A culture of caring begins with district leaders who cultivate conditions that address everyone’s social and emotional needs.

For almost two years, educators and parents have grappled with a host of challenging questions: Is it safe to send my child to school? How can we meet the needs of our students when they are learning virtually or are quarantined at home? What can we do to ease the anxiety teachers and students are experiencing? Given the circumstances, it’s no wonder that mental health crises are on the rise among students and staff across the country. In our recent conversations with educators, however, we’ve also heard many declarations of hope, optimism, and resilience.

Our research suggests that a school system’s central office can play a key role in supporting educators, students, and families by providing what we call caring district leadership. Yet, until recently, research has failed to provide clear guidance as to how superintendents and other central office leaders can promote a culture of care. To date, most research on caring leadership has emphasized relationships at the school level (Louis, Murphy, & Smylie, 2016) — for instance, school-level findings suggest that principals should attend carefully to organizational dynamics (Walls et al., 2019); adopt racially and culturally affirming practices (Bass & Alston, 2018); and foster a sense of hopefulness among members of the school community (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020).

We know that superintendents and central office leaders play important roles in district policy making and that the actions and beliefs of district leaders affect program implementation and educator buy-in (Coburn, 2016; Donaldson et al., 2021; Rigby & Woulfin, 2016; Wong, Coburn, & Kamel, 2020). So, as researchers who study care and social-emotional supports, we believe it is well past time to closely examine what caring district leadership entails and what it means for school leaders, staff, and students.

It is well past time to closely examine what caring district leadership entails and what it means for school leaders, staff, and students.

We were especially curious about how district leaders provided caring supports during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. So during the 2020-21 school year, we interviewed nearly 50 superintendents, assistant superintendents, and director-level district leaders across the country. We asked them: How do you provide care? What challenges are you experiencing, and how are you handling them? What supports, resources, and skills are you using to provide caring supports?

Creating conditions for care

Nel Noddings (2015) suggests that care at the organizational level is done through caring about. This is inherently different from the type of care performed by those who are in direct caring relationships with students (e.g., teachers, nurses, and counselors). At the organizational level, caring about is performed not through providing direct support but by creating conditions for care. In other words, district leaders who care about the people in their district cultivate a climate where everyone is able to give and receive care, even if the leaders themselves are not providing the care. When exploring our research data, we sought to understand how district leaders were creating these conditions. We learned that caring leadership is complex and evolving, that it occurs in collaboration with educators across departments and roles, that partnerships with community organizations and outside agencies enable districts to provide more and better care, and that district leaders see equity initiatives as distinct from their care-oriented work.

Complex and evolving work

District leaders in our study described their caring leadership as multifaceted, complex, changing, and somewhat in flux. For example, Sarah, director of student services in a medium-size, suburban district said that, for her, care meant “making sure that everybody has what they need . . . it’s wearing a lot of hats . . . to meet the physical and social-emotional needs of everyone in the system.” Sarah does not restrict her conceptions of care to one relationship or practice but implies that her role as director is to care for all in the system, students and adults alike.

The complexity of caring for both adults and students came up often in relation to the pandemic, when leaders’ conceptions of how to cultivate care became an ongoing, fluctuating process, occurring in tandem with changes caused by COVID-19. Trevor, a superintendent in a medium-size suburban district, exemplifies this change and complexity. He explained that the pandemic prompted the district to expand its mental health programming and to offer access to services to students, staff, and other members of the community. Some district leaders described how this expansion led them into uncharted territory in their understandings of their role. Deborah, director of counseling services in a small, rural district, described paying closer attention to adult care needs and working with her staff to coordinate teacher wellness days. Whereas, before 2020, district leaders had primarily focused on student care needs, the pandemic underscored the need to care for adults as well to ensure that they had the capacity to continue caring for students.

A collaborative and relational practice

Another finding from our study was that a large part of district-level care work involves collaboration across and within the school system. In many cases, this work occurs as central office leaders work with teams, colleagues, and fellow educators. Winnie, assistant superintendent of a large suburban district, said much of her caring work happens in meetings as she leads and interacts with various teams. As Winnie works with teams from across the district, she puts care and social-emotional needs at the top of her priority list by attempting to be attentive to team members’ needs and encouraging teams to prioritize efforts that address needs within the district. Victoria, the assistant superintendent of a small suburban district, reported that increased attention to social and emotional learning and mental health led her district to create new cross-functional teams because, “You don’t have to have all the answers yourself, but you have to have people surrounding you that have that particular expertise.” These teams focused on challenges like the social transition from middle school to high school and supports for older students who were themselves trying to support younger siblings amid the pandemic.

