Now Hiring: A Kooky High School Principal For A Teen Comedy
The Greater Chicagoland School District is pleased to announce that we’re seeking to fill a principal position at Marshall High School, effective immediately. We need a principal who’s ready to tackle challenges fit for a high school that exists in much more pleasant alternate reality, where there are hijinks and flash mobs aplenty, and everyone who deserves it gets a happy ending.
About Marshall High
This is a fast-paced environment, with a number of shenanigans and misunderstandings happening on a daily basis — your basic mascot-stealing, gender-swapping to prove a point, and a reporter going undercover as a student to expose corruption, but instead finding her inner-child.
We have a very “hands-off” approach to education, which is to say there’s almost no education going on at all, save for a bombshell school newspaper article, an overhyped college admissions essay, or the big school play with themes that just so happen to reflect what the students are experiencing in their everyday lives. We don’t want to prepare students for the outside world — we want to provide a safe environment where the nerd can get the popular girl he thinks he wants but realize it was his best friend all along, for teens to set up multiple intricate bets with high emotional stakes, and of course, to lose their virginities on prom night.
Responsibilities
- Handle disciplinary matters as a friend first, and a principal second.
- Take long strolls throughout campus to generally get a sense of, as the kids put it, “what is up.”
- Head up our budget, ensuring that the majority of our funds go towards the Homecoming dance.
- At some point in the school year take an extremely vested interest in one student, and by extension that student’s group of friends.
- Have a very good (and definitely not lame) catchphrase like “I put the pal in principal” or “Don’t hate, administrate!”
Requirements
- You must be willing to treat students’ love lives with the level of care and patience normally reserved for arms deal negotiations.
- You possess an incessant need to constantly disclose details about your personal — and even sexual — life, to anyone around you who will listen.
- When the student you’ve paid more attention to all year than your own children finally kisses their crush at graduation, you need to know just the right way to nod approvingly, in a way that suggests pride and not that anyone needs to call the cops.
- You have read just like, one book — probably Catcher in the Rye — so that when your favorite student is at their lowest, you have an extremely cliche novel to recommend them. Honestly even The Great Gatsby would be fine.
- At some point, you might find yourself duct-taped into a box. When the school’s mascot gets sick, what choice do you have except to dress up in the costume yourself? Of course, then the rival team will find you and duct tape you inside a box. But you’ll go along with it. That’s how quirky we want our principal!
Prior Experience
Our ideal candidate must have no more than a basic understanding of schools and how schools operate. Maybe you spent some time as a zany teacher — or a teacher who was too hard on your students, but only because you care.
More important than experience, though, is someone with the right temperament: Someone who has the energy of a ringmaster for a traveling circus, who is bursting at the seams to tell you about their sourdough starter.
What we do not want, under any circumstance, is someone who exudes authority or is taken seriously by the students.
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