Tight flickr photo by Qwedgeonline shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license
If I were to create a school, I’d fill it with trust. Trust among faculty. Trust between teachers and parents. Trust between teachers and students. Trust among students. Trust between the school and the community.
I get it. Trust is earned, never given. So it would take time to fill. But I’d never stop trying. I’d encourage everyone to try something new. To trust the process. To trust that failing is part of learning. That trust takes time and hard work and causes egos to be bruised and feelings to get hurt.
As the school is being filled with trust, it would become a place where everyone could take (responsible) risks. It would become a place where individual strengths would become collective strengths. Where weaknesses would lead to learning, to discovery, to passions being uncovered. School would become a place where people couldn’t wait to be and where no one would ever want to leave.
“Trust each other again and again. When the trust level gets high enough, people transcend apparent limits, discovering new and awesome abilities of which they were previously unaware.” – David Armistead
The Buist Babble 
It’s pretty amazing what happens when trust is built… walls come down and collaboration becomes the status quo. And mistakes have a buffer of trust in the bank to support recovery.
Thanks for this poignant thought about school culture. I talk to my students about trust presenting itself as a House of Cards. We work so hard to build it up, designing rooms and making the house taller and taller. However, one wrong move and WOOSH! Down the house goes.
Trust is a delicate thing. While it’s so easily destroyed, the more you build, the more others become invested in it. At a critical point, you may still make that dreaded mistake, but now others come to your aid in the rebuild. So keep trusting, and keep building.