SchoolCEO Fall 2020

P OW E R E D BY A P P T EGY

FALL 2020

Leveraging Local Leaders Support from the local community moves a district from good to great.

Are you leveraging those connections?

Are you building more?

This Just In Building Relationships with the Media Developing Leaders Dr. Candace Singh Be the Backup Helping Teachers Thrive in Trying Times Safe Havens Dr. Mark Bedell

Strong partnerships build strong schools.

Who’s helping you grow?

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Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Apptegy is an education technology company dedicated to helping school leaders build a powerful identity for their schools.

Learn more at apptegy.com.

Table of Contents 8 Safe Havens: Dr. Mark Bedell

Leaning on his own childhood experiences, Kansas City Superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell is building an atmosphere of safety, equity, and belonging for his students.

14 School Ratings, Enrollment, and the

COVID-19 Home Buying Boom

The housing market can impact enrollment. We’ll take a look at the market, districts’ relationships with real estate agents, and ways to leverage your influence.

23 Q&A: Developing Leaders Dr. Candace Singh of California’s Fallbrook Union Elementary School District is creating opportunities for teachers, students, and aspiring female leaders across the country.

30 This Just In Media coverage can affect your community’s perception of your schools. We’ll teach you how to build and leverage partnerships with local media.

37 The Customer Service Mindset Guest writer Dr. Katrise Perera, superintendent of Gresham-Barlow School District in Oregon, shares why customer service is crucial—especially in times of crisis.

46 Be the Backup Your teachers always face incredible stress, and now, it’s worse than ever. We’ll offer advice from experts on how best to help them thrive, even in trying times.

55 Q&A: Small but Mighty Four superintendents of small and rural schools share their unique strategies for success during COVID-19.

60 Leading From a Full Cup You’re working hard to take care of your students and staff—but are you taking care of yourself?

Vol. 3 No. 1 © 2020 by Apptegy Inc. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint or quote excerpts granted by written request only. SchoolCEO™ is published 4 times a year (November, February, May, and August) by Apptegy Inc., 2201 Brookwood Dr., Suite 115, Little Rock, AR 72202. Send address changes to SchoolCEO™, 2201 Brookwood Dr., Suite 115, Little Rock, AR 72202. Views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the magazine or Apptegy Inc. Accordingly, no liability is assumed by the publisher thereof.

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From the SchoolCEO Team Over the past few months, U.S. education has been a rollercoaster. We’ve seen leaders tasked with making impossible choices, balancing their community’s health with students’ needs, and even fighting off the virus in their own homes. Due to an inconsistent national response to COVID-19, school leaders have been forced to make polarizing choices. No matter your reopening plan, we’re sure you’ve faced criticism.

Through the whirlwind, we’ve seen your bold service: standing firm on controversial decisions, maintaining support for struggling communities, rebuilding education to meet a new era. We’ve seen your leadership, and we’re proud to feature your strength.

Now more than ever, we need one another. To keep weathering this storm, we need to come together—and public schools have always been at the center of U.S. communities.

In this edition, we look at how you can leverage partnerships with local leaders within your district and beyond to make your schools stronger.

As you know, strong communities need strong leaders.

Whether you are creating a supportive environment for your students like Dr. Mark Bedell, mentoring aspiring leaders in

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your district like Dr. Candace Singh, or creating more welcoming environments for parents like Dr. Katrise Perera, your schools—and communities—need you.

But challenging times also demand that you build relationships with leaders and influencers in the community outside your schools, from local news reporters to real estate agents.

Using marketing basics as a guide, we’ll dive into strategies for building relationships with the media. We’ll also look at the booming COVID-19 housing market: who’s moving, why it matters, and how to connect with real estate agents.

Finally, we’ll share ways to support your staff—and yourself—during the stressful circumstances brought about by the pandemic. In order to lead, teachers and school administrators alike need to stay healthy, leaning on each other through the hard times.

Before we wrap up, we wanted to say that we see your hard work and dedication. While we wish schools weren’t called to support so many crucial aspects of society, you are rising to the challenge. We’re thankful for your willingness to fight for students and families.

“

Connection is the energy created between people

when they feel seen, heard, and valued.

Brenė Brown P OW E R E D BY A P P T EGY

SUMMER 2020

Good News in Public Schools Indianapolis, IN High school art teacher Kate Toebes is using social-emotional learning in her lessons to help students eliminate self-doubt and gain confidence in their creative abilities. She recently taught a lesson called “Pandemic Reactions,” where students expressed their feelings about COVID-19.

Toebes said she felt honored that students were comfortable enough to share their stories.

(Chalkbeat Indiana)

La Jolla, CA Daxton, a high school sophomore, is working to ensure that his nonprofit, Kid by Kid, continues to provide tutoring services during the pandemic.

Kid by Kid pairs students with tutors who fit their specific needs, allowing them to focus on skills that “might have gone unnoticed by [their] school.”

Although they’re teaching remotely, Daxton and his tutors have been able to keep strong relationships with students. “All of us are going through the same thing,” Daxton told La Jolla Light. “We as a community have to move forward.”

(La Jolla Light)

Fairfield, OH After watching a YouTube video about a lemonade stand, Cayden, a 5-year-old student at Fairfield North Elementary, was inspired to raise money to help other students in need. With a COVID-friendly lemonade stand, he raised over $1,000 in less than 24 hours. “It’s fun,” Cayden told The Cincinnati Enquirer. “I want to do it again.”

(The Cincinnati Enquirer)

Birmingham, AL Peter, a high school senior, created The Cool Cat Club, a charity for cancer patients. Offering financial support as well as products like headwraps, The Cool Cat Club hopes to inspire others to do acts of kindness during this difficult time. They’re currently planning to expand their operation so other high school students in Alabama can join.

(Bham Now)

Dallas, TX In Coppell Middle School East’s first gardening elective, science teacher Jodie Deinhammer is teaching eighth-graders to tend the school’s community garden. Through the use of iPads and other technology, students can visit the garden and identify weeds, bugs, and other natural elements, even if they are taking classes remotely. “Learning digitally as well as physically gives me the resources and tools to make my own decisions,” said one student in the class.

“It’s a more enriching learning experience.”

(Apple Newsroom)

Montgomery County, MD Following school closures in March, Margaret Norris, a teacher at Arcola Elementary, has packed and delivered up to 150 bags of food per week for students in Montgomery County. Using donations from the community, as well as their own money, Norris and a group of volunteer teachers have been able to stay close with local families through this community effort.

(WTOP News)

Safe Havens

At Kansas City Public Schools, Dr. Mark Bedell is building safety, belonging, and equity.

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As a teenager in Rochester, New York, Dr. Mark Bedell had two sanctuaries from the stresses of his difficult home life.

One was an ice skating rink that doubled as a basketball court, where he and his buddies would shoot hoops late into the night. The other, he says, was school.

“I went through a lot growing up,” Bedell tells SchoolCEO. The oldest of eight kids, he moved in and out of different homes: his mom’s, his grandmother’s, his aunt’s. “That’s the reason I played sports three times a year,” he says. “I did everything I could to stay busy, to stay as far away from home as possible.” For a while, he was even homeless, sleeping in his car or on friends’ couches. School was an escape from the struggles of his everyday life.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t always that way. Before it became Bedell’s refuge, school almost failed him. “I had a teacher in the second grade who told me, You’re dumb, you’re ugly, and you’ll never amount to anything,” he says. The insult decimated his confidence. “I quit school,” he says. “I quit school in the second grade.” Fortunately, Bedell’s break from education didn’t last long. Later that year, a security guard found him on a weekday and asked why he wasn’t in class. Soon, he was living with his aunt and back in the classroom.

While one teacher nearly sent his life careening off the rails, another put him on a track that would define the rest of his life. “I had a 10th-grade teacher, Mr. Barrett, who basically said, You’re academically talented. You don’t even know what you’re doing by throwing it away,” Bedell says. Mr. Barrett encouraged him to find an adult to talk to, and a few weeks later,

Bedell confided in him, sharing his home struggles. “He and another teacher took me under their wings and made me believe I could do more than I ever thought I could,” he tells us.

He went on to be the only child in his family to earn a diploma.

As a high school sophomore, Bedell believed he was going to the NBA—and he nearly did. “I played ball all my years in high school and college,” he tells us. “In essence, it was my meal ticket out.” He even got an opportunity to try out for the pros. But his teachers—especially Mr. Barrett—had planted a seed that would grow into Bedell’s lifelong career. “They really did inspire me to go into education,” he says. “That’s where it began.”

A KCPS Kid at Heart Today, Bedell serves as the superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools. He’s spent the last four years making sure kids see his schools as a refuge. Often the stories of Bedell’s students look similar to his own. Of the more than 14,000 kids at KCPS, 91% are students of color, and 100% qualify for free and reduced lunch. About 1,300 experience homelessness.

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“Those four walls should be a safe haven for kids,” he tells us. “School should be a welcoming environment, regardless of how you show up. You don’t have to be embarrassed about being poor or having a parent who’s addicted to drugs.

When you’re going through abuse, or you’re homeless, or you don’t have food, we are going to take care of you.”

This is Bedell’s first superintendency. Starting out as a second-grade teacher, he served as a principal and later School Improvement Officer at Houston ISD before becoming Assistant Superintendent for High Schools at Baltimore County Public Schools. In 2015, just before coming to KCPS, he completed his doctoral dissertation at Nova Southeastern University, with a focus on school climate and culture.

“Climate sets the tone for how kids will see schooling,” he says. “I always believed there was some level of correlation; if you improve school climate in particular, what changes?

Are there reduced suspensions? Are there higher GPAs? Does the graduation rate increase? Do attendance rates increase?” Given Bedell’s background, it’s not hard to see where this interest started. “It was personal for me,” he says, “because I’m always trying to figure out: How do we make kids want to be in school?”

That’s the question he’s been trying to answer since he first set foot on KCPS’s campuses as super in 2016. “When I interviewed for this job,” he says, “I told them: I don’t have experience as a superintendent. I may not be the most polished candidate to grace this stage, and I am not a political person. If you’re looking for those three characteristics, I’m not your guy.

But I have a heart. I’ve lived through what these kids have lived through.” He may have gone to school in Rochester, but he could just as easily have grown up in this very district. “I am a KCPS kid,” he says. “I just happen to be one who made it.”

Needless to say, he got the job.

Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline Before he even began, Bedell knew that to create a culture of emotional safety at KCPS, he needed to make sure each child in the district received the same treatment, the same opportunities. After he completed his first 100 days in office, listening to and learning from his community, he immediately recommended that the school board craft a formal equity policy. They agreed.

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“These four walls should be a safe haven for kids...

School should be a welcoming environment, regardless of how you show up.”

