Since I first saw it on ABC's Wide World of Sports long ago, there is one athletic event that I’ve had a difficult time understanding.  For those who wanted a more profound experience of this event, there was the Atari Game, Decathlon.  And other than that, my opportunities for seeing someone pole vault in person have been really limited.  In the intro to the Wide World of Sports, an athlete does the pole vault, lands, and then does a backflip.  The backflip, I get.  Tyreek Hill does them after he scores touchdowns.  But the pole vault thing has me confused.

I am not googling this or looking it up on AI.  I don’t know how it came to be that someone would grab a pole, run as fast as possible, jam it into the ground, and hurl their body over a horizontal stick.  Why? First, this doesn’t seem safe.  Sticks break, and bodies hit the ground.  The padded landing area makes sense, but if the pole should break – and from what I hear, they do – it is all hard ground from there.  Look at it this way – the indoor world pole vault record is more than 20 feet.  One-half of all fatal falls are actually from less than 20 feet. Do the math.

Perhaps when this started, the stick wasn’t so flexible, and the jumpers didn’t get quite so high.  These days, the poles bend quite a bit, and the vaulter needs to be pretty comfortable with the ability of the pole to sling a human body more than 20 feet in the air. Indeed, a reader will send me the answer about how the pole vault came to be – or maybe a lesser-known story about the event.  But this post isn’t really about the pole vault, is it?  It is about the concept of the pole vault and how it connects to our expectations in the broader sense of life.

It's like this. We are supposed to reach expectations in almost all of life’s circumstances.  In some industries, these are called deliverables.  When someone says this word to me, I always think of a pizza – the most common deliverable known to humans.  I had a guy who pranced around like some business big shot, always saying the word deliverables.  I wanted to send a pizza to his house with a note saying, “This pizza is deliverable.  You use the word far too much.“  It’s like saying to someone that your job is to deliver something to me, you little Plebian, you.  If you use the word deliverables with people, I recommend you don’t – because you sound stupid. Find a better, more respectful way to ask people for stuff. 

Think about all the things you must do in terms of a bar you have to jump over.  Think of the pole as the resources that you need to get there.  For a long time, I could not make enough money to keep everyone in my life happy.  So…I got another job.  Then another.  I worked so often that I started to really dislike the world.  In some senses, the mission was accomplished.  In others, not so much.  But, know that when you don’t make it over the bar, like many before, you fail…that time.  You can often get a bigger pole and try again.  People will always want things from you – and all is good if you have the resources. 

The same is true of our kids and our schools. In the realm of public education, the analogy of the pole vault extends far beyond the physical exertion and strategy of the sport, striking at the heart of a school's ability to elevate its students to new heights. Just as a pole vaulter relies on their pole's strength, flexibility, and reliability to clear the bar, schools depend on their budgets to provide the necessary resources that enable students to achieve academic success. A school’s budget acts as the pole in this metaphor, a critical tool that can help launch our children over the educational barriers they face when adequately funded and managed. Without adequate resources, schools are like vaulters with subpar poles—struggling to support their students' aspirations and potentially failing to clear the obstacles that stand in the way of learning and development.

The importance of a well-resourced school cannot be overstated. Just as a pole vaulter needs a pole that is strong enough to withstand the forces of the vault and flexible enough to catapult them over the bar, schools require adaptable budgets. These budgets must cover a wide range of needs, from up-to-date textbooks and technology to qualified teachers and extracurricular programs, each element contributing to the holistic development of students. The analogy emphasizes that just as a pole vaulter cannot succeed with a broken or inadequate pole, students cannot reach their fullest potential in an underfunded, poorly equipped educational environment. The consequences of neglecting our schools' financial needs are as dire as the risks faced by a vaulter with a failing pole. Instead of soaring over the bar, our children may be unable to overcome the challenges of an ever competitive and complex world.