Code of Ethics for School Leaders

Standard 1.2 – Using the school tractor to mow your personal acreage.

            This happens very often when school equipment is used for someone’s personal gain.  This is very prevalent in the Career and Technology areas because of availability of different equipment and funds.  My example is the Ag teacher that allows for people in the community to use the welder on the weekends at their homes.  Over time the welder has many hours placed on it not by the community’s children, but by adults.  Then the welder breaks and its cost money to get it fixed or worse yet, you have to buy another welder.  The short term consequences are money out of the budget and the school’s reputation.  Ruling out termination of the accused teacher, the teacher must learn that they are setting themselves up to fail.  Equipment will break and it will break faster when there are multiple users.  When you allow some then many will come and you must be fair.  It is best to not allow and to get a hold of the situation very quickly.

Standard 1.6 – Changing the final count of the gate money from last night’s basketball game to match the number of tickets sold.

            Many times, someone is put in charge of counting the ticket sales from the money box from sporting events.  The best way of accounting for the amount of money made is to account for the amount of tickets sold and attach a value to each ticket.  There are occasions where someone does not add or subtract correctly and the money can be a few dollars off or the wind blows through the doorway and tickets are lost, causing the money and tickets to not add up correctly.  The administrator must sign off on the money collected and account for the missing money or missing tickets.  It is very easy to avoid questions asked to make the tickets and money collected match by throwing away some tickets or taking out some of the money.  You could lose your job and cost the position of the person counting the money.  The trust that you have built will be lost.  The best thing to do is put counters in place at the business office.  Make sure that two people are with the money at all times and they double check the counting procedures.

Standard 1.5 – An assistant principal that does not impose the same discipline to a student because they are their baby sitter.

            You as a superintendent have many complaints that one of your assistant principals is allowing his baby sitters to not attend detentions that they are assign and taking them off the list.  This is causing problems in the student body and the parents are calling you about this and want it stopped.  You must call in that principal and make sure that their credibility will forever be altered and that their ability to serve discipline to students will be ruined.  In the short term, this will affect the climate of the students.

Standard 2.5 – Not including teachers in the Christmas Party based on their religious beliefs.

Standard 2.7 – Threatening someone who is brought into an investigation that concerns you and your students.