This evening some of the leadership of several school parent groups met informally to discuss how, with the departure of our current principal, we can help develop a vision for the school. It was a wonderful discussion -- I have rarely been in a group that had such a shared commonality of vision for the school. There were a lot of really good ideas about team-building, mediation, diversity (writ large), and community. I offered a couple of ideas. My primary suggestion was that what kind of principal we get is going to largely determine how much and what parts of the vision can be realized and that, therefore, we should think strategically about attracting the kind of principal we need (and repelling the others). I suggested that we have everyone in the school submit statements about the school: I love the school because...; I want the school to be...; select a subset of the statments, and create a video with the people saying their statements. Then we can use it, not just at the interviews, but to go after people nationally who we think might be a good principal for our school. We need to build a bigger pool of candidates and weight it in our favor. And I think we have a community that can do it and could be a powerful force for making a world-class school. If we can find the right person.