The Day I Flew a Distress Signal (And Didn't Even Know It)
On my first morning as an elementary school principal, an eleven-year-old had to teach me how to do my job. It was the most useful lesson I got all year.
Before I became an elementary school principal, I was a middle school vice-principal. I knew how to manage a timetable, run a staff meeting, and talk a thirteen-year-old down from a hallway confrontation that started because someone “looked at them wrong.” I thought I was ready for anything.
Then, on my very first morning as acting principal, I hung the Canadian flag upside down.
I had never hung a flag on a flagpole before. That’s not something middle school vice-principals do. Someone else always handled it. But now I was in charge of a building, and the building had a flagpole, and the flagpole was empty, and parents were going to start arriving soon. So I clipped the flag on, hauled it up, and stepped back feeling pretty good about myself.
When the school day started and I opened the doors, a Grade 5 student was standing beside me within minutes.
“Are you the new principal?”
“Yes, I am Mr. Reimer.”
“You hung the flag upside down.”
He was right. The maple leaf was inverted, which is the international distress signal.
I was flying a distress signal. On day one. In front of the whole school.
He didn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that he was correcting the principal. He just walked up, told me, and then showed me the right way to do it. Step by step. With the kind of patience you’d use on a well-meaning but slightly confused substitute teacher.
I told him that if he came in a few minutes early each morning to help me with the flag, I’d buy his hot lunch every Friday for the rest of the year. He agreed without hesitation. He definitely got the better deal, but so did I.
Now, the funny part of that story is obvious. New principal. Upside-down flag. Kid saves the day. Good for a laugh at a retirement dinner.
But the part I kept thinking about afterward wasn’t the flag.
I actually was in distress that morning. Not in any dramatic way. I wasn’t falling apart. But I was genuinely, quietly overwhelmed. Everything I knew about schools had been shaped by the middle school world, its rhythms, its routines, the way adults and kids moved through the building. Elementary was completely different. The pace was different. The emotional temperature was different. The number of things a principal was expected to personally handle before 9:00 a.m. was something nobody had warned me about.
In middle school, students barely register your existence unless you’re standing directly in front of them. In elementary school, you get spotted the moment you turn a corner. Small humans run over. They tell you long, winding stories about their weekend. They show you a loose tooth.
And beyond the kids, there was the operational stuff. The morning announcements. Dismissal, which is not just “the bell rings and everyone leaves” but a full logistical production involving buses, parent pick-up zones, walkers, daycare vans, and at least one child per afternoon who genuinely cannot remember how they’re getting home. Nobody teaches you this kind of stuff in a leadership course. Of course, all of these things happen in middle school, but the processes are very different.
I learned more about how schools actually work in my first two weeks as an elementary principal than I had in years as a vice-principal. And the biggest thing I learned was that the people who really understand how a school runs are not always the people with the titles.
That Grade 5 boy knew how to hang the flag. The custodian knew every mechanical quirk of the building. The administrative assistant knew every family, every allergy, every custody arrangement, every kid who needed a quiet check-in on Monday mornings. The primary teachers understood child development in ways that made my textbook knowledge feel thin.
My job, I realized, was not to show up with all the answers. My job was to be honest about what I didn’t know and to pay attention to the people who did.
That sounds simple when you write it down. It is not simple when you’re standing in a new office, in a new school, with a community watching to see if you know what you’re doing. There’s a quiet pressure that comes with the title. People expect the principal to have things figured out. Sometimes you expect it of yourself. But the title doesn’t come with automatic competence. It comes with a set of keys and a to-do list that grows faster than you can get through it.
What actually helps in those early days is not expertise. It’s the willingness to say, out loud, “I’ve never done this before. Show me.” It’s letting a ten-year-old teach you something in front of the entire school community and not pretending it didn’t happen.
I think about that flag more often than you’d expect. Not because it was embarrassing, though it was a little. I think about it because it set the tone for how I tried to lead from that point on. Pay attention. Ask questions. Don’t fake it. And when someone offers to help, let them.
The distress signal came down that morning. The lesson never did.
Something worth thinking about this week: When was the last time you let someone with less authority teach you something, and actually thanked them for it?
If you’re enjoying How to Principal, share it with a colleague who could use it. And if you haven’t picked up A Year of Leading, it’s the book I wish I’d had on that first morning. Flagpole instructions not included.