Responding to COVID-19: Short- and long-term challenges

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.