Paradox or Predictable?

I am starting a new residency at a school that is all the way out at the end of a train line, and it is in the kind of neighborhood you find at the end of a train line- run down, boarded up. But you walk into this school and it is filled with art and reading nooks and animals and books, books, books, everywhere you look. It is the most amazing school I've been in in NYC, possibly anywhere. It is filled with imagination and safety and love. I went for the first time yesterday and was immediately overwhelmed- such a change from other hallways I've been walking through. The principal there is engaging and enthusiastic and charismatic and it becomes almost immediately clear that this school is this way because she has willed it so. She is the unquestioned authority in this school, and all teachers and all students know that everything begins and ends with Ms. P. My co-worker and I went out yesterday for a planning meeting with the teachers we'll be working with, and Ms. P told us before we came that we should have everything mostly planned out and run by her before the meeting because there were a lot of teachers involved if we tried to do all the planning in the meeting nothing would get accomplished. I thought this was a strange request given our collaborative, partner-based residency approach and our commitment to integrating our work in to the curriculum rather than being stand-alone workshops, but we went along with it. A planning meeting is still a planning meeting, though, and in these meetings we were still soliciting input from the teachers about how the residency would unfold and fit in to their classes. Ms. P came in half-way and overheard my co-worker asking for a teacher's opinion. After the meeting she called my co-worker into her office and reprimanded her, telling her "I was clear that you needed to have your plan approved by me and not ask the teachers their opinions. Don't do it again." I was appalled. She REPRIMANDED a private contractor for doing the job she was hired to do! She instructed us to send her all our lesson plans and come to her first if we had any questions or changes.

So it's got me thinking- most amazing school ever = principal with an iron fist. The kids seem happy, the teachers seem happy, but it still it left me with a strange taste in my mouth. I wonder how the residency will unfold...