“I’m staying positive for my teachers, but I’m burning out — and it’s only my first year on the job,” a high school principal in northern Virginia recently wrote to me. “I’m getting an earful from all sides, and there’s no way to make everyone happy. I have a lot less power than people seem to believe.” As he prepares to return to campus after nearly a year of virtual instruction, he added, frustrations and complaints only seem to be increasing. For instance, he regularly hears from angry teachers who were denied their requests (under the Americans with Disabilities Act) to continue working, remotely, and he keeps hearing from parents who worry that when the school reopens, their children will get “nothing more than glorified babysitting.” Concluding his letter, he asked, “Is there some magical principal out there who isn’t fielding dozens of complaints weekly? If so, please tell me what they’re doing differently. How are they communicating the constraints and limitations of their role to their community in a way that doesn’t anger everyone?”
Shortly after I got that letter, I came across a tweet from Damon Monteleone, who is in his seventh year as principal of Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland. In his tweet, he had written: “If you want to know the complexities of making it work, ask more principals. We are squeezed between parent expectations, CDC guidelines, union negotiations, and Board of Education requirements. We have been making plans for three months without knowing the final parameters.” It occurred to me that Monteleone (whose school is set to reopen in three phases, beginning March 1) might have some useful advice for the principal from northern Virginia, so I reached out to him to learn about his approach. Here is a condensed version of our conversation.
Phyllis Fagell: Let’s start with how you prepare teachers for the return to school. How do you build trust and get their buy-in?
Damon Monteleone: I try to be very clear as to what I know for sure, what I don’t know, what I’m guessing about, and when I’ll have the final information. I think it’s important to reveal yourself as a vulnerable leader, someone who doesn’t have all the answers, and to show them that when it comes to getting solid information about the district’s plan, you’re in more or less the same boat they are.
When you explain that you’re also dealing with challenges and complexities that you’ve never dealt with before, and that you truly want to hear their ideas and input about how to handle this transition, then you have an opportunity to build trust. You know the saying, “From every crisis comes opportunity”? That has certainly been true of the pandemic. We’ve been forced to innovate and question some basic assumptions about teaching and learning: “Why do I give homework every night? Is that necessary? What has remote learning taught us about the importance of ongoing assessment? How can I get better at using formative assessment as part of the learning cycle?”
Fagell: I like the reframe. It reminds me of the line from Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Uses of Sorrow”: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” But on a practical level, how do you ensure that teachers actually take you up on the opportunity to rethink instruction and collaborate with you on reopening the school?
Monteleone: I constantly ask teachers what they’re lacking, and then I work my tail off to get it to them. You can build relationships through happy hours and parties, but the real way to build trust is through the work itself. By meeting challenges together. By consistently going to them and saying, “You’re facing new challenges. To meet them, what do you need?” and then designing staff development based on what they say. We’ve also been offering multiple drop-in sessions to help them with topics they’ve identified as urgent. For example, whenever our school board announces an important decision (such as the final decision to return to in-person learning), we immediately solicit comments and questions from staff. We need to know, on the front end, what they’re wondering about, what they think, and what fears and anxieties they have, so we can factor those things into our planning and communication.
Fagell: Do you use the same strategies to communicate with parents? They’re also under tremendous pressure, so how do you work effectively with them?
Monteleone: I send parents weekly emails, and I work closely with my PTSA president. To the extent that I know the inside scoop about the school system’s plan, I let him know, and I tell him what I’m thinking about how best to implement that plan. Also, one week before PTSA meetings — which are on Zoom and draw around 200 attendees — he sends a Google form to parents so they can submit questions in advance. He groups them into categories, such as health and safety, college and career, or grading. I then circle back with my team, get answers from the experts in the building, and if an assistant principal or a counselor or somebody else on my staff is the best person to answer the given questions, then I’ll invite them to attend the meeting, too.
As a rule, when parents ask me a question, I tell them the truth. For instance, if the school system has just changed its plan, or if it still hasn’t told us what its plans are, parents should know that. I try to give them the facts, without editorializing. I’ll tell them, “Here’s exactly what’s under my control, here’s what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, and here’s what’s in the district’s purview, not mine.” Meanwhile, the PTSA president moderates and watches for new questions in the online chat. And if I can’t answer a question or run out of time, I’ll answer it in writing later. I’m sure that some parents are unhappy with me — that’s inevitable — but I haven’t had parents complaining to my office about how we communicate or demanding to know about our plans for a return to in-person instruction. They have been kept pretty well informed.
Fagell: In early December, at a time when there were still a lot of unknowns about when or how the Montgomery County schools would reopen, you presented your reopening plan to all the middle and high school principals in the district. How did you manage to prepare for a return to school when so much was still up in the air?