“Our equity policy really does focus on trying to dismantle a system built on systemic racism,” Bedell says. Take, for example, the way the district distributes funding among its schools. “The data was telling us that the schools in the poorest zip codes, which generally serve the highest percentage of African American students and Latino students—those are the neighborhood schools that are constantly falling further and further behind. But we give extended resources to our signature schools”—magnet schools that operate under more of a choice model. “Our board’s been very intentional in wanting to figure out how we can dismantle these practices that have plagued this city for decades,” he says.

Just a few years later, the KCPS team is already seeing the fruits of that equity policy. Graduation rates have shot up; this year, they’re expected to hit 75%, a record high for the district. Attendance rates are climbing, too. But these high-level changes are not enough, says Bedell. “We haven’t done any unpacking of our existing administrative and board policies that may be written in a very oppressive nature,” he tells us.

“The next phase of our work is to start dismantling some of those policies and making them align with our overarching equity policy. That’s where you begin to influence practices inside of your schools.”

Bedell is especially interested in examining the district’s disciplinary policies. Though suspension rates at KCPS have gone down over his four years as super, students who do face suspension are still disproportionately students of color.

“We’ve got to change the mindset of how our people look at applying disciplinary infractions,” he says. “If a kid writes on the school building with chalk, we should just tell them not to.

That shouldn’t go into the system as a Level 3 vandalism citation.” Those citations, he knows, can go on to affect a student for the rest of their life. “We don’t want to be a school district that is complicit in perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline because we are suspending kids for subjective things at such an early age. We have to ask ourselves: Does the language in our policies leave it open for implicit biases to ultimately railroad a kid’s future?”

And no one—not even a Black leader like Bedell—is exempt from the rigorous work of combatting personal prejudice.

“Even people of color show up with implicit biases,” he says.

He tells us the story of an 11th-grader he nearly suspended as an administrator at Houston ISD. “I was riding this kid because he was sagging,” he says. “I kept telling this kid to pull up his pants, and he would always look at me with this attitude. I saw it as disrespect because he wasn’t doing what I wanted him to do.”

Finally, Bedell called the student into his office to suspend him. “And he touched my shoulder, and I looked at him, and he had a tear coming down his face,” he tells us. “He said, You mean to tell me you’re getting ready to suspend me? You don’t even know me. I come to school everyday, I don’t get in trouble, I’m minding my business. Maybe if you took time to get to know me, you would know that I’m homeless. I don’t have anywhere to live, and I’m more worried about that than my pants.”

“It just floored me,” Bedell says. “I told him I had been homeless, too, and we vibed from then on. He had respect for me because I had a relationship with him. Then we didn’t have that issue anymore. I didn’t suspend him.”

Bedell is quick to point out that as a teenager in Rochester, he sagged his pants, too. “But I’ve moved up a couple of socioeconomic classes, and now I have these different ideas in my head of what we should or should not accept. But those ideas are very punitive, and that’s the reason why you see the disproportionate suspension rates of African American males—and the disproportionate rates at which they go to jail. It starts with schools.”

We Will Speak When the police killing of George Floyd rocked the nation in May, Bedell and his team knew they could not remain silent.

Black kids at KCPS needed to know that their teachers and administrators cared about them, loved them, would fight for them. They needed to know they mattered.

The statement Bedell and the school board released on June 3 is nothing less than an emphatic declaration of support for Black students. “Black lives matter in Kansas City Public Schools,” it begins. “This is simple and true. We say it proudly and we will act on it as individuals and as a public school system urgently and intentionally.”

But the statement also goes beyond stating fact; it promises action. “When we see those names”—George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor—”we see our own children,” it reads. “We will speak and take action on their behalf. We will defend the lives of our Black and brown children.” It also calls on “our partners in the business, philanthropic, civic, and faith communities to stand with us in active engagement to tear down the institutional barriers that have long been foundational in this country.”

These are powerful words, but it’s the legacy of action behind them that makes kids feel safe at KCPS. “It’s easy to prove to people that I’m not just throwing around a buzzword like equity,” Bedell says. “I’ve been doing this work since I got here.”

Well before Dr. Bedell’s tenure, KCPS publicly advocated for their kids. In 2010, it was one of the first public school systems in the nation to add gender identity and sexual orientation as a protected class under their non-discrimination and harassment policy. Under Bedell’s leadership, that legacy has only grown. The district has often spoken out against wrongful evictions. They’ve publicly refused to support ICE raids. In 2017, as Islamophobia flared up across the country, KCPS implemented an anti-bullying resolution specifically to protect Muslim kids.

Some leaders may shy away from taking such public stands on controversial issues, but not Bedell. “I don’t do things for political reasons,” he tells us. “I do things based on values and beliefs around how to best advocate for the kids that I’m serving. I’m not going to compromise my values and beliefs just to keep this job, to keep this nice paycheck. That is not why I got into education in the first place. If I’m going to FALL 2020

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create enemies, I’m going to do it on behalf of these kids who don’t have anybody out here to fight for them.”

Reimagining SROs For a few school districts across the country, responding to the Black Lives Matter movement has meant severing ties with local police departments. But at KCPS, School Resource Officers—SROs—are a crucial part of the web keeping students feeling safe and welcome at school.

Since 2015, Bedell has sat on the board for the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the largest school policing organization in the country. He says he’s “a huge supporter of security officers and SROs in schools”— as long as they’re properly trained.

“SROs are individuals who have been trained specifically to serve in our schools,” he explains. “We need to decouple that from the larger conversation about police reform. There needs to be broad and deep reform of policing, not just in Kansas City, but across the nation. All those issues around how police are trained, how they’re equipped, all those kinds of issues—that’s separate from the fact that we have individual SROs who are very high-quality.”

At KCPS, SROs wear khakis and polo shirts instead of traditional police uniforms; “I want them looking like they’re a part of the school,” Bedell says. They also have a clearly defined role—and it’s not disciplinary. “As a superintendent, my job was to let everyone know that it’s not the responsibility of SROs to go into a classroom and address a kid who has their head down,” he says. “Their job is to be visible, to give everybody a sense of safety, a sense that we’re not going to have a school shooting on our campus.” For SROs to maintain that role, administrators and teachers need training as well. “You don’t call an officer to come and handle a routine disciplinary infraction,” says Bedell. “That’s where you cross the line and start to have a lot of issues.”

Just like the rest of the staff, SROs receive trauma-informed training, conflict resolution training, and implicit bias training. They travel to NASRO’s annual conference to get what Bedell calls “the best professional development available in this country,” with sessions on developing successful relationships with diverse students, becoming aware of implicit biases, and more.

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district’s kids. Many participate in mentoring or coaching sports. And thanks in large part to this training and relationship building, KCPS is “one of the safest school districts in the area,” Bedell tells us. “We also haven’t had to deal with local or national media because SROs are inappropriately handling students.” At KCPS, SROs aren’t meant to be a source of fear; they’re an integral part of the district’s mission to help kids feel a sense of safety and belonging.

The G.O.A.T. Decades removed from the teenager who shot hoops on that Rochester ice rink, Bedell hasn’t forgotten his first love: basketball. The skills he learned on the court, he tells us, helped make him the successful superintendent he is today.

“Basketball created a leader,” he says. “I ended up becoming a team in college at a very early age. It taught me how to collaborate with people, work with people, treat people right. It’s a very influential piece of my life, and even at the age of 46, I still use it as a way to bond and connect with the community at large. That’s what works for me.”

In just four short years, Bedell has won the trust of the Kansas City community, trust that allows him to accomplish the district’s important equity work successfully. He earned that confidence through several different avenues—for example, being the first superintendent in district history to have a child graduate from KCPS. But ultimately, much of the community’s faith in Bedell comes from something more personal: he plays ball with them. “I go into some tough neighborhoods and play pickup games—things that a superintendent has never done,” he says. “That has allowed me to get unprecedented buy-in, because most people in the community just have their guards up with superintendents.”

Before COVID-19 hit, Bedell held community open gyms on Saturdays. ”I would invite the community into one of our high schools and we’d play ball,” he says. “It’s faculty, it’s staff, it’s police officers, it’s alumni, it’s current students—and I feel like it is the most wonderful thing that we’ve been able to do.”

In the wake of the virus, though, these and other community-building events are on hold, and the separation is taking a toll on the superintendent. “It’s very depressing,” he told us honestly. “Not being able to see a lot of our kids, connect with them, encourage them—it’s been hard. It’s been very hard.”

But Bedell is hopeful that before too long, he’ll be shooting

hoops with his students again.

One story he shared from the basketball court sent Bedell into a fit of laughter before he could even start telling it. “I played in a fundraiser this past year with people who were 40 and up,” he says. He can hold his own even against high school students, but against people his own age? “I gave these guys the business, I ain’t even gonna lie to you.” A few high school students came to watch the game. “They nicknamed me the G.O.A.T.,” he tells us, cracking up again—the Greatest of All Time.

compelling about Black and brown boys in a largely impoverished district giving their superintendent a nickname typically reserved for Lebron James or Michael Jordan. They admire him; that much is clear. But when they look at him, what do they see? A mind-blowing basketball player, sure; but at a deeper level, these boys—and all of his students—see a Black man in a position of leadership. They see a man who cares enough about them to play basketball in the streets.

They see possibilities for their futures. Maybe, in Bedell, they see a safe haven: a pair of wings under which to grow.

Bedell thinks it’s funny, and it is. But there’s something

“I do things based on values and beliefs around how to best advocate for the kids that I’m serving.”

Image courtesy of Kansas City Public Schools.

School Ratings, Enrollment, and the COVID-19 Home Buying Boom A look at real estate agents’ role in selling your schools—and why it matters

While most sectors are experiencing major setbacks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is at least one major outlier: the housing market is booming. Low interest rates have made home buying accessible to a wide range of Americans.

Couple those low rates with quarantining families, and you have the ingredients for what has become a “white hot” market, reports real estate site Redfin. What’s more, the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

For school leaders, this uptick in the housing market provides an opportunity. With families relocating, your district has the potential to grow your community, boost enrollment, and attract young teachers to your schools. However, many families’ first impression of your schools comes not from the district, but from a real estate agent.

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From an economic standpoint, we see a critical opportunity for school leaders to connect with brokerages and examine their pipeline for recruitment. After all, you and your local real estate agencies have one thing in common: the more homes sold in your community, the more both of you benefit.

If you’ve ever purchased a home, you understand how complex the process can be. You might be wondering if real estate agents are even allowed to talk about schools, or what you, as a school leader, can do to change the narrative about your district. We’ll take a look at issues in the current home buying experience along with strategies for connecting with real estate agents in your area.

