20 tasks, each one witnessed by the sources that watched the job — and behind every one, a prompt you can use tonight.
You usually start before teachers arrive: check attendance and emails in Microsoft Outlook, review discipline or safety notes, and meet briefly with administrative staff. Mornings often include classroom walkthroughs, quick meetings with counselors, and handling immediate student or parent issues.
Afternoons are planning and paperwork: budgeting in Microsoft Excel, updating the school calendar in SharePoint, observing lessons, and meeting with teachers about curriculum or professional development. Evenings might have a parent meeting or a school event; expect work beyond regular school hours several times a week.
You’ll use Microsoft Outlook for email and scheduling, Microsoft Excel for budgets and data, and Microsoft Word and PowerPoint for reports and presentations. SharePoint often stores school policies, forms, and shared documents.
If your district uses a student system like ACS Technologies HeadMaster, you’ll use it for attendance, grades, and student records. Familiarity with those five systems covers most administrative needs.
Principals collect test scores, attendance, and behavior records (often in Excel or HeadMaster). They create a school improvement plan by looking for patterns—low scores in a subject, chronic absences, or discipline spikes.
Then they coordinate curriculum planning and teacher development: change lesson plans, schedule targeted professional development, or start intervention groups. The principal monitors progress by comparing new data against the baseline every few weeks or terms.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 2025, there were about 328,330 principals employed with a median pay of $105,870 per year. The lowest tenth earned about $76,280 and the top tenth about $167,770 per year.
Districts set actual pay; it varies by state, district size, and whether you are in elementary, middle, or high school. Use the BLS numbers to get a realistic national range.
You split duties: manage school operations—budgets in Excel, hiring paperwork, facilities requests—while delegating day-to-day classroom decisions to department leads or instructional coaches. You still lead curriculum planning, attend key lessons, and sometimes teach classes yourself.
Strong principals spend mornings on instructional leadership (walkthroughs, teacher coaching) and afternoons on administration (finance, HR, reports). Prioritize tasks that directly affect student learning when time is short.
AI can help draft newsletters, summarize meeting notes, or generate lesson-plan ideas, using Word or PowerPoint output. Never upload student-identifiable data (names, IDs, grades) to public AI services. Treat student records like you would in HeadMaster or district systems.
Work with your district IT and legal team to approve tools. Use AI for drafting and brainstorming only; always review and edit outputs before sharing with staff, parents, or students.
Focus on leadership and communication: run meetings, speak with parents and community stakeholders, and write clear reports in Word and emails in Outlook. Practice data analysis in Excel—budget numbers, attendance trends, and test scores.
Also build instructional skills: lead curriculum planning, run teacher observations, and design professional development. Learn your student system (like HeadMaster) and SharePoint for document management. Those concrete skills get you noticed.