Monteleone: You take the known information, variables, and parameters, you identify what’s still unknown, you go through the possible scenarios that might play out, and then you plan for what will definitely happen and what’s most likely to occur. That would have been difficult, if not impossible, to do if I didn’t have a strong instructional leadership team that was in agreement about our priorities and goals for reopening. Outside the building, various interest groups — the unions, the board of education, the superintendent, the public health officials — will have to work out their differences. Inside the building, though, if you’ve come to agreement about the basic parameters for reopening, then there’s a lot that you, as a principal, can do to start preparing. Back in December, we didn’t know the number of teachers who were ADA approved or how many students were coming back. Even now, we still don’t have a final bargaining agreement between the teachers union and Montgomery County Public Schools, which will affect our instructional model and health and safety requirements — for example, the PPE we’ll use, our protocols, how we’ll check people when they walk into the building, how to keep more than one kid from going to the bathroom at the same time, and so on. But the school has been ready with signage and distancing requirements in place, sinks disconnected, and water fountains disabled since the beginning of January. [Editor’s note: MCPS and the teacher’s union came to a tentative agreement over the weekend.]
Fagell: In his letter, the first-year principal in Virginia pointed out that a lot of parents are concerned that when students return to school, they won’t receive in-person instruction at all, but only “monitored distance learning.” That is, while the kids may be sitting together in the same room, their teachers will be in their offices or classroom space, still providing instruction online. Has this been discussed in Montgomery County? Can you share some of the behind-the-scenes thinking at your school with regard to instruction and the specific forms it might take?
Monteleone: Discussions about instruction couldn’t really move forward until we had a rough idea about the numbers of students who would be coming back. At first, the district provided principals with daily updates as to how many and which parents had responded to an online survey, so far, indicating whether their child would be returning. Then we made an all-hands-on-deck effort in real time to reach out to every single parent who hadn’t yet responded. That boosted our numbers significantly. At this point, out of 2,500 students, we know of about 1,100 who intend to come back.
We then used multiple student performance measures to identify a priority list of students, those who’ve really struggled with remote instruction and would likely benefit the most from returning to campus. And it’s important here to go beyond the aggregate data. If a student gets a D or an E, we dig down deeper for the root cause. Is it because they didn’t attend online classes? Did they get As on four out of the 12 assignments they handed in, and then they checked out? Which students are showing up and doing everything they can, but still are not successful?
As far as the kind of instruction we can offer them when they come back to campus, the district has given us three models we can implement. The first is direct instruction, which is old school, with the teacher standing at the front of the classroom facilitating only in-person instruction. Due to staffing constraints, this is reserved for students with the most severe learning challenges. The second is simultaneous, where you might have 10 kids in a classroom and 19 or 20 at home. It’s difficult for one teacher to teach simultaneously to kids in the class and online, though, so we’ve decided to add a second teacher in classrooms where students need additional support. At Richard Montgomery, we refer to this as a Simultaneous Model with Support, meaning there is an additional adult in the room so both the students at home and those in the classroom have more instructional attention.
Then there’s a third model, called the Support Model, which is used when you can’t do simultaneous with support due to staffing shortages, the need to comply with distancing guidelines, or because the number of students exceeds staffing or available space. The plan is for students to work online, with multiple adults present in the room to provide in-person support. This could occur in a larger space, such as the auditorium, but we think it might work better in a smaller space, so we’ve measured the square footage in every common area (like the dance studio, wrestling room, cafeteria, and gym) to see how many students we can fit in each, according to CDC distancing guidelines. And in cases where co-teaching hasn’t already been established, then we’ll find a way to put an additional adult in the room, tapping our media specialists, paraeducators, the IB coordinator, our staff development teacher, the athletic director, and the internship teacher (who has no interns right now). We spoke with each of these folks on the front end to explain the need, listen to their concerns, and discuss how we can support them.
Fagell: Did you get any pushback from staff when you shared this plan?
Monteleone: None. It goes back to what I said earlier: You can’t stand in front of your teachers and staff and pretend that you know everything and have it all figured out. To earn their trust, you have to be honest with them, be transparent, show vulnerability, and be willing to engage in real, tough conversations. Given the world we’re living in right now, there’s no playbook. Nothing’s certain. But if you’re up front with people and take their concerns and ideas seriously, then they’ll be unlikely to push back on your plans later on.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phyllis L. Fagell
Phyllis L. Fagell is the school counselor at Landon School in Washington, D.C., a therapist at the Chrysalis Group in Bethesda, Md., and the author of the Career Confidential blog. She is also the author of Middle School Matters and Middle School Superpowers, available at https://amzn.to/3Pw0pcu.
