Camelot Profile: Michael Gurley
Michael Gurley, principal at Camelot’s therapeutic day school in Naperville, IL, is celebrating 15 years with Camelot!
Michael has a bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and master’s degrees in Social Work and Education. He began his career as a unit manager at a residential home for kids, which he likens to working in the Emergency Room. “You learn a lot in a short amount of time about medications and psychology and I was responsible for about 20 kids and 60 staff members around the clock.”
He joined Camelot in January 2000 as a social worker, specializing in oppositional and psychiatric students, kids with the most severe concerns. He found it challenging and exciting to help the kids who people think can’t be helped and are the most difficult to reach.
After five years in that role, Michael became clinical director, then assistant principal and finally promoted to principal in September 2007. He added to his title, Head of Clinical Services for all eight Camelot TDS’s in 2012.
In this additional role he helps with risk management, quality management and clinical management and clinical consultation, working with a dynamic group of clinical directors and staff and being a part of expanding the expressive therapies – music, art and play – and always looking to add more programs,
How do you manage to serve both as principal at Naperville and Clinical Director for all eight schools?
Systems theory is always in my mind – how each part makes a whole, and that each part has to be able to fill some of the parts of the other parts. I have all these systems in place where I develop my staff around me to know what I expect to be in my mind. I don’t make decisions in a vacuum. I bring my team in as part of a professional learning community. Everyone gets a voice. Everyone is treated equal in the whole team, not just leadership. Everyone can talk to me about what they think. And when I make a decision I explain to my team what we weighed out, why we’re doing this, and why it will be beneficial to onboard the team to believe in the decisions that I make, to believe in the vision that I have so that when I’m not there they think, ‘I know that Michael would want us to do this.’ And that’s what I want. Because my leadership team here at Naperville has been involved in reaching the decisions, when I am on a call or when I am visiting a different campus my team can carry on. I think it’s bad leadership if things fall apart when the person in charge leaves.
Your professional team has a mix of veteran and younger talent. How does the mix of experience benefit your students?
The idea of having a mix is always a part of what we do in education. There are always new folks coming in with new ideas and they mix with the veterans who have all the strength and knowledge of the Camelot model, our systems, things that have worked and things that don’t work. We have leaders who will go in and help foster the communication between those groups so that we use our longer-tenured folks as mentors with the newer people to teach them our ways and get them to be part of our positive peer culture as a staff, and then we have to listen to the newer people as they bring in their new ideas. I try my best to create an environment to help the newer people understand that they might not have been here as long as others but they have a voice and opinion and we will listen to it. That helps people get on board and ultimately produces the best approaches to helping our kids.
At your level, what is your relationship with students?
As principal, my job is making sure that the students have what they need in terms of our programming and that the programming is of a quality to meet their needs. Some days that puts me in offices analyzing data and looking at trends, helping my team’s data driven decisions. Some days I’m not doing those things during the work day; I’m out in the classrooms, in the hallways, talking to people, responding to calls for help, and I’m observing, praising, giving feedback to people, talking to kids, checking on classrooms. I think that my building functions better when I do. No matter how skilled my team is, everybody wants to see the principal in the rooms and in the hall.
What is it that drives you to care so much about the students you serve?
I am driven by wanting to help people. I love figuring out problems, like what’s the key and what’s the one thing that hasn’t been tried that might work. I’ve always enjoyed listening and analyzing a person’s entire story and situation and then being able to pull out the one thing that hopefully can help. The thing that keeps me doing it is that I have seen students overcome stuff that would lay low most people. And they overcome it with our help and our system and they learn to trust us. I like being a part of mentoring staff and setting up a system where staff can feel comfortable and confident to help kids in that regard, the kids can feel comfortable to share with us and grow and we can be just be a part of helping them overcome this traumatic history and this learning deficit and not wanting to be in a classroom because they don’t feel good around an educational environment, being afraid to be around other people or having medical issues, being able to overcome that. The toughest case comes across the desk and you read the chart and it sounds really difficult and it excites me to ask if not my program, who’s going to help? We are. That’s what we do.