1 Buying a Home in America About five and a half years ago, Integrated Schools podcast host Andrew Lefkowits was on the hunt for a family home in the Denver area. At the time, his kids weren’t old enough to be in school, but that didn’t mean that education didn’t play into the conversation. “We ended up buying our house in our current neighborhood for its very highly regarded school,” he told us. It wasn’t the school itself he was focused on; it was the school’s effect on home values.

“I hadn’t really spent a lot of time thinking about education,” he told us. His final choice—down the street from the house he grew up in—ended up costing him an estimated $75,000 to $150,000 extra due to its zoning. “I thought, Great. That’s where my kids will go to school. It’s one less thing to worry about,” he told us.

Before his kids were old enough to enroll, however, Lefkowits stumbled across an old VHS tape from his own elementary school’s talent show. Just as he remembered, the students were a reflection of his neighborhood at the time. The talent show, he says, “was this celebration of all of the various cultures that were in the school. It was a great insight into what I remember from elementary school. That’s the experience I wanted for my kids.”

He started to research the “great school” his kids were zoned to. It touted high test scores, excellent arts programs, opportunities for extracurriculars. However, Lefkowits found that it notably lacked diversity. As with so many neighborhoods in Denver, rising costs of living had driven out families of color in the decades since Lefkowits had been in school.

So he started to look into different schools in the area, but the experience was puzzling. “If you put in my ZIP code on GreatSchools, the school where my kids ended up transferring to—which is barely a mile from our house—doesn’t come up until the fourth page of results,” he says. The site showed him schools from another district before listing the school a few blocks away, which actually had the diversity Lefkowits was looking for. The school’s score on GreatSchools was 2 out of 10. However, Lefkowits doesn’t feel that this score represents his kids’ experience.

“Everything in the system pushes you to pick your house based on the schools, even if you don’t have kids. It’s tied to your property value anyway,” he says. “I felt like I knew enough about the neighborhood and the school to do that.

But when I got here and started looking into it, I realized I didn’t actually have any sense of that at all.”

The barriers Lefkowits faced in finding a diverse school for his kids point to greater problems in the U.S. housing industry.

The housing market, from real estate agents to homebuyers, leans on school ratings to determine everything from housing prices to school fit. As Lefkowits’s experience shows, there are lots of ways to measure a strong school—and many have nothing to do with test scores.

The COVID-19 Home Buying Boom There are three main factors currently accelerating home buying in the U.S.: low interest rates, the need for more space, and a short supply of houses. Because of the pandemic, lots of new home construction was put on pause in the spring, creating increased demand for new housing.

Who is buying homes?

Many middle-class families with at least one parent working from home are starting their search. They’re looking for different reasons; some are interested in extra space, others are looking for a lower cost of living. However, these families commonly have a paycheck coming in to support the move.

Most are white, college-educated, and employed in sectors largely unaffected by the pandemic.

While some homeowners are upgrading to larger homes, the surge is fueled by first-time homebuyers. Millennials are moving into homeownership at a large scale. Even those areas which have been seeing an exodus of young people should continue to see young, employed millennials purchase homes.

However, we also need to acknowledge the other side of the housing boom. The same economic conditions making home buying accessible for young, employed families is putting strain on those who have lost employment. If moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures are lifted, families may be on the hook for months worth of lost housing payments.

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Where are buyers moving?

In this economy, rural areas have the opportunity to win big.

While most small to mid-sized cities and suburbs had already been experiencing growth over the past few years, the notable change since March is that rural areas are rising in popularity. The search for more space and cheaper housing indicates that the longer the pandemic continues, the more rural communities will appeal to young families.

On the other hand, some areas that were formerly the most expensive in the U.S.—most notably New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area—are trending downward. For rural and suburban school districts, this could provide an opportunity for growth. The nearly overnight collapse in the appeal of large cities for businesses means that both corporations and individuals are looking to relocate to more affordable areas.

Right now, millennial families’ interests seem to be changing. Both small towns and rural areas have the opportunity to market more space, access to nature, affordable housing— qualities homebuyers are seeking. However, the young, middle-class families fueling the housing boom are also more likely to choose private schools, virtual schools, or homeschooling. If they don’t have a clear and compelling reason to choose your district over another option, you might miss out on the opportunity.

2 A School Leader’s Guide to Real Estate For many school leaders, home buying isn’t new terrain.

Whether you’ve already landed in your forever home or you’re still on the hunt, you understand the complexity of buying a house.

When we first started researching this article, we weren’t sure how much real estate agents were allowed to say about their neighborhood schools—much less if school leaders had a role in the process. However, as we talked with real estate agents and school leaders alike, we found some notable holes in brokers’ understanding of school quality. We believe that school leaders have both the capacity and authority to fill these gaps.

How much do schools actually affect the home buying process?

Of the many factors that play into home buying, school is near the top. When the National Association of Realtors (NAR) studied which elements buyers compromised on in their home search, they found that only 3% were willing to compromise on the quality of the neighborhood’s school— and that includes buyers without kids.

According to NAR, roughly half of buyers with school-aged children indicated that the quality of schools was an important factor, with another 50% indicating that convenience to schools was important.

Then there’s the issue of price. As in Lefkowits’s experience, houses cost more when they are zoned to “better” schools. A study from Realtor.com showed that houses zoned to highly rated public schools are an average of 49% more expensive than the national median listing price, and 77% more than homes zoned to lower-ranked districts. For many families, that’s a difference in tens of thousands of dollars.

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Real estate agents can’t actually talk about schools, right?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer. According to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, real estate agents are not allowed to “steer” families toward certain communities. Steering can be based on race, religion, national origin, or sex. Because school demographics so often match neighborhood demographics, talking about schools can be one way to steer a prospective buyer. However, what exactly agents are allowed to say—and whether or not those rules are followed— is a gray area.

all, real estate agents are only allowed to share the facts, and they can’t share more facts with one family than another. On the other hand, many agents we spoke with actually considered it part of their job to match homebuyers with the type of school system they are looking for. One broker from the Houston area told us that her clients’ top priorities were great schools for their kids, and that need drove the home search.

“Our focus is really zooming in on the quality of the elementary school and their ratings and reputation,” she says.

Many agents, for example, don’t even attempt to play by the rules. In a 2019 Newsday study, investigative journalists in New York found that real estate agents shared district information that directed white families toward predominantly white schools. Similar school information often wasn’t disclosed to families of color.

Generally, real estate agents we got on the line assured us that they stuck to the facts. Usually, they’re referring to school ratings such as those found on GreatSchools, SchoolDigger, or Niche. Whether a family does their own research or a real estate agent hands them information, both parties generally end up sifting through these external sites to learn about schools. And, of course, those rating systems are a far cry from a perfect measure of school quality.

For decades, real estate has been a coded way to talk about race and class in America. What makes a “good” or “bad” part of town are often the same factors that make a “good” or “bad” school. Generally, those factors have nothing to do with quality of education, but instead with both the race and socioeconomic status of a school’s students.

For example, GreatSchools is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making a school’s quality digestible for parents.

Each school receives a rating from 1-10 on GreatSchools, along with demographic data. But compressing an entire school’s story into a scale of 1-10 or A-F takes the full picture out of focus.

Oftentimes, this type of steering isn’t quite so direct. In researching this article, we heard stories from coworkers, school leaders, and even real estate agents themselves about brokers making their unconscious bias known— whether through tone, body language, or guided information about the district. Often, the agent didn’t explicitly steer a prospective buyer in any direction; they didn’t mention neighborhood demographics or provide an unsolicited opinion about schools in the area. But that doesn’t mean that their opinions weren’t clear. One white homebuyer we interviewed mentioned that her agent didn’t say anything overtly negative about the mixed-income neighborhood where she was looking. However, the agent did pose a few coded questions: What do you think of the street? Can you see yourself living here? These questions weren’t asked when touring higher income neighborhoods.

In 2019, Vox published an expose on GreatSchools, largely based on research conducted by Chalkbeat. They compared schools’ ratings on GreatSchools to the socioeconomic status of their surrounding areas, and the results weren’t so great. “GreatSchools’ ratings effectively penalized schools that serve largely low-income students and those serving largely Black and Hispanic students, generally giving them significantly lower ratings than schools serving more affluent, whiter student bodies,” Vox reports. Since then, GreatSchools has reacted, adding both an equity and a growth measure into their ratings formula.

What can real estate agents legally say about local schools?

The short answer is nothing. Many brokers told us it’s ultimately safest for homebuyers to do their own research. After

But the unavoidable problem with GreatSchools may not be the ratings site itself, but rather the parents sifting through the data. A 2020 Harvard report shows that while most parents across the board claim to support integration, they don’t act on it—especially as they start to get more data about potential schools. When ranking the top three most critical traits of their child’s school, a whopping 81% put academic quality in their top three answers, and 70% picked safety.

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a critical trait. In short, parents might claim to value diversity, but when push comes to shove, they’re making choices largely based on their perception of the school’s academics.

The way a school’s academic data is depicted, then, matters quite a bit. Providing parents with an inaccurate or incomplete picture of a school’s academic quality can not only damage a school’s reputation, but potentially encourage self-segregation. We’ll talk more about the problems with school ratings—and how to explain them—later on.

3 Four Steps to Partnering with Real Estate Agents With the acceleration of home buying due to COVID-19, you have an opportunity to reevaluate your pipeline for enrollment—especially real estate agents’ role in the process.

Many future parents’ first introduction to your schools occurs during the search for a new home. With a little care and thoughtfulness, you can start planting the seed for advocacy before parents even think about enrolling.

Of course, real estate agents are a critical piece in this puzzle.

While they aren’t allowed to share opinions about your district, they often play matchmaker between homebuyers and their dream schools. Without proper communication from the district, they may be leaning on misconceptions about your schools.

At Georgia’s Barrow County School System, Director of Public Relations and Strategic Partnerships Shenley Rountree understands the issue firsthand. “Barrow County is one of the fastest-growing counties in Georgia,” she tells us. “It’s really important to have good relationships with real estate agents so that they are representing our school system in a positive light with accurate data.”

In the past decade, schools in Barrow County have seen significant improvement. The graduation rate percentage jumped from 64% for the graduating class of 2011 to 88% 18

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for the class of 2019. Academic ratings have grown tremendously, and the district’s current superintendent is leading a rebranding effort spearheaded by innovation. The district’s tagline, Barrow BOLD, captures this idea: Building Our Learning Differently.

The problem is that real estate agents in the area remember the old Barrow. Part of Rountree’s job is to combat those misperceptions of the school system. “It’s important for us to be able to share the innovative things that are happening with our real estate agents, and, again, pass that information along to families so they can get excited about and apply for the different programs we have,” she tells us.

Fortunately, you and your local brokerage firm are actually on the same team. More homes sold in the district means a higher tax base for the community, more commission for real estate agents, and more students and employees for you.

We’ll walk through four strategies to connect with and market toward brokers in your area.

Lean on your common goal.

