Principal for a Day: A Little Power Can Be an Awesome Thing

Ashley E. Aitkem grabbed the microphone of the public announcement system Thursday morning to address the 500 students of St. Joseph School on her first day as principal. She liked it so much that soon afterwards, she did it again.

The second time, she summoned a youth out of class. It’s not that he was in trouble. The new principal was just learning the privileges of power.

“I promised I’d call him to the office,” the 10-year-old Ashley explained.

“We have a tetherball court. He’s really good at tetherball, and I’m not good. So, he said he’d pick me on his team if I called him on the PA system,” Ashley confided.

Traded Places

So it was on Thursday--in what sounded like the plot of a teen-age B movie--that the fifth-grader and the real principal, Marion M. Patzem, traded places for the day.

While Ashley spent her day evaluating students’ behavior and giving out detentions at the Placentia school, Patzem spent her day accepting illicit bubble gum and tossing a paper wad or two. At first glance, Patzem, 43, looked like one of the older Catholic school students. At 5 feet, 2 inches and 100 pounds, the principal was able to wear her daughter’s blue, gray and white plaid school uniform.

“I sat in one class for five minutes before the teacher realized there was a new student in the class,” Patzem said. The giggles of her younger cohorts, however, gave Patzem away.

Thin blue stripes on her tennis socks also were a dead giveaway. “The younger students have taken pains to tell me I’m out of uniform,” she explained. And Patzem further broke dress codes by wearing makeup--a definite taboo.

A ‘Special Friend’

“I told them the principal was a ‘special friend’ and that I had permission to wear makeup and nail polish,” Patzem said, laughing. When Ashley then reminded the principal-turned-student that she was granted no such permission, Patzem insisted: “That was the original part of the agreement. I’ll go so far!”

Although she has been principal of the first-through-eighth-grade school for only one year, Patzem agreed to give up her job for one day for the sake of creating a computer lab for the school. During a school auction, parents helped raise about $10,000 for the lab, which is scheduled to open next fall.

Ashley’s parents paid $375 for their daughter to sit in the principal’s office. On Thursday, her mother was on hand to take snapshots of their investment. Meanwhile, Ashley was busy trying to “act like the principal.”

When three boys were spotted playing where they shouldn’t have been, Ashley was stern but not too tough. They received half-hour, after-school detentions. Did she feel bad about giving out such sanctions? “Not really.”

Nervous at Lunch?

When lunchtime came around, she joined teachers in the teachers’ lunchroom, whose interior was foreign to her until Thursday. Did she feel nervous about “doing lunch” with grown-ups? “Not really.”

Actually, being principal was “fun,” Ashley said. The PA system, of course, was the best part. It netted her a coveted spot on the next tetherball team. The boy who weaseled his way out of class, by the way, “just sat there” when he reached the principal’s office. “Then he got to leave because I didn’t want him to get in trouble,” Ashley explained.

Ashley, who said she was attired “like a principal” in her blue dress, spent a good part of her day sitting in the back of classrooms--pencil in hand--ready to evaluate the rooms’ neatness, students’ behavior, teachers’ lessons and other factors with either a “good,” “very good” or “excellent” mark.

The better classes--along with certain individuals--received “free dress,” a pass which allows the students to wear their street clothes instead of uniforms. And Ashley was excited about her authority to give “free dress.”

Until Thursday, Ashley--who wants to be a doctor, “maybe a surgeon”--said she sometimes wondered exactly what a principal does. “Before this, I thought it was pretty easy,” she said. “But now that I’m here, it’s not that easy.”