when the story takes on a life of its own and we succumb to the story rather than the journey itself. We become characters rather than being the author.

Now is the time to take back control the narrative of our public schools. When people want to focus solely on test scores as the lone metric of success, we need to double down and show them all of the things that we are doing right. We are not perfect institutions, but we do excel in a lot of areas. Of course, in Nebraska we have an awesome cheerleading group known as Nebraska Loves Public Schools that helps us get our stories out in the open to let people know that public education is thriving in spite of the negative press that labels us as failing. If you know if anyone that falls in to this camp, send them the links to the videos posted on the Nebraska Loves Public Schools website and inform them that we in public education are actually doing quite well and we are making an impact for countless numbers of students and families.

This year, I challenge all schools to #OwnYourEpic and tell your unique stories. Share them on Twitter at #OwnYourEpic and let's flood social media with the AMAZING things that we are doing in public schools. If we don't write our own narrative, someone else will and it won't be nearly as good as if we wrote it ourselves.

P.S. 
Go HERE and order an I Love Public Schools tee shirt and wear it around town. Take pictures of yourself wearing it and tag it on Twitter using the hashtag #ilovepublicschools. You don't need to be from Nebraska to do this. Let's all come together and show/tell people how AWESOME we are!