There are myriad benefits to attracting homebuyers to your region—and not just for you. The onus falls on all local leaders, including chambers of commerce, business leaders, real estate agencies, and school leaders, to attract families to the district. Superintendents we spoke with leaned on partnerships with these entities to build a plan for community growth.

About a decade ago, Superintendent Dr. Jamie Skjeveland at Crosby-Ironton School District in Minnesota was at his wit’s end. “We would hire new teachers, and then those new teachers would literally walk out of our office, drive to the largest town out west, get a newspaper, and look for places to rent,” he groans. Teachers would buy a house in the neighboring town, have kids in the neighboring town, and enroll them in the neighboring town’s schools—all while taking a paycheck from Crosby-Ironton. “We were employing these people and increasing enrollment in the neighboring school district,” he says.

So Skjeveland called a meeting of local leaders. At the time, Crosby was somewhat of a ghost town. “You couldn’t even buy a pair of socks in Crosby!” he says. “So we leveraged our relationships. In 2013, we brought people together.” Skjeveland started hosting meetings that included real estate agents, journalists, teachers, and representatives from the

chamber of commerce. “We just said, This needs to stop,” he says. Together, they leaned on one another to revitalize the town from the inside out.

Today, Crosby is far from a ghost town. Renowned bike trails run through the city, attracting active young residents. When a new teacher signs their contract to work at Crosby-Ironton, Skjeveland hands them a Crosby newspaper and the number of local realtor Verne Lewis, a close friend who was a key player in the town’s initial planning meetings. Then, the new candidate is ushered outside for a private tour with the chamber director. In short, you can now buy socks in Crosby.

Address the school ratings misconception.

As you probably know, school ratings—either from the state or private companies—may not be casting your schools in a positive, or even accurate, light. After all, rating a school is incredibly complex. The process of simplifying the data can change the story of what’s going on in your schools, especially if you’re serving disadvantaged students.

There are generally two main types of rating systems available to parents and real estate agents: state ratings and ratings systems created by private companies like GreatSchools, School Digger, and Niche. Most of these school ratings giants rely on assessment data available to them, often from national or state databases. While this data is useful in the right context—such as helping school leaders identify growth opportunities for students—you well know that test score data doesn’t paint a full picture of school quality. When parents lean on this data to compare schools, it often disadvantages those serving students with high needs.

“Proficiency is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status,” explains Dr. Andrew Ho, the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “The glaringly obvious problem is that students and families aren’t randomly assigned to schools.” In short, schools with more children from high-income families will often have higher ratings—even if students’ outcomes aren’t improving from year to year. A simple, apples-to-apples comparison of assessment data isn’t available between most schools because of differences in schools’ demographics.

To paint a more accurate picture of school quality, Ho and a team at Stanford University have pioneered the Educational Opportunity Project, a national database of academic performance. Instead of showing test scores alone, the database shares demographic data, average test scores, trends in test scores, and learning rates. Part of the program’s mission is to complicate and ultimately improve how we think about school quality.

In Georgia, Rountree connects with real estate agents to explain some of the issues with school rating companies in person. “I wanted to break down why those are not the best indicators,” she says. After attending meetings with Leadership Barrow, a program run by the Barrow County Chamber of Commerce, Rountree connected with a local real estate agent in the group. “She invited me to come and speak at two counties’ monthly realtors’ meetings,” she says.

At the meetings, Rountree presents the growth in Barrow County and directly addresses issues with the ratings systems. She lays out the factors going into school ratings companies’ algorithms, noting that the data doesn’t usually account for students’ socioeconomic circumstances and is often at least a year behind. To account for negative complaints, which are factored into Niche’s ratings, Rountree mentions the Yelp phenomenon: people rarely go online to leave a positive review. “We have to remind people that typically, if you’re going onto one of these websites, you’re more likely to be angry than not. You’re looking for somewhere to voice your frustrations,” she says.

In Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish Schools, Superintendent Hollis Milton usually counts on an A or B letter grade from the state each year. However, he still reminds the community of the shortcomings of any type of school ratings system. “The grade does represent something, and we have to be very honest about that,” he explains. “But you also remind parents: This is one snapshot. We’re definitely more than just a letter grade.“ When new test score data comes out, Milton shares it in context. “When you have three years of data, it’s more real. As soon as the scores come out, we want to celebrate what we can celebrate and share with our community,” he says. “And I believe if you have trust and relationships, all of the other stuff goes by the wayside.”

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It goes back to one of the simplest, most holistic strategies available to school leaders: make sure your community knows about the great things going on in your schools. “We constantly communicate all the good things that are going on in our district,” says Milton. “You let stakeholder groups know: Here’s where we are. Here’s where we aspire to be.

Here are the great successes.”

Figure out where your schools excel, and sell that.

Most parents are looking for more than just a highly rated school; they want the best fit for their child. If their student has dyslexia, will the school be able to provide enough support? If their student is interested in robotics, will the school feed their curiosity? The language we hear real estate agents use describes matching a family with the school system they believe will best fit their needs.

In order for them to do so, however, your area real estate agents need to know where your schools excel. So help agents match prospective parents with your schools. Give them basic information about your district, but then, consider what makes your schools shine. While you may want to point out everything your teachers are acing, pick just a few examples. What core programs do you love to talk about at board meetings or with your peers across the country? What do parents in your community value? Your district’s core messaging lies at that specific intersection: What does your community need that your schools uniquely provide?

Need help developing your core messaging?

Visit schoolceo.com/marketing-101 Once you’ve narrowed down your messaging, make that information accessible. In Barrow County, Rountree’s team is building out a landing page for real estate agents with downloadable printouts for each campus. That way, agents have access to information about a school whenever they need.

Rountree also keeps communications with real estate agents specific. Before the pandemic, she drafted a quarterly email newsletter just for them. “Realtors are busy,” Rountree acknowledges. “So we highlight some of the key things that we want to emphasize with them on a regular basis.”

She includes the district’s most impressive programs, focusing on arts and innovation.

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But she also tailors each newsletter to the time of year, with an eye toward enrollment. “In July, it’s new student registration,” she says. “So if they just helped someone move in over the summer, they can send them the information about how they register their student with our school system, where they find supply lists, bus routes, and more.” The updates provide value to real estate agents, while giving families the tools they need to enroll at Barrow County.

To real estate agents, these types of connections are helpful. “We try to learn about what’s happening in schools all the time,” says Stuart Mackey, Executive Vice President of the Hathaway Real Estate Group in Arkansas. “We, as an association, have invited the Little Rock superintendent to come to our general meetings to tell us what’s going on in schools,” he says. “That is important to us.”

By supporting the superintendent, Mackey believes that real estate agents can help build better schools—which, in turn, increases home values. “We think it’s important to open the communication between the schools and the public, and we enjoy being a liaison to help make that connection,” he says.

Get real estate agents into your schools.

School today doesn’t look like it did 10, 20, or 30 years ago— and many real estate agents have lived in their communities for decades. At Barrow County, Rountree’s team created programs that invite all sorts of community members onto campus. “One of the most successful things we’ve seen is when you can get community members directly into the school. Then they walk away going, Wow. And they are huge advocates for us,” she says.

One of the most successful of these programs is Principal for a Day, a collaborative initiative with the district and the Barrow County Chamber of Commerce that kicked off last year.

As part of the program, members of the chamber signed up to shadow a principal at one of the district’s schools. Last year, many of the attendees came on Halloween, getting to see school administrators in action and in costume.

But here’s what makes Principal for a Day great: the program is carefully crafted to leave a positive impression for attendees. Instead of throwing participants into a day in the life at Barrow County, administrators host an orientation breakfast days in advance. Community members sit next to their

Barrow County’s Principal for a Day program gets community members onto campus to see firsthand how the district has changed. Last year, the program fell on Halloween, allowing stakeholders to see administrators in action and in costume.

Images courtesy of Barrow County School System.

Buying a first home is one of the most exciting and expensive purchases of a person’s life. But when a family closes on a new home, the school district’s job has just begun. Think of enrollment as a pipeline. The average family makes a series of decisions from the time they show interest in a neighborhood to the time they enroll in school.

mentor principals and learn where to park, what to wear, what they’ll eat for lunch. Afterward, participants are asked to reflect on their experience. A week later they reconnect, and the Barrow team plays a video of the day, complete with interviews from participants.

Of course, it’s not just real estate agents. In Louisiana, Milton is pulling prospective homebuyers onto campus as well. “We always remind real estate agents: We’re glad to give tours of our schools. We’re glad to bring prospective parents or employers in,” says Milton. “They’re usually blown away. You’re opening eyes of parents who realize: This school system offers a lot. This is something that I need to be a part of.”

In marketing, touch points are every interaction your audience—potential homebuyers—has with your brand. In a great campaign, these touch points are optimized to share your brand’s story each step of the way. Many of the touch points in home buying are controlled by real estate agents, but not all of them, especially after the home is sold. In most cases, you want to be a step ahead of your audience, making it easy for them to accomplish your end goal.

When families move into your area, reach out with congratulations. Invite your new neighbors onto campus for a personalized tour. Answer questions. They are part of your community, so take the initiative to extend an invitation. You might just add a few new students to your district family.

To learn more about building advocates, see www.schoolceo.com/advocates.

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Superintendent Q&A:

Developing Leaders Dr. Candace Singh

This year has shown us that leaders are everywhere.

You’ve seen students taking the lead on helping siblings with virtual classes, teachers connecting with students and parents both online and in-person, and support staff handing out hundreds to thousands of meals a day.

These leaders are not few, far, or in between. You see them everyday when walking through your schools.

Dr. Candace Singh knows this well—she’s been developing leaders at Fallbrook Union Elementary, a district with close to 5,000 students in San Diego County, California, for a decade. Singh became a superintendent with the intent to uplift voices in her district and beyond. A finalist for AASA’s 2020 Women in School Leadership Award, she’s developed a culture in her district that empowers students, staff, teachers, and administrators to take on greater leadership roles.

Students are encouraged to take ownership of their own education, and teachers are motivated to pursue leadership opportunities within the district.

We caught up with Singh to learn exactly how she has created a culture of leadership at Fallbrook, how she mentors aspiring female leaders, and what leadership— from the student to the administrative level—looks like in a pandemic.

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What influenced your idea of leadership?

I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I worked three different jobs through school. But I had the support of my mom, the most influential female leader in my life. Once I graduated, the first person who hired me as an elementary teacher was a female principal. She was so empowering to me. She trusted my decision-making, inspired me, and encouraged me to keep growing and learning. She was a beautiful example of a female leader, and just watching her do her work—I remember thinking, I would love to do that.

