On my recent return trip from China, I chuckled when my Sprite, served by a United Airlines flight attendant, sat on a napkin with the phrase “Planes Change; Values Don’t.” IPA is not alone in recognizing the duality of long-term commitments and short-term realities.

I wrote to you last week about the appointment of James Nelligan, IPA’s Secondary School Principal, as the Head of School for Baldwin School in Puerto Rico. His move to his new position will represent a significant change in his life, and a change for us at IPA as well. Our school community has seen periodic departures by teachers and by families attending the school. Common sense and a knowledge of the passage of time in life tells us that IPA will have such transitions from time to time for all of its history. Any human endeavor will.

I have been through such transitions before in both roles, the one leaving and the one staying behind to appoint a new leader. I suspect many of you have had a similar experience, leaving a job you have enjoyed and at which you have done well, for an opportunity for professional growth. You might also have moved due to some familial exigency; an ailing parent (also a major factor for Mr. Nelligan) or to be nearer grandparents, etc. Our military families have become accustomed to periodic transfers; that is a condition of employment they accept as a given.

The fact that we all are subject to professional and personal factors that can affect where we live and what we do is a major reason why healthy institutions have strong and enduring values as their foundation. In the eight years IPA has been in existence, we have had teachers and families move away at the end of a school year, which is always bittersweet; we are happy that our friends have an exciting opportunity or a new challenge, but we will miss their presence in our day-to-day lives. I state with confidence, though, that the core values of the school have remained intact. The power of human kindness; generosity of spirit; sustaining curiosity and creativity; helping students learn how to learn; these remain the values, the message we communicate about ourselves to the community and the measures our students and teachers use in our quotidian activities.

Transitions can produce some anxiety. However, when the process of finding new colleagues is rooted in the core values of the school, or the church, or the business, there is strong reason to be optimistic that “Faces Change; Values Don’t.”

Transitions can also produce freshness of perspective. Finding the right blend between people who carry institutional memory and a track record of living the values of the institution and new people whose new perspectives can stimulate even greater achievement is the responsibility of the leadership of the institution. It is a responsibility I have exercised before in other venues, one that I accept will occur periodically.

I noted above that I have been in the position of the one leaving a job in which I was experiencing success for a new challenge. There is an awkwardness; you can feel that some folks are disappointed that you are “abandoning” them or that colleagues are seeking out others for guidance because they know you are a short-termer. It is hard to live in two places at once, leaving well even as you are preparing to lead another institution. Eventually, everyone becomes comfortable again, and school life goes on.

There is a significant lesson for our students here. To say that change is the one constant in life tends to trivialize how disorienting change can be. Some of us are better than others at handling change but changes always affect us in some way. Our task is to prepare our students for the vicissitudes of life, for the rapid development of technologies, for the remarkably speedy alteration of the work world because of economic conditions or disappearing vocations. A firm foundation of enduring values, paired with the capacities to adapt, think clearly and critically in all situations, and to accept the inevitability of change is excellent preparation for life in any century.