Not all collaborative caring work was easy or possible, however. In one large urban school district, David, a whole-child district specialist, lamented that district silos and a strong culture of educator autonomy prevented him from doing caring work in collaboration with others. Indeed, the absence of relational care throughout the district organization seemed to run counter to David’s sense of what caring district leadership would entail. In districts where caring structures were in place and where strong leadership prioritized social-emotional well-being, these efforts transcended or crossed silos typically found in school district central offices.

A constellation of care

Our research revealed that caring leadership includes building on and expanding existing partnerships with mental health agencies and other organizations that address the wide-ranging needs of staff and students. Noah, superintendent of a medium-size suburban district, noted that his district frequently partnered with outside agencies out of necessity — the need for social-emotional supports was too great to be supported inside the district. This need for outside counseling services became especially great during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to many participants in our study. Noah told us that when he became aware that teachers in his district were struggling, he “gave them numbers to all the counseling agencies within our district and told them how it works with our insurance. It doesn’t cost [them] anything so that they could get some help if they needed help.”

Some district leaders noted that partnerships enabled them to quickly bring resources to bear on emergent problems, sometimes before they became serious. For example, one assistant superintendent in a small suburban district had noticed that a lot of students were having trouble with the transition to high school: “We’re losing those kids; we’re missing how to connect with them and keep them cared for.” She sought out partnerships with intervention groups that dealt with gang involvement and a youth mental health nonprofit so that they could reach out to and work with students who were likely to have rocky transitions between 8th and 9th grade.

An equity disconnect

With a few, notable exceptions, district leaders spoke about care and social-emotional supports without directly discussing how they were related to district equity initiatives. There is a broad movement to embed attention to race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in social-emotional learning frameworks (Allbright et al., 2019; Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Williams, 2019; Kennedy, 2019), yet our study revealed that, in practice, there is a large disconnect between caring leadership and equity-oriented leadership. While some leaders mentioned the impact of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement on their districts, they seemed, overall, to consider equity initiatives to be complementary to — but separate from — caring. In some respects, this was a structural necessity, for directors of student services, who are typically “in charge” of caring-oriented programs, and directors of equity and inclusion both have full agendas, with little room for a new joint venture. Rarely did district central office leaders describe close collaboration across these roles, although a few districts were making intentional strides in this direction. In some cases, though, district leaders faced political pushback to equity initiatives.

Recommendations for leaders

For the past two years, district leaders have attempted to create caring organizations amid a global health crisis. Nearly all of our research participants reported an unprecedented level of stress and anxiety in their school communities, a finding consistent with much of the research conducted on the conditions within schools in 2020 and 2021 (e.g., Castrellón et al., 2021; DeMartino & Weiser, 2021). Yet, the leaders we spoke with remained hopeful and optimistic, even using experiences with other crises — such as hurricanes, school shootings, or student suicides — to offer guidance on how to provide caring leadership during rough times. What they shared has practical implications for educators at all levels and can be applied by following the four concrete suggestions described below.

The leaders we spoke with remained hopeful and optimistic, even using experiences with other crises — such as hurricanes, school shootings, or student suicides — to offer guidance on how to provide caring leadership during rough times.

Make care systematically collaborative

Our study showed that collaboration is essential to caring district practices; however, the ideas we’ve uncovered in this research about how to lead caring organizations were not created in a systematic fashion. Rather, they arose from the beliefs and practices of the individuals we spoke with. That is, how collaborative care happened across the districts was varied and, in many cases, lacked a systems approach. Some of our respondents took up the mantle of “champion of care” because their backgrounds in special education, social work, or working with English learners or Indigenous populations brought these concerns to the front of their minds. But, we wonder, how can district leaders ensure that care work is shared, intentional, and systemic, rather than taken up by a few individuals?