I also had other female role models and mentors in my life who encouraged me, who tapped me on the shoulder and said, Hey, you would really be great at this. That kind of sponsorship, encouragement, and mentoring was a significant reason why I kept developing as a school leader. It has contributed significantly to the work that I do now—I want to be a leader who serves as a model for other women who aspire to be in leadership roles.

School leadership is predominantly male. How do you encourage women to take on leadership roles in your district?

Another priority is not just hiring women for leadership positions, but particularly seeking out women of color for those roles. In my district, almost 50% of our principals and assistant principals are women of color. I think this is something superintendents have to be very intentional about and pay careful attention to. We want our leaders to reflect the children in the communities we serve.

How are you helping women become school leaders across the country?

I, along with an incredible group of female leaders from San Diego County, started the country’s first Aspiring Superintendents Academy for Female Leaders in partnership with AASA. We started our first cohort of aspiring female leaders in October of 2019 with 35 women from 17 states across the country in our inaugural class. The cohort came to San Diego to meet face-to-face over two weekends before everything shut down.

We continued our work online through the last remaining dates, and it was wonderful because of the relationships we had developed with one another. We became a very tightknit group of women who communicated regularly in between sessions.

Through the end of the last school year and the spring, things were really intense and a bit overwhelming. The Academy became a safe haven where there was camaraderie, mentoring, and coaching for every member virtually. It kept mentors connected with these female leaders who were often doing the heavy lifting in their school systems.

The majority of my site leaders are women, who work alongside fantastic male leaders, too! They make up my assistant principals, principals, and cabinet-level positions. Making sure women have a seat at the table has always been very important to me.

Internally, I do a lot of mentoring and coaching with my building-level leaders. I try to support them in their own We finished the Academy earlier this Dr. Candace Singh leadership development, then give year, and these female leaders are them opportunities to grow and take on new responsibilities. now colleagues and friends for life. We’re still in contact with many of them, who are now applying for superintendencies Our internal processes and priorities are also specifically and higher-level positions. We’re providing coaching, helping designed to make sure that both men and women are highly them practice for interviews, or just being a sounding board prepared to take on the next position when it arises. As a re- for things going on in their schools. sult, we have many women at all levels of leadership within our organization, with ongoing opportunities for modeling, Right now, we’re planning our second cohort, which will start coaching, and development. I pay particular attention to in January 2021. AASA is currently taking applications, and making sure that our women are supported and that their we’ve already received broad interest across the country professional growth is intentionally planned. from women who are eager for this type of professional development and networking.

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I think it’s inspiring for women to meet other female colleagues who are working their way up the ladder and to see other women in the superintendency. It’s very rare.

How can other school leaders be intentional about hiring more women for leadership positions?

To begin, leaders have to do some analysis and reflection of the leadership workforce in their particular school district.

The vast majority of people who teach in our classrooms are women, and I don’t think women typically toot their own horns. We don’t aggressively go out and promote ourselves.

It’s actually one of the things that women really have to work on—getting people to see the skills they could bring to the table as far as leadership.

Sometimes there’s a lack of awareness that women aren’t at the table, so superintendents need to be intentional about reaching out and creating leadership opportunities. Not just letting women self-select to apply for jobs, but intentionally reaching out and encouraging them to do so. In my district, Images courtesy of Fallbrook Union Elementary School District.

we regularly engage teachers—and classified employees as well—in the leadership work that we’re doing.

As a superintendent, you need to really consider the women who are working in your organization right now. Who could you tap on the shoulder and empower with more responsibility? Who could you bring into higher-level leadership roles?

You have to actively seek out and create opportunities for women to grow and improve and move into higher levels of leadership within your organization. It has to be an intentional act; it cannot just be that women have to figure it out and find their way to the table.

What’s the impact of having more women in leadership roles?

I talk with young women in our district regularly about how the vast majority of higher-level positions in education are filled by men. But girls in our schools see women as assistant principals, directors, assistant superintendents, and as the superintendent. The majority of the people leading our schools are women. It’s important to have women at all levels of leadership within a school district, because we’re modeling for girls what the possibilities are. Often, one of the reasons we don’t see young girls aspiring to leadership roles is that there aren’t women in leadership for them to see. They may not have strong female models in their own lives, in their own families. It’s hard to be what you can’t see.

I want girls to see themselves as leaders early in their lives, and in addition, I want the boys in our schools to see girls in leadership roles.

The more we see women in these roles, the more young women and girls can see that this is something they can aspire to. When boys who are growing up into young men see women in these roles, they then can be mentors and sponsors for women when they themselves are in leadership roles.

As girls are moving up and boys are moving up, we’re redefining what it means to be a leader.

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How do you teach your students to be leaders at Fallbrook?

In our district, we work on leadership development and teach Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People starting in kindergarten. We explicitly teach those timeless principles to our children: beginning with the end in mind, seeking first to understand before being understood. What does it mean to think win-win? What does it mean to be proactive in your life? Those are skills we know are contributing to their success. They know when they begin to lead their own lives, those same principles will apply. So as they become leaders in their schools and in their classrooms, they’re able to utilize these skills.

We do this through the Leader in Me Framework—it’s a way of thinking about how to develop a culture that inspires students to be more effective in their own lives. It revolves around three big ideas. One is that you are very intentional about teaching leadership principles to children and to adults. This is done through professional learning for our students and staff, which teaches them how to be effective in their own lives. The second focuses on creating a leadership culture that gives every member in the school leadership opportunities. Children have the opportunity to help lead their schools and themselves, and we teach them how to do that.

This creates a leadership environment where you’re empowering children and adults to take on leadership roles no matter what level of the organization they are in.

Lastly, it’s about how you align systems within your school district so that everyone understands the school’s goals, all the way from the administrative level to the student level.

After everyone understands their own academic goals, you then empower children to own their learning, and you help teachers engage children in a way that motivates them to take the lead in their own education.

For example, we explicitly teach students how to stand in front of a group of people and talk about what they believe in, what their interests are, where their passions lie. We seek out opportunities for all of our children to do that—not just the kids who volunteer to be the leader or who are more outgoing. In the past, teachers may not have seen that leadership potential from children who are quiet, who might not always have their hand raised. Now, we are watching children come out of their shells more because they’re given the opportunity. They’re just gifts that haven’t been unwrapped yet. In this 26

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environment, they feel supported and encouraged to grow into leaders in their schools.

This type of thinking and learning has absolutely transformed the culture of our school district. It’s been magical to watch children grow into the leaders they were meant to be.

How has the Leader in Me Framework helped Fallbrook adjust to changes brought on by COVID-19?

From March to June, we were dealing with triage, as all school district leaders were. We didn’t know what was going to be a problem because we had never been through a pandemic before. The first thing we did was immediately put in tech support for students and parents. We started creating videos, tutorials, and webinars to teach them how to use technological tools in their homes. We quickly mitigated a lot of the challenges people had during that time, and we got through it by consistently reaching out to families and students to support them at home. We transitioned to online learning with less difficulty than most because a lot of the systems we had in place worked.

One of the biggest challenges we had was that we were using multiple types of programs for our kids, and it was difficult for students and parents to access them all. It didn’t provide the ease of use that we needed. When kids were at school, they could easily log onto all of these systems, but once they went home, we realized we needed to simplify and streamline the process.

This streamlining was driven by our instructional coaches and teachers from across the district. They formed teams and reviewed newer, simpler platforms that could accomplish the same kinds of things without them having to go to six different places. They were the leaders in making those decisions, because they knew what tools are most effective for learning. They’re the experts, and we really leaned on them for their opinions and for their professional insight into what works with our kids.

I believe this pandemic has amplified either how effective or ineffective we were before. We know that a crisis amplifies the good and the bad. In Fallbrook Union, we had a organizational culture that emphasized positive, caring relationships.

Before the pandemic, we created an effective system that produced opportunities for children to grow and improve

academically, socially, and emotionally. Our strong culture and systems existed before we transitioned online, and while we may have a different instructional format for now, we know our approach is working.

How does the Leader in Me Framework address socialemotional needs?

It’s important to have women at all levels of leadership within a school district, because we’re modeling for girls what the possibilities are.

The Leader in Me Framework is one of the most effective frameworks for SEL in schools. It really works to develop children’s personal effectiveness, resiliency, and communication skills. Plus, it empowers them to make a difference in the world. They know and understand their purpose, which is extremely important in the social-emotional development of children. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been using this framework in our district for seven years, and we’ve seen it grow beautifully over time.

One of the reasons it’s effective is that it begins with the adults. Adults in our district have a deep level of care for our students, and they all form strong connections with them. This foundation serves as the basis for everything we do. When we shut down in March, we knew our priority was making sure every child still felt personally connected to their teacher, and their families felt supported. I asked every teacher in the district to make a personal phone call to every child, every week we were shut down. I wanted them to see how they were doing and to hear what their families needed. I also asked staff members to check in on one another. Everyone got a personal phone call from someone else—just to make sure they were doing okay.

Relationships are the foundation for the way we do our work. It’s where we lift off from when we’re working toward the academic and leadership goals we have for kids.

It all starts from a relational caring perspective. I think that is the fertile garden that everything else has to grow from. Every year I have been here, it’s been an important cornerstone of everything we do. The way we think about leadership, how we lead our schools—it is all grounded in our relationships with one another and in the ways that children know and understand that they are valued and loved. Our staff knows that children do not work hard for people they can’t trust or don’t like, which is even more true with online instruction. If our kids don’t feel connected, valued, and loved, there’s no reason for them to get up and turn on their laptops. So we have to continue those messages of care and love and concern, even through a screen.

I’ve been in all of our schools these past few days observing our teachers, most of whom are working from their classrooms. I’m seeing our teachers make beautiful personal connections, with words of love and encouragement. It’s the same level of optimism and enthusiasm that they would have face-to-face. We have to create opportunities where children are connecting to one another virtually. That is our job, and after watching my staff do it, I absolutely know it can be done.

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What about your district makes you most proud?

Obviously, I’m so proud of my students and what’s happening with them. I know, though, that you can’t have a supportive and effective school district without the really amazing people who work in it. When this pandemic started, I observed the collaboration, camaraderie, and can-do spirit of the 800 people who work here. It brings tears to my eyes talking about it. The way our folks work together is so beautiful.

That sense of collaboration and camaraderie has been established over time. We know that working collaboratively in teams is how we get to better outcomes. It really engages people in the work and in the decisions we make. It taps into the unique abilities and skills of every employee, which has made us really effective. As I watched us transition into remote learning, every single staff member and teacher just stopped and said, Okay, how can I help? They got out of their comfort zones and started doing things they’ve never done before. In the last four months, it has been so inspiring to me, and I’m incredibly proud of the special people who work in my school district every day.

THIS

JUST IN How your schools can build thriving relationships with the media

It’s not breaking news that communicating with the public is vital for the success of your schools. And you know all too well that your relationship with local media can affect the way your community perceives you—and how often your story gets told.

