The key ingredient in developing and maintaining a healthy school climate is faculty morale. While board, parent and student morale are very important, they tend to flow, negatively or positively, from faculty morale.
Boards often provide strong directives to the head.
If always followed, these directives can sometimes lead to a significant drop in faculty morale. When boards have just finished a search process for a new head, they tend to lay out their expectations for the head very clearly. And those expectations, if acted upon too quickly, can lead to tension within the school and radically unhealthy changes in school climate. The areas of change that pose the greatest risks are changes in leadership, compensation structures or levels, work load changes, creating or changing the teacher evaluation process, changes in curriculum or schedules, and changes in the school's financial health that may threaten the teachers' sense of the school's, and therefore their own, financial security. A change in heads causes great anxiety to teachers.