One important early step to creating a systemwide culture of care might be for executive leadership teams or heads of academic departments to come together and concretely define caring leadership for their district. What does it look like? How do you know it when you see it? What are the core actions, practices, and resources your district can commit to and dedicate toward creating conditions that promote care? Many leaders are already having these conversations on an ad-hoc basis, but we did not often observe the same level of commitment to care and emotional support that district leaders have committed to, say, academic outcomes and initiatives. We believe that the current pressing need for social-emotional supports creates the perfect opportunity to make more concrete commitments to care, followed by sharing the established caring vision throughout the district and wider community. District leaders can create a shared vision that transcends silos by holding regular executive team meetings that focus on care, having vocal leaders at the top who clearly communicate caring priorities throughout the district, and harnessing the enthusiasm and strength of willing staff members across role types (such as coaches, counselors, and classified staff).

Use data to drive caring district leadership

Another area where systematic attention may be useful is in collecting and analyzing data about social-emotional needs. We were surprised that only some leaders drew on data to make decisions about caring practices. Some, for example, mentioned that they conducted surveys during the pandemic that highlighted teachers’ stress and then created professional development, counseling programs, and mindfulness initiatives in response. And yet, when we asked what they had learned about student and family needs, we heard mostly about their feelings related to virtual instruction. While these feelings are important, we urge leaders to dig deeper by collaborating with educators and stakeholders at all levels of their organizations to pinpoint social-emotional needs throughout the school community.

Over the past several decades, policy in the United States has heavily emphasized the collection of academic data, but ensuring caring schools also requires thoughtful data gathering and rigorous use of evidence to understand the needs that exist and assess efforts to address them. Research indicates that in districts where social-emotional data indicators are taken seriously — for example, by being shared publicly or discussed in data meetings — caring practices flourish (Marsh & Kennedy, 2020; Marsh et al., 2018).

Cultivate internal caring resources

A persistent theme throughout our leadership interviews was the outsized role that external agencies, partnerships, and community leadership play in building the architecture of care. Although such partnerships appear to be much more significant to these efforts than they are to instructional reforms, the levels and types of political capital needed to navigate and nurture this constellation of care are unknown. A fruitful area for discussion among school boards or district leadership teams might be to carefully consider when they should turn to community partnerships to broaden the district’s web of support and how to ensure that partnerships are undertaken conscientiously and in ways that align with district values, rather than as an unplanned response to acute problems or challenges. Further, we suggest that district leadership teams take small, purposeful steps to cultivate internal resources related to care, shifting the responsibility for social-emotional and mental health needs to district-coordinated sources of support.

Lead systems of equity-oriented care

We also urge leaders to consider how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives can be an important part of caring leadership. Similarly, we recommend that district leaders in charge of DEI work collaborate with their colleagues in charge of caring initiatives in substantive ways. As our research reveals, these cross-initiative collaborations are not occurring in organized ways.

Research suggests that racially and culturally affirming practices, as well as positively affirming LGBTQ+ students’ identities and needs, are essential to creating fair and inclusive schools. And yet, when it comes to caring leadership, educators were more apt to think in general terms, rather than about particular types of student or staff identities. We believe that there is much room for improvement in this area, and we urge central office leadership teams to work with school-based equity and well-being teams to consider questions like these: How are we caring for our students of color? How is the mental health of our marginalized students? Does our district-approved social-emotional learning curriculum positively affirm LGBTQ+ identities? A wealth of resources are available to guide leaders on this equity-oriented caring journey. In particular, we recommend the Transformative SEL framework from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), California’s newly adopted Transformative SEL Conditions for Thriving, and some of the most recent research on these topics (i.e., Eakins, Adams, & Falaise, 2021: Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Williams, 2019; Kennedy, 2019; White, Bristol, & Britton, 2020).

Our research revealed that district caring is complex and evolving, involves collaborative or relational care with other educators, and taps into community organizations to allow for a constellation of care. As any practicing superintendent can attest, district leaders can be powerful drivers of reform and change (Burch & Spillane, 2004; Honig, 2009; Peurach et al., 2019). So, as notions of school quality increasingly emphasize the interpersonal nature of schools and their roles in supporting social and emotional learning and mental health, district leaders’ personal and organizational approach to the work of care will continue to grow in importance.

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This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 5, pp. 13-17.