Even as school system leaders scramble to meet students’ immediate needs, they must also plan for what may stretch into weeks or even months of school closures.
How to lead during a crisis is not something you learn in superintendent school. You may get a couple of classes on crisis management or communications, and perhaps a guest speaker will tell a compelling story of how they handled an emergency. But the truth is that you can’t know how you’ll respond to a crisis until you actually encounter one. And the COVID-19 pandemic is like nothing any of us have encountered in many decades. Unlike school shootings, tornadoes, and floods, this catastrophe is neither localized nor a single, onetime event. The situation evolves by the hour, and the endgame is unknown, which means that even as school system leaders scramble to meet the immediate needs of students, families, teachers, and staff, they must also plan for what may stretch into weeks or even months of school closures.
Even in the early days of the pandemic, it’s clear that different parts of the country are being affected in very different ways and no two school systems are dealing with precisely the same set of problems, so it doesn’t make sense to recommend a one-size-fits-all approach to handling this crisis. But I do think it’s valuable for superintendents and others to identify the challenges they do have in common and to share their thoughts on what it means to provide effective district leadership in this environment, with special attention to the needs of our most vulnerable students.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’d like to offer a few ideas, and I hope that others will weigh in with theirs.
Meeting immediate needs
Already, many public school systems and their community partners have created effective processes and systems to feed children and families, both those who previously relied on school meal programs and those who suddenly find themselves in need of this vital support. Some districts are providing grab-and-go meals in central locations, and some have even arranged for deliveries to students’ homes. This is essential work, and it has been encouraging to see so many educators rise to the challenge.
It has been encouraging to see so many educators rise to the challenge.
But of course, access to regular meals isn’t enough to ensure children’s safety. As we all know, many of our students are homeless, and many others live in unstable homes, where they’ve been subjected to abuse, neglect, and other forms of trauma. The closure of schools may leave these children without a refuge or a place to seek emotional, psychological, and legal support. Further, while the schools are shut, many children must take care of their younger siblings or older relatives. Increasingly, too, parents are losing their jobs, and families can’t afford basic necessities, much less school supplies, books, and computers.
Thus, while district leaders’ most immediate priority has been to feed children, efforts to provide a range of other social services must follow close behind. Here, though, most school systems don’t have the kind of robust infrastructure they need to provide these services, and the logistical challenges may seem daunting. How are administrators supposed to identify which students need which kinds of services? Which staff are available to help? Given the closure of not just schools but also libraries, community centers, religious institutions, and other facilities, where can services be provided? And given the imperative to limit face-to-face interactions, how can school districts provide services that normally require people to be in the same room, such as psychological counseling or physical and speech therapy?
As a start, superintendents can look to their data systems to help them identify those students and families that are most likely to need social services to make it through this phase and beyond. The process for doing so is fairly straightforward. By reviewing existing data and records related to student attendance, behavioral referrals, and course grades, superintendents should be able to generate an initial list of students who are lagging behind in one or more areas. Individual principals can then convene school personnel to take a closer look at each of these students’ current status, asking, “What do we know about this child and their family? Who in the school knows this student’s story? What can we learn from their teachers, counselors, social workers, and psychologists?”
Like all assessment data, though, this information won’t be useful unless somebody acts on it — which raises the question of school system capacity: Who has the time to follow up on an initial list of students who may need targeted support? No doubt, the answer will vary from district to district, but I’d urge superintendents to consider prioritizing this work over and above academic planning, at least for the short term. This strikes me as an all-hands-on-deck moment. In addition to spending their time reconfiguring the curriculum and designing virtual lessons, a team of teachers (and other administrators and school staff) should be asked to help reach out to the children who’ve been identified and check in on them, whether by text, phone call, or (if there’s relatively little risk of exposure to COVID-19) a home visit. This sort of personal outreach by a trusted adult can make a real difference, allowing the school to identify which students need urgent help and to start organizing a response.
Once needs have been identified, there are a range of issues school and system leaders will have to contend with to deliver services. For one thing, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), can pose a challenge as student privacy must be protected. Yet, with some legal review, it is certainly possible to share critical information among agencies. Then there’s the challenge of offering virtual or physical services. The latter is inadvisable for everyone these days and accessibility to the former is difficult for many vulnerable kids and families, especially younger children who may not have a smartphone. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of good answers to how to deliver essential social services during this unique time, but I do know that local leaders are coming up with creative solutions.
Principal supervisors (often the superintendent, depending on the size of the district) can hold regular meetings with principals to go through the list of students, determine what district resources are available, and decide how best to go ahead and allocate them. This will likely require working closely with local social service agencies, too, both to share resources and to avoid duplicating efforts, so superintendents will want to coordinate with the directors of local food banks, homeless shelters, mental health clinics, public health agencies, and other organizations. It may be helpful also to work with those organizations to construct a map of the social services available to students and families in each neighborhood and to agree on plans to get necessary resources to areas where they aren’t available.
Schools pick up the slack.
If this kind of collaboration among district leaders and local organization seems complicated or farfetched, keep in mind that hundreds of community schools, all across the country, have long engaged in precisely this sort of coordinated approach. There’s no reason why districts can’t do the same. Plus, integrating school and agency services and resources will ultimately save the community money through early intervention, the prevention of more serious and costly problems, and greater efficiencies in management and operations, leaving more money for direct services.
Keeping one eye on the longer term
Even while superintendents are racing to ensure students’ health and safety, they cannot afford to ignore the longer-term challenges that their districts will face, given not just the need to move instruction online but also given that COVID-19 is all but guaranteed to do serious damage to state and local economies. Right now, state legislatures and governors are supposed to be determining what to allocate toward education in fiscal year 2021. Local jurisdictions make those decisions on the basis of tax revenue raised in the previous year, which means school system budgets should be safe for now. But that revenue will decline significantly over the coming months, as a result of the current economic shutdown, which means that the FY 2022 and perhaps the FY 2023 budgets will be pared way back. And since wide swaths of the public have taken, and will continue to take, a financial hit, I can’t imagine we’ll see much appetite for local tax increases, even for a goal as worthy as maintaining healthy school budgets.
Thus, superintendents should probably use some of the time they have available in the short term — when they would have been visiting schools, meeting with stakeholders, attending events, and leading their district teams — to plan for the likely fiscal scenarios. Since at least 80% of any school system’s budget is personnel, it will be nearly impossible to plan for possible reductions without considering layoffs. Attrition always plays a role, as faculty and staff can be reduced simply by not hiring new employees. And COVID-19 is forcing school systems to learn how to deliver instruction online, which may provide cost-saving opportunities in the future. The process by which superintendents begin considering options, preparing their communities and employees, and communicating the reality will be their real test. Given the myriad of unknowns, simply having frank conversations about the various possibilities will help stakeholders accept the ultimate decision when it has to be made.
The ills of society are foisted upon public schools. When local, state, and federal governments fail to support students and families, schools pick up the slack. There’s a reason Americans trust teachers and school leaders. We know that educators will do whatever it takes to support our children, no matter what. During this time, that mission has become all the more important even as our ability to act has become compromised and will likely be diminished in the future. But, with intentional data analysis and some forward thinking, superintendents can and will continue to do what they do best.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua P. Starr
Joshua P. Starr is the managing partner at the International Center for Leadership in Education, a division of HMH, based in Boston, MA. He is the author of Equity-based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems.