By building strong, trusting relationships with local education reporters, you can keep the most accurate stories about your schools in the news cycle and ensure you’re being heard in times of celebration or distress.

We get it. Sometimes it’s hard to trust that the media has the purest intentions. News is a business, after all, and the most positive things happening on your campuses won’t always strike a reporter as newsworthy material.

Beginning a media strategy can seem daunting. However, education reporters are actually looking for stories to print on schools, and they need credible sources to make their stories stronger. So what can you do to make sure they’re contacting your district?

As you know, no matter the story, your obligation is to the public. The media’s biggest concern is holding you to that.

This can often make it seem like the press is an opposing force to your schools, only wanting to sell stories or get a good scoop. But this is a huge misconception, and it could be keeping you from sharing the most impactful stories coming out of your district.

“Don’t overthink it,” advises Alia Malik, an education reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. “Don’t think of it as one journalist or one media outlet. When you talk to the media, you’re talking to the public. Treat us with the same respect you would treat them.”

We know you can’t control every piece of news that’s out there about your schools—and that can be scary. What you can control is how you approach and work with the media.

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Establishing Media Partnerships

Jenny LaCoste-Caputo knows a thing or two about building partnerships with the media. Before becoming the Chief of Public Affairs and Communications for Round Rock ISD in Texas, she was an education reporter herself. LaCoste-Caputo’s experience in journalism has helped her build a thriving partnership between her district and local media in the Austin area.

“When I was a reporter, I would often get frustrated with communications folks. I would say, They just don’t understand what we need,” she tells SchoolCEO. “You have to understand, frankly, that journalists are not your PR agency; that’s not their job. Their job is to report the news, to be a watchdog for the public.”

No matter how tempting it may seem, funneling inspiring stories to the media probably won’t get your schools the coverage you’re seeking. They may appreciate a celebratory story here and there, but touting your district’s strengths just isn’t their job—and this false expectation could lead to frustration for everyone.

Instead, make it your goal to build goodwill with local education reporters. When they’re on a deadline, you want them calling your district to ask for quotes and clarification—not asking a neighboring district or publishing a story without your knowledge. If the media knows you’re a good source to work with, you can start reaping the rewards of those partnerships. Once you’ve had a few conversations with your local media outlet, you’ll start to pick up on their needs—which puts you in a perfect position to supply information.

Make the initial connection.

To foster a good relationship with local media, connect with them before there’s a big story—when you don’t need anything at all. Get to know who’s reporting on your schools: not just who they are, but how they work, how they communicate, and what they expect from you and your team.

When it comes time to celebrate their teachers and staff, Clovis Unified’s relationship with the media helps their most inspiring stories get told.

talked to said they appreciated school communications personnel reaching out to them directly—through email, phone call, or even text message.

“You’re almost always better off if you make a personal connection with someone,” says Charles Lussier. He’s been reporting on education for The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for 19 years. “If the goal is to actually get coverage, there needs to be a meeting of the minds. It’s harder and harder because there are fewer and fewer folks like me, and there are more and more schools seeking attention.”

He recommends reaching out to reporters with a simple email introduction. “Sometimes that could just be, Hey, do you have a minute to chat about what may work for you and what won’t?” he advises. “I get a lot of cold call emails where there is no connection made at all. Anybody who covers your schools on a daily or weekly basis is someone you’ll want to get to know.”

According to LaCoste-Caputo, establishing these personal connections should be a priority. “The very first thing you do is start to establish those relationships, calling reporters, telling them a little about yourself,” she says. “Try to set up coffee or lunch with them. Meetings are great—phone calls are fine too. But if you can start building a relationship, that’s always going to be helpful. Someone’s far more likely to pick up the phone or respond to your email if they recognize your name when they see it come across the screen.”

Let them know your “why.”

Even though the media is never going to be your PR agency, articulating your vision for the district can help them tell the complete story of your schools. If a journalist understands your mission, they’ll better understand your choices; they’ll get to know you. Eventually, they might even pick up on some of the words you are using in your marketing and branding— and help tell your district’s story.

Clovis Unified teacher wins State Educator of the Year Making that initial connection with a reporter doesn’t have to be scary, either. Remember that it not only benefits your schools, but also helps journalists who may be looking for education stories to cover down the line. The reporters we

For Dr. Shawn Foster, new superintendent of Orangeburg County School District in South Carolina, making a thoughtful connection with local media has allowed him to share his mindset as a school and community leader. “I think it’s important, first of all, that you sit down and explain your philosophy,” he tells us. “As superintendents, we have to make sure people see the big picture in regards to communication, because education is no longer about just reading, writing, and arithmetic. Education is a foundational economic driver for FALL 2020

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communities. We determine if someone’s going to come live here, if businesses are going to come in—we determine all of those things. So the message about your schools that the media puts out impacts everyone that lives in that community, including that media entity.”

Dr. Foster also stresses that a strong relationship with the media is beneficial in making sure who they’re writing about and reporting on is never forgotten. “We have to tell a story about children,” he says. “That’s the one thing people have to remember when you’re talking about communication in the school aspect—you’re talking about kids. No matter where they go when they leave us, if someone hears something negative about the area they come from, people oftentimes unfairly associate what they heard with those kids. And that’s not fair to them. So it’s extremely important, because a child may have to bear the burden of what we put out into this small world.”

There are three main tenets to maintaining credibility: be responsive, be prepared, and be transparent.

Be responsive.

Remember that reporters are busy, and they’re often working on a deadline. You don’t have to respond perfectly, but make sure that you respond as soon as possible.

Through the connections they’ve built, OCSD can rely on local media to be on the scene when there’s important news to share with the public.

Building and Maintaining Credibility Let’s say you’ve put in the work: you’ve reached out to local media, had coffee chats and Zoom calls, exchanged emails and phone numbers. You trust that when a story comes their way, you’ll be the first to know. But how do you maintain that level of credibility when things get chaotic or unpredictable?

How can you ensure that you’re still trusted to be a reliable source, no matter the news?

Orangeburg County schools helping expand health care; district teaming up with providers to offer telehealth

Maintaining your credibility is an essential part of your relationship with the media and the public. “If you’re working with the same school comms directors for any length of time, you have a sense of who’s responsive and who’s capable of getting your questions answered,” Malik tells us. “If you don’t return calls and you’re not interested, that doesn’t let you off the hook. When the school district is not releasing or providing that information, then that becomes part of the story.”

“Reporters are really busy just like we’re all really busy,” LaCoste-Caputo tells us. “So being specific and brief is really important. If you take the time to build those relationships, here’s what’s awesome—on slow news days when they’re looking for something, they’re going to call you up, because they trust your judgment and know you’ll hustle to churn something out quickly.”

Credibility can also go a long way with the media in times of crisis. We know it can be difficult to be responsive when your priority is the safety and health of your students and staff, so that foundation of trust can go a long way with a journalist. If you know a reporter and they know you, the communication between you will be more timely, efficient, and accurate. The relationship you’ve already built with them saves you drama and stress when your schools need you most.

One thing you don’t want slowing you down when dealing with the press is not knowing about state or local laws, especially concerning media relations with the district. “I think comms directors need to have some basic knowledge about public records and open meetings laws in their states,” says Malik. “They shouldn’t have to go to their district’s lawyers every single time there’s a media request.”

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Be prepared.

This is another reason it’s especially important for a school leader and their communications director to work closely together. “I think the comms person and the super need to have a symbiotic relationship themselves,” Lussier tells us.

“The comms directors who are more plugged in are the ones I seek out. Reporters always prefer to talk to people who are in the know.”

Of the 18 different school districts in the Denver metro area, the Denver Post ran a story on Jeffco and its teachers’ approach to remote learning.

time, but I think they should prioritize talking to the media because they view it as talking with the public.”

Being honest and forthright regarding your district is not just a way to build credibility and strengthen your brand—it’s your obligation to the public. “You want to make sure to have an organization that’s doing things the right way,” LaCoste-Caputo says. “But then also share the challenges. People need to understand them. It’s two-fold. You’re building trust for being honest. But primarily, you’re demonstrating your needs so that when there’s a call to action, people feel compelled to answer.”

Pitching Stories We don’t have to tell you that newsworthy things are happening on your campuses every single day. But without a strategic and thoughtful plan for collecting and sharing these stories, you could be missing out on countless chances to connect with your community and highlight your schools through media coverage.

How do a first-grade teacher, educator to the deaf and photography instructor make remote learning work?

Be transparent.

Transparency is the foundation of your credibility, and the experts we spoke with emphasized it repeatedly. “If the media feels like you’re going to hide things from them or answer in a misleading way, they will not trust what you’re sharing with them,” says Kelly Avants, APR, former President of NSPRA and current Chief Communications Officer for California’s Clovis Unified School District. “It’s a huge one—be transparent and be willing to rip off your own Band-Aid.” In San Antonio, Malik covers education in an area with 17 public school districts and more than 30 private and charter schools. Needless to say, she knows a few things about keeping up healthy relationships with school districts. “Good comms directors tell the truth and are open and transparent,” she says. “I understand they have lots of demands on their

The media won’t always know what’s going on in your schools unless you tell them. So you also need a plan for taking stories you’ve collected from your schools and pitching them to local education reporters. With an internal story pitching strategy and a plan for pitching to the media, you can be sure the best things happening in your schools don’t go unnoticed.

Create an internal system for pitching stories.

Nobody knows your schools better than the teachers and administrators in your classrooms everyday. But if a class starts a successful fundraiser for a local food bank, would their teacher know how to share that story with the district or media? Does the principal know who to talk to? Should they go to your communications team or directly to the media?

“Our district has some pretty strict protocols in place, and I think for a leader who is learning or rethinking their media strategy, there’s a lot of value in that,” says Avants. At Clovis Unified, she assigns a communications liaison to each one of the district’s more than 50 school sites. This person serves as the district’s eyes and ears on the ground. “They’re tasked with sending information to us,” she explains. “They’re bringing that content to us, and we’re figuring out how to use it— maybe putting out a press release, creating a media event, or FALL 2020

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simply posting a video on Instagram. We consider ourselves our own newsroom in a sense. We certainly work with the media to tell our story, but it is incumbent on us to tell our own story as well.”

Many journalists don’t like the idea of checking in through the communications office before talking with sources in schools, but Avants says there are good reasons to do this as a district. “I often remind the media that we are sometimes dealing with contentious custodial issues with families who have restraining orders, one parent against the other, etc.,” she says. “We want to be confident that our systems are not going to put a vulnerable child in the line of a camera or a reporter that would be jeopardizing them while they are under our care.”

Jeffco Public Schools posts visual content that is not only fun for its community, but also easy for media outlets to share.

