Every IKEA box comes with a parts list, a tiny Allen wrench and a wordless cartoon man who looks way too calm about all of it. Dr. James Whitfield has basically spent the past year as that guy.
After budget math forced Treetops School International, a pre-K through 12 charter in Euless, Texas, to cut grades 7 through 12, James started hunting for a cheaper way to put them back together. Texas handed him the first part in 2025 with Senate Bill 569, a law that let more schools run hybrid and virtual programs. Then the state turned down his grant applications, but he kept building anyway.
James spent 17 years in Texas public schools before becoming superintendent at Treetops, starting as a teacher and basketball coach.
“We were like, hey, even if we don’t get this grant, we’re going to move forward,” he says.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: Some assembly required
What We’re Tracking: AI-anxious parents + stressed principals
From Our Desk: We got our peaches out in Georgia
Watch of the Week: Spy lessons for your next cabinet meeting
Some assembly required
A lot of leaders who lose a program wait years to afford the showroom version, with a teacher for every subject. James headed straight for the flat-pack aisle.
Here’s everything that came in James’s virtual learning “box,” minus the leftover screws:
The Treetops Comeback Kit
1 new state law. (aka Senate Bill 569)
1 EdTech vendor who brought up students before James had to. (knock knock, it’s us)
1 parent info night. Subject’s team came out to help pitch families on a program that looked nothing like the old one.
2 grades in the first batch. Seventh and eighth graders came back to campus first.
5 days of login wrangling. Every username had to match. Every single one.
3 electives on the old menu. The new menu needs a scroll bar.
Plenty of districts have a cut program they still bring up like an ex at Thanksgiving. James got his back on his own terms. He moved into administration after grad school showed him how many gaps kids were falling through, and he’s been patching them since.
“Once you know better, you got to do better,” he says.
Our latest playbook has every step, including the holiday homework glitch and the part that surprised James most.
Great expectations need better footnotes: Teachers asked to stress high expectations gave kids more specific math feedback in a new study. Sorry, gold star sticker industry.
Your newest neighbor hums 24/7: More AI data centers are going up near schools, and one in Frederick County, Md., is set to land 500 feet from an elementary school. Health experts flag the noise and light, and the local board president is already sweating the power bill.
Principals are bringing work home, and it’s bringing friends: A new study ties principals’ anxiety and depression to job stress that follows them home. The researcher wants districts to hunt down “phantom tasks,” easily the scariest phrase you’ll read this October.
The hiring committee member who came to play: A retiring teacher landed a seat on a principal hiring committee and wrote up the tough questions they’d ask, like whether candidates would model teaching in real classrooms. Bring a lesson plan and a snack.
Back-to-school night, now with AI cross-examination: Parents spent back-to-school night grilling teachers about AI, while nobody in the gym asked if a chatbot could run hill sprints. The writer says skipped academic sprints catch up with kids too.
When the stipends stopped, so did some student teachers: The Education Department canceled 104 of 109 active teacher training grants, and a new survey says at least 127 teacher candidates dropped out. Another 259 accepted candidates never enrolled in programs built for hard-to-staff jobs like special ed and STEM.
State lawmakers keep editing the sex ed syllabus: State lawmakers introduced 174 sex ed bills in the first half of 2026, and 54% were restrictive in some way. Only five states require comprehensive sex ed right now.
Paging Elle Woods… We dropped our ranking of the top 25 best JD programs in the country. See our picks here.
Sorry UT, we might be Penn State fans now.
Tomorrow night, we’ll host our 2026 Subject Georgia Gala. If you’re an educator or administrator in the Peach State, we’d love to see you there! Send us a message or comment on this post for details.
Other states can check out Subject on the road too! If you’ll be at any of this week’s below conferences, email [email protected] and let’s get together.
Oct 21-23: K12 Collaborative (Fall Conference)
Oct 21-23: APLUS+ Network Conference
Oct 22-24: MSBA Annual Conference (MO)
Watch of the Week: Lioness
Why we’re obsessed: Zoe Saldaña plays Joe, who runs a CIA program that plants undercover operatives inside dangerous inner circles and still tries to make it home for dinner. That makes it basically a cabinet meeting about recruiting and burnout, with more helicopters. Season 3 even filmed mostly around Fort Worth and Dallas, which makes it practically a local PD resource for Texas districts.
Recommended lesson integrations:
Hire for the hardest day of the job. Joe recruits for grit and judgment over polish. Have your hiring team list what your hardest-to-fill roles actually demand on a rough Tuesday, then rewrite the job posting around that list. We bet Cruz never once listed “proficient in Microsoft Office.”
Map the spillover. Joe answers calls from Washington in the middle of family life, and it never ends well. Open a leadership meeting by listing every after-hours task your principals handle, then circle the ones central office could cut by Friday. If your principals answer emails during their kid’s recital, they’re one helicopter short of their own Paramount+ series.
The person who decides and the person who carries it out. Kaitlyn makes decisions in D.C. that Joe has to carry out on the ground. Ask principals to name one central office decision they had to implement without a say, and actually write the answers down. Morgan Freeman narrating your org chart would help, but you’ll have to settle for the assistant superintendent.
Test your cover story. Every operative needs a cover people believe, and every new district program needs a pitch families believe. Have each department explain its newest initiative to a skeptical parent in 60 seconds. If it needs 14 acronyms and a QR code, your cover is blown.
Check the plan before the finale. Joe’s plans fall apart constantly, and she adjusts mid-mission instead of waiting for the season to end. Schedule a six-week check-in for every pilot so glitches get fixed while they’re still small. Finding out in May that the attendance app thinks Presidents’ Day is a school day helps exactly zero people.
Run the vacation test. Joe is so central to the Lioness program that it wobbles whenever she’s distracted. Ask every leader who could run their work if they disappeared on a three-week assignment. “Only Brenda knows the password” is a single point of failure, and oh boy, does Brenda deserve a vacation.
Tell the family early. Joe’s family is usually the last to hear what’s going on, and it shows. Use that to plan how you’ll talk to families about cuts before the rumor mill does it for you. Calling a canceled program “paused for realignment” is the district version of telling your spouse you’re at a conference in Ohio.
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That’s a wrap on this week’s On the Subject! If you’ve got a cut program gathering dust in a budget spreadsheet, the Treetops playbook is a good place to start. Read it here then reach out.