Before You Close Out the Year, Close the Loop

This is Week 3 of The Last Bell — a four-week series for school leaders navigating the end of year with steadiness and intention.

I want to tell you about a colleague I almost let slip into June.

She had been on my teaching team for three years. Reliable, steady, the kind of person who showed up early and stayed late without being asked. But somewhere around February of that particular year, something shifted. She got quieter. She stopped popping her head in to share a win from her classroom. She started eating lunch alone.

I noticed. I told myself I'd check in. And then March happened, and April happened, and suddenly it was May, and I was looking at her across a staff meeting and realizing I had let four months go by without a real conversation.

I almost let it become June.

I didn't. I knocked on her classroom door one afternoon after dismissal, sat down in one of her student chairs, and said — not as her colleague, just as a human — "I feel like I lost you somewhere this year, and I'm sorry I didn't come sooner. How are you really doing?"

What followed was one of the most important conversations of my career. Not because of what I said. Because of what she needed to say.

That conversation didn't fix everything. But it closed a loop that had been quietly fraying for months. And she came back in September, different — more connected, more anchored — because someone had shown up before June.

I think about that afternoon a lot. Especially in May.

What a loop actually is.

In the Heartbeat Framework, two of the five domains speak directly to this moment in the school year: Relationship Architecture and Co-Regulation and Repair.

Relationship Architecture is the intentional design of how connection happens in a school — the structures, the habits, the micro-moments that build trust over time. And Co-Regulation and Repair is the practice of coming back after a rupture — because ruptures happen in every relationship, in every school, every year. The question is never whether they happen. The question is whether we repair them.

An open loop is an unrepaired rupture. It's the conversation that needed to happen and didn't. The misunderstanding that was never addressed. The student you lost in October and never quite got back. The staff member who needed to feel seen, and instead felt managed. The colleague you were short with in a hard week, and never followed up with.

Open loops don't close themselves. They just get carried — quietly, heavily — into the next school year.

End of year is your best chance.

Here's what I've learned: June is actually a gift, if you use it right.

When the school year ends, people exhale. The pressure releases. And in that release, there is a small but real window for connection that doesn't exist the same way in October or February. People are more willing to be honest. More willing to receive honesty. More willing to say the thing they've been holding.

End of year is the best — and last — chance to close open loops with the people who matter in your building. And the leaders who use it well don't arrive in September dragging unfinished relationship business behind them. They arrive lighter. And so do their people.

What repair actually looks like.

Let me be clear about something: repair is not a grand gesture. It is not a formal meeting with an agenda. It is not a card, a gift, or a speech at a staff appreciation breakfast.

Repair is a moment of genuine presence. It is small and direct, and it usually takes less than five minutes.

It sounds like: "I've been thinking about our conversation in March, and I don't think I handled it well. I wanted to come back to it."

Or: "I feel like this year got hard between us, and I didn't want to let June arrive without saying that I noticed and I care about our relationship."

Or, for a student: "I know this year wasn't always easy between us. I want you to know I see how hard you've worked, and I'm proud of you."

That's it. No performance. No lengthy explanation. Just presence and honesty and the willingness to show up before the bell rings for summer.

The question underneath the question.

When I work with school leaders, I often ask them to do a quiet inventory in May: who in your building needs you to close a loop before June?

Not who deserves it. Not who asked for it. Who needs it.

Sometimes it's a student. Sometimes it's a teacher. Sometimes it's a parent you've had a complicated relationship with all year. Sometimes — and this one takes the most courage — it's a colleague or a supervisor.

The inventory doesn't have to be long. It usually isn't. Most leaders can name one or two people immediately. And the ones who do the work of showing up for those conversations — who knock on the door, sit in the student chair, and ask the real question — those are the leaders whose buildings feel different in September.

Because belonging isn't built in grand gestures. It's built in the moments when someone bothered to come back.

Pulse Check Reflection:

Who in your building needs you to close a loop before June — and what has been getting in the way of that conversation?