So as you align your district’s media communications, make sure your stakeholders know that there are always extenuating circumstances and events that are beyond anyone’s control. Make sure they know your system is meant to help them communicate their stories, not silence them. “There’s some time lost in unnecessary middleman stuff if there’s restrictions on teachers reaching out to the press,” says Malik. “What I’m concerned about is that people feel like they are able to talk to the press no matter where they fall in the school system—especially students and their families.”

In Orangeburg County, students and families always come first when it comes to communication with the media. For Merry Glenne Piccolino—Orangeburg’s Assistant Superintendent for Communications, Business, and Community Partnerships—that means having a solid system in place that helps find the most impactful stories to share. “Alignment is important to me,” she tells us. “I think about a teacher being an example of a strategic vision for the school district. When you can actually have a human interest story that relates and contributes to the vision and the goals of the school district and shows its employees fulfilling that vision, it’s such a win.”

Learn how to pitch to the media.

So you’ve got your plan in place for gathering story pitches from your schools, but how do you take those ideas and share them with the media? Unfortunately, you can’t just send them anything that comes across your desk—you need to learn more about their needs and what they like to cover. What are they looking for in terms of stories?

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Jeffco music teachers rickroll students with socially distanced jam session

Cameron Bell, Executive Director of Media Relations and Public Information for Jeffco Public Schools in Colorado, does research into her district’s local media to learn as much as she can about them. “Get to know publications and outlets,” she advises. “Watch them, read them, follow them on social media—and follow reporters on their own channels as well. Look at what they’re doing so you can also get to know them. That way, you know their voices and what they tend to report on most often. You know what kind of stories they like to tell and seem passionate about.”

Bell also says to be aware that some journalists you work with may not know exactly what they’re looking for. “A lot of reporters who normally cover politics or sports are having to cover things like education because of shortages,” Bell tells us. “A lot of them will say to me, I don’t even know what this means. Can you help me?” If you’re prepared with newsworthy stories and pitches, you can make a reporter’s job a lot easier—and that buys you goodwill and helps you build a stronger connection.

However, the media is always looking for a few common things. “People need to think in terms of what is new, what is a little different,” says Lussier. “They also need to think about the medium. I work at a newspaper. Newspapers aren’t just print entities anymore; we’re news sites. So we’re also trying videos now. The more complete the package on a story you can deliver to someone like me, the more it’s sellable. Especially if it’s visual.”

Education is rife with confusing and complicated rhetoric, so it’s also important to keep that in mind when you’re pitching a story. “The more complex a story, the more human you’ve got to make it,” Lussier advises. “If readers see someone grappling with something in real time and in real circumstances, it’s going to mean more, and it’s going to come alive.”

Knowing what your local media is looking for in terms of education stories will make things a lot less stressful for you, your communications team, and the media. And if everyone’s on the same page, the right stories get told.

gain may sometimes mean being consistent and assertive in pitching to the media to make sure you’re being heard.

In Jeffco, Bell sends out a weekly newsletter to local media that includes a list of story pitches from schools around the district. “Once I send them out, I post each one on our media relations webpage,” she says. “We give information, but we also pitch fun stories, give construction updates, and things like that.” When directly pitching to a reporter, Bell may use “a blurb-like pitch” or even develop an idea into a story that a reporter can then expand on.

It also never hurts to follow up with a reporter or reach out when something is important or timely. “Definitely nudge me,” Lussier says. “If you really think something is a story, you may have to grab me by the lapel and shake me a little bit and go, This is something and here’s why. Don’t assume that I’m just going to jump to it. If I’ve been doing five other things, it wasn’t even on my radar.”

In terms of how you should nudge or reach out to a reporter, Lussier offers some sound advice. “It’s usually an escalation.

If it’s something happening now, give me a call. If it’s something happening tomorrow or the next day, you can start with an email or maybe send a text.” Also remember that reaching out to a reporter who may be too busy for your story isn’t a fruitless endeavor. “If I can’t do it, but I know it’s something big enough, I may be able to find someone else, or we can think about a plan B and circle back,” he says.

When Bad News Strikes Your schools should be prepared to respond to any kind of story that comes across a reporter’s desk. Sometimes, as you well know, it isn’t good news. So first it’s important to acknowledge and accept that you can’t keep news from reaching your community, no matter what it’s about. Because you serve the public, much like the media, you already know that being transparent and responsive is a top priority. This, in turn, will help you build strong relationships with local education reporters so that when negative things do happen, they call you first.

Don’t be afraid to nudge reporters.

React thoughtfully and honestly.

Depending on your location, you may or may not be dealing with a great number of other schools that want to tell their stories, too. Keeping up your end of the communication bar-

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give them the answers. Bad things happen every day, and you certainly don’t want your reaction to the media to become part of the story.

“Realize that anytime someone has an issue, they’re going to call me,” Lussier tells us. “But if I have a good relationship with a district, I’m not going to pop off with the first tip of the day. I’m going to call them and go, Look, I heard about this.

What’s going on here? I’m willing to have a conversation with them on anything people come to me with.”

CUSD shared a touching video of high school students building a tiny home for families who were affected by the nearby Creek Fire. In no time, the local ABC news station picked up the story.

To react to negative stories in a thoughtful, transparent way, be as open as you can be with the media and public about whatever is going on. If there’s been an incident on one of your campuses, or a mistake has been made, your district should be as upfront as possible. “There are going to be negative things that happen,” Piccolino says. “The media needs to know that when we’ve done something wrong, I’m going to own it. I’m not going to sugarcoat it or try to spin the story or anything like that. If a child is hurt or something else has happened that is the fault of an employee, process, or system, I’m going to own it, apologize, and identify how we’re going to do things differently to prevent it from ever happening again.”

Build a bank of good stories.

You can’t keep bad things from happening, but you should always remember that good things are happening, too. Having a system in your schools for gathering those inspiring stories means you’ll be ready to share them when you need to most.

“We’re always trying to build that bank of really good stories,” Piccolino says. “We’re one of the largest employers in the community, and people make mistakes—kids, adults, everybody. Sometimes when things aren’t going so well, we pull a story out of our pocket that is going to change hearts and minds. Those living examples help refocus the community’s mindset on what’s positive and on the intentions of our work.

It recenters public interest and attention on something that is positive so that stakeholders can put a small error in perspective while remembering the larger and overwhelmingly positive impact our school system makes.”

Creek Fire: Clovis High students, local contractor make tiny home for evacuees

By being prepared to share your very best stories, you can ensure that no matter what happens, your schools are being seen, heard, and understood. As the saying goes, If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. After all, it’s the media’s job. But nobody ever said you couldn’t help them along the way.

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Superintendent Perspectives:

The Customer Service Mindset Guest Writer: Dr. Katrise Perera Gresham-Barlow School District, Oregon

Before I took the helm as superintendent in Gresham-Barlow School District here in Oregon, I put on a baseball cap, T-shirt, and jeans to visit schools disguised as a prospective new parent. I walked right in off the street and started asking questions, pretending I was relocating to the area and wanting to learn more about the school for my children. But I really wanted to learn about the customer service in my new district—and I quickly found out that we still had some growing to do.

Without anyone knowing who I was, I visited the front offices of two schools at every level—elementary, middle, and high school—and, let me tell you, I did not have the warmest welcomes in the majority of them. Ninety percent of parents never go beyond the front office in their interactions with schools, so I knew right then and there that one of my top priorities as the district’s new leader would be to instill a customer service mindset in all our staff, especially those interacting with parents. I want our community members to have the best experiences possible when they walk into our schools.

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In our busy day-to-day lives, being nice may not always be on your mind, but it’s critical to the success of your schools. If parents aren’t being treated with respect and gratitude, then how should they expect their kids to be treated? We’re here for the students, and we need to be there for their parents and guardians as well. Their interactions with our staff are their takeaways of what our schools are, of who we are.

extra mile to take care of their needs built trust and loyalty, allowing both students and the company to thrive.

So what does effective customer service look like in your schools, and how can you measure it? Well, it isn’t all that different from the business world—the stakes are just a lot higher. Good customer service in schools is assessed by how well we meet a family’s needs or Because we know a majority of parby how much we exceed their expecents interact with a school’s front office tations. I believe successful customer staff, we provide professional developservice in education carries more ment for those staff members. We also emotional weight because of that seek out candidates for those roles student connection. A customer will who have a customer service mindset never be as attached to a product as and traits that will allow them to provide a guardian is to their child. As you well good service to every parent or guardknow, there’s nothing quite like an upian who visits our schools. set parent who demands to speak with the principal. It’s our job to make sure Of course, it doesn’t stop at our front that parents leave with a positive imoffices. Customer service is necessary pression of our schools, even if they’re Dr. Katrise Perera at all levels of a successful school syshere dealing with a difficult issue. tem. So we need to be strategic in making sure everyone, from principals to teachers to custodians, understands that I cannot stress enough how important our communiwe serve the community; they don’t serve us. We do this in cation with families is to the outcomes of our students.

Gresham-Barlow by maintaining a districtwide culture of Communications and customer service go hand in hand. customer service, providing ample professional develop- When I served as a principal, I began to learn the real value of ment opportunities for our staff, and always keeping our stu- communication. Once, a sixth-grader came to us with acute dents and their families first. below-average reading skills. After assessing his skills and identifying his needs, my school staff worked with him oneThe Need for School Customer Service on-one. His reading skills started improving; my staff went Providing great overall customer service is vital to the suc- well beyond expectations in helping this student. However, cess of any business, and the same is true of any school dis- the communication between the school and his family wasn’t trict. I’ve had the opportunity to see how customer service as clear or consistent as it needed to be. works in both settings, and we in the education field can take many lessons from the business world.

In focusing so much on this student’s academic needs, we didn’t consider the full needs of his family. We were asking to Shortly before starting in Gresham-Barlow, I served as keep him after school and sometimes take up a portion of his National Director for Urban Markets at McGraw-Hill elective class, but we weren’t communicating with his family Education (MHE). You could say I was an army of one at as frequently or as accurately as we should have been. The MHE—my job was to learn how their products would help student’s reading skills improved quite a bit, but because we students, to leverage my connections to help open doors didn’t have the communication piece in place, we came up for the sales team, and to provide professional development short. In retrospect, we realized that despite his progress, we to school administrative teams when necessary. My experi- should have been more open with his family about our interence as a superintendent had afforded me the opportunity vention methods. When you don’t give parents the full picture, to be not only a rep for MHE, but a thought partner as well. they assume you’re hiding things. Our customer service misNeedless to say, I had my hands full. But through working steps in clear communication caused concern and confuwith 70 different districts, I learned quickly that going the sion that could have jeopardized the student’s progress.

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As educators, our focus is often on the task at hand: making sure all our students are being served. The other side of that coin, though, is making sure their families see how well we’re taking care of them. If customer service is always top of mind, we can get positive academic outcomes and earn the loyalty of our community. When schools embed customer service into their culture, they can make true progress.

