Struggling to learn the obvious

Why is this so hard to understand? I've been a teacher for good-god 34 years and yet I keep forgetting that it's the staff....and maybe primarily the principal...who sets the tone for a school.

My partner teachers and I had meetings set up at our school system's two middle schools to talk to the 6th grade teachers about our gifted kids....the ones we worked with for three years and have now sent on to them. To talk about family issues, medicals stuff, our professional observations, what we learned from spending time with this group of kiddos. This is the first time we have done this meeting thing but with our state's mandate for gifted education, including counseling type stuff, we decided to take this on. It meant developing a form, filling out that form for 72 children, coordinating time with those two schools, blocking out time on our part....but the lines of communication between schools in our system have historically been poor (not just my opinion. The latest consultant confirmed this.) so we wanted to do our part.

School One: easy atmosphere, interest in what we had to say, note taking by the 6th grade teachers, a counselor present, a sense that these teachers enjoy kids, collegiality and respect, talk of further sharing of ideas for helping this sort of student.

After that experience, my partners and I felt good about going to School Two. Sure, we had a perception of School Two's principal as an arrogant jerk based on our past experiences with him but this was a new format for a new reason. Well, School Two's principal is still an arrogant jerk and guess what? His staff behaved like jerks too. One teacher was taking something to the high school (not job related) and showed up late, all the 6th grade teachers talked over and through our presentation and laughed at inappropriate times, no one took notes or seemed even remotely interested except to tell us that whatever we saw, they saw the opposite. Oh, that was if they knew the kid. They have had those students for 5 weeks now but they didn't know who a lot of them were.

I'd like to say that I'll never go back there. It felt like we were the middle school kids...that kind of uncomfortable social feeling like thank God I don't usually have any more as an adult. I don't like that feeling. But I will probably go back. I need to for my students. Those children are stuck in that building with those arrogant unfriendly jerks (did I mention that we did hall duty with them during a passing time and not one of the teachers spoke to a child?). The least I can do is show up once a year.

So anyway. A school is only as good as its staff. The kids of course are important but they are kids. It's those adults who set the climate and tenor of the school. That should be obvious to an educator but I just keep wishing we adults didn't have that much power. But we do and School Two should be ashamed of itself. (Sadly, it's rare for arrogant jerks to ever feel shame.)