There are moments as leaders when we carry the weight of the world—not just for ourselves, but for the people we are called to protect. For our students. For their families. For our colleagues who trust us to lead.
I remember vividly a day when I was a principal in Boston. A day when the world seemed to close in on us. The district office sent us a notification: federal immigration officers could enter school grounds to arrest or detain immigrant children or their family members.
I read it twice.
Three times.
And the rage bubbled up inside of me. I couldn’t fathom it.
Schools—our sanctuaries, our places of learning and safety—being reduced to hunting grounds.
And I thought, Not on my watch.
I remember standing tall that day, six-foot-three, nearly 300 pounds, cornbread-fed and unapologetically Black.
I called my supervisor and said firmly, “They’ll have to come through me first. There’s no way this is happening here.”
But it wasn’t just my anger that drove me. It was the faces of the children I saw every day.
That morning, a little Haitian girl in third grade, with glasses perched on her nose and a mind sharper than any, came to me. She was the caretaker of her two younger siblings, a first grader and a kindergartener. Her hands carried their backpacks; her heart carried their lives.
Tears streamed down her face as she looked up at me and asked, “Mr. Martin, are they coming for us?”
I knelt down to her level, placed my hands on her shoulders, and said, “Not on my watch. You see how big I am, right? You know Mr. Martin don’t play.”
She searched my eyes for truth, for safety, for a reason to believe me. And when she hugged me—her siblings wrapping their small arms around me, too—I felt her fear. And mine.
I walked them to breakfast, holding back my own tears, because I had no guarantee. I could protect them in the school, but when the buses took them home? I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I’d see them again the next day.
The helplessness I felt in that moment still sits with me. And today, as I watch families once again live in fear, children once again wonder if they’ll lose everything, I know that many of you are carrying this same weight.
You are the guardians of your communities. You are the protectors of not just education, but dignity and humanity. You stand in the gap for children who look to you for safety, who believe you when you say, Not on my watch.
So here’s what I want to say to you, from one leader to another:
Keep fighting. Even when it feels too big, even when the tears fall, even when you doubt your own strength—keep fighting. You are the reason children wake up and come to school each day.
You are the reason families trust that someone sees them, hears them, fights for them.
We may not always win the battles, but our resolve, our presence, our defiance in the face of injustice—those things leave marks. Those things matter.
Let’s stand together, for our children, for our families, for each other.
Not on our watch.
In solidarity and hope,
Craig