Creating a Customer Service Culture Building a culture of customer service is like any instructional initiative: You have to start at the root of the problem.

Once you identify what’s keeping you from providing great customer service, you can build a strategic plan to implement with fidelity. When I say “implement with fidelity,” I mean that customer service can and should be measured in your schools. Begin with clear indicators of success. Prioritize time to assess progress, clarify expectations, and, of course, provide feedback and guidance.

To keep a districtwide customer service mindset in their schools, Gresham-Barlow centers communications around their most important customers: students. Here, they’ve invited families to share photos of their kids learning remotely.

Effective customer service must be a collaborative effort.

Each school, department, and individual has to understand their role in customer service to ensure consistency. As leaders, it’s just as important that we seek out resources and guidance, and model great service for our staff.

Establishing a culture of customer service and getting everyone on board are two different things. But there are ways to model that culture for your staff and to instill it in their daily mindsets. For one thing, it’s always important to set language and communication norms. We have to ensure that all our staff fully understand the information we’re communicating, that we define common vocabulary, and that our staff use that same language when communicating with our stakeholders. To help, we often provide a script or response statement for anyone communicating with the public on behalf of our schools. This way, our language and practices are as aligned as possible.

If we want people in our communities believing in what we do, we need to make sure our entire culture is centered around service. Some of these shifts in mindset can be frustrating to staff members, but as educators, we have to realize we’ll always be learners.

Developing the Mindset Modeling and communicating a mindset of customer service is a huge first step, but you can’t overlook the value of professional development. To achieve excellent customer service, you need to identify and offer adequate professional learning opportunities to everyone in your schools who interacts with those you serve.

To get our culture up to speed, we partnered with an outside company for a series of customer service training sessions with our administrators and front office staff. The training was well received, and feedback suggests that parents now feel more welcome when they visit schools.

I also require my entire leadership team to substitute in an actual classroom at least twice a semester. When I first announced this new policy, it went over like a lead balloon. But when we are making big decisions that will impact schools, I believe it’s important that we keep a connection to the classroom. I started doing this as an assistant principal—covering for absent teachers’ classes—and it helped me stay

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student-focused as an administrator. Despite that initial hesitation, the substituting has been a success. Last fall, I had to sit down with a director and remind him that substituting five times a semester might be overdoing it.

No matter what leadership role you’re in, I think you have to be centered from the classroom outward. Even today, I love teaching. I like to think I never lost that focus. I want the leaders in my schools thinking outwardly from the classroom as well, always centering decisions around meeting our students’ most immediate needs. Without question, we are focused on keeping the classroom front and center, and we’re serving all our customers in the process.

For me, responding to a crisis like COVID-19 has been about planning backward. Back in late March, we assumed we’d be remote until the fall, so we asked ourselves what we would need on day one in September, and planned backward from that. With the uncertainties affecting all aspects of the district, and every one of our stakeholders, we knew it was best to divide and conquer.

If we have learned nothing else this year, we all realize now that sometimes things are beyond our control. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a great teacher. As in any crisis, schools have to leverage their established customer service to reinforce and restore the public’s faith and hope for moving forward. It isn’t an easy task. When the world is in a crisis, the prevailing response is usually confusion, panic, and high emotions. But if you’ve got a solid foundation of customer service, you’ve got a better chance at success.

We created what we called rapid response teams—six cross-functional teams made up of administrators, department representatives, and teachers. Considering stakeholder input, each team strategically addressed a specific need, planning backward from the identified September readiness dates. These areas included health and safety; equity and learning recovery; distance learning; mental health and social-emotional learning; workforce and legal; and finance and cost control. Having these cross-functional teams to make decisions on the ground improved our output, helped us innovate new processes and procedures, and allowed for quick pivots where and when they were needed.

As soon as we made the switch to remote learning, our rapid response teams were already troubleshooting, putting plans together, and making recommendations regarding professional learning opportunities for our staff.

Any change in normalcy will increase levels of anxiety, especially in schools, where a consistent structure is expected.

Students depend on that structure, and so do their families.

To best serve a community during a crisis, the school has to help families understand what changes are occurring, why they’re happening, and what outcomes are possible. If we can communicate these changes and allow for feedback, stakeholders will better understand what’s at stake and why certain decisions are being made.

Collaboration always plays a big role when serving others, and during a crisis, it is no different. The distance learning team worked with the equity team on developing the best possible instructional model for our students with special needs. At the beginning of each week, all the rapid response teams came together to review information and grapple with needs and resources. It goes back to good customer service: working together to make sure we’re meeting our students and families’ needs.

We also have to be active listeners who are open to learning.

This will allow us to offer empathy and ask for flexibility when we need it. In times like these, take a moment to reflect and ask: What can we do better?

It’s been a long process, but tackling the challenges in small chunks has helped my team focus and weather the storm as we all deal with the pandemic. In any crisis, leaders need to make sure we’re taking care of our team so we can take care of others.

Service in Times of Crisis

It’s important to ensure that students’ physical and emotional needs are being met—even before their academic ones.

Prioritizing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs allows for more effective applications of Bloom’s Taxonomy. We have to put people’s needs before our programs. We don’t know the mental and financial toll that crises like this take on many of our families, who are already dealing with more than enough.

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The Most Important Customer It is our moral imperative as educators to ensure that we’re providing students and their families with what they need— otherwise, why are we here? It may not be easy, but teaching and learning are what we do best. Our community expects

us not only to prioritize our students, but to model that priority in our behavior and communications.

Last spring, amid total remote learning, one of our more traditional veteran teachers witnessed something that gave her a new perspective. She was on a virtual call with a student who had been struggling academically when suddenly a verbal altercation broke out between two of the child’s family members. The teacher could see this on camera.

We now ask our students to use a digital background to ensure their privacy. But this situation gave our teacher insight into her student’s unique struggles. “What I took away was a whole new appreciation for this student,” she told me. “I feel terrible because I’ve chastised them a lot over the year.” She ended up apologizing to the student for not taking more time to get to know their situation, for not asking the right questions. Her new approach will be proactive, looking for ways to help students rather than reasons to punish them.

A customer service mindset isn’t just about being polite and attentive when a parent shows up to school. It’s about giving our very best to the communities we’re charged with serving.

It’s about asking the right questions and not letting the unanswered ones allow our kids to fall through the cracks—no matter the learning environment.

When I first considered moving to Oregon to take this superintendency, I was disturbed by the racial history of the state.

Despite all that, I have been welcomed warmly as a woman of color and a leader in this community. So not only do I instill a customer service mindset, but I also lead with the idea that our history is not our future. We can always work to be better.

After our teacher shared her story with me, she said something I won’t soon forget. “I will never ask another child, Why did you not do your homework?” she said. “I will only ask them, What can I do to help you?”

With their #TogetherWeCan hashtag, Gresham-Barlow has been highlighting their dedicated staff as they navigate school closures, remote learning, school reopenings, and a year like none other.

When it comes to serving our customers—students and their families—perhaps it’s best to start by asking that same question: What can we do to help you?

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A customer service mindset isn’t just about being polite and attentive when a parent shows up to school. It’s about giving our very best to the communities we’re charged with serving.

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Information at their ďŹ ngertips, now.

Karl Galey Superintendent, Lawrenceburg Community School Corporation

The speed of communication has evolved over the 10 years I've been a superintendent.

Everybody wants information at their ďŹ ngertips, now.

Being able to consolidate everything and push it out through one platform has made it so easy.

SchoolCEO News Desk A closer look into upcoming changes in policy and practice across the nation

Georgia The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a lot of annual traditions this past spring, but one that may not have been missed was standardized testing. Before Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that she wouldn’t accept any testing waivers for this spring, Georgia had already filed a waiver to opt out of offering its Georgia Milestones assessments for the 2020-2021 school year. Parents applauded the decision; a survey from the state Department of Education found that 96% of parents either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with Georgia seeking a federal assessment waiver.

Even before the novel coronavirus hit, state leaders in Georgia were starting to rethink the battery of annual state tests. Governor Brian Kemp and State Superintendent Richard Woods worked to cut down the number of end-ofcourse exams for high school students.

Georgia Senate Bill 367, which reduced the number of required tests in high school from eight to four and cut a middle school exam, passed earlier this year with unanimous support from the legislature. The state will drop its economics, geometry, physical science, and ninth grade literature and

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composition exams. The law also requires the state board to study how many benchmark tests local school districts are administering in addition to federal and state tests.

Despite the overwhelming support in the state for less testing, the cuts have created logistical challenges. For one, the pause in state testing in the spring also meant there was no way for the State Charter Schools Commission of Georgia to evaluate charter schools this year. Teachers also use assessment data to inform their instruction. To help fill the gap, the Georgia Department of Education is offering BEACON, an online student assessment tool, to school districts for free this school year as a way to monitor academic achievement.

The changes to test policies in Georgia could be a sign of things to come for education leaders around the country.

In Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Wolfe and legislators are looking at possibly extending the two-year moratorium on the status of the state’s Keystone Exams as a graduation requirement for high school students. This would be in line with Idaho and Rhode Island, which made the move to drop high school graduation exams in 2017.

South Carolina Several South Carolina counties are testing a creative solution to provide instructional content to students without broadband internet. The technology is called datacasting. It’s cheap, it reaches 98% of the state, and it fills a need.

According to SCETV, the state’s public educational broadcasting network, almost 20% of South Carolina’s families lack stable internet access.

Datacasting works through regular TV antennas, no WiFi or data package required. Providers piggyback on existing television broadcast signals, sending encrypted computer files—such as images, videos, and HTML files—over the airwaves. People watching television don’t notice anything unusual, but end users can download this computer data using an inexpensive antenna and receiver. Students can then access their datacasted lessons and materials on a standard browser using any WiFi-enabled device.

Unfortunately, datacasting is a short-term solution; students can download material but not upload assignments. A few districts are currently exploring options for students to upload completed assignments in community spaces that have internet connections.

How Datacasting Works

SCETV selected several districts to pilot a datacasting program, funded by both the CARES Act and the state of South Carolina. Luckily, SCETV’s signals reach 98% of the state, and their existing broadcasting infrastructure only requires minor modifications to reach families.

Inspired by SCETV’s innovative approach, public broadcasting stations around the country are exploring datacasting as a way to send educational materials to students. Indiana’s Jennings County School Corporation is partnering with Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations Inc. to provide datacasting technology to about 1,200 students. In Pennsylvania, PBS received a recent investment from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund to provide datacasting statewide. According to America’s Public Television Stations, a nonprofit organization representing public broadcasters, stations in several states are looking to use datacasting for education even after the pandemic has passed.

America’s public broadcasters have been partnering with educators for over 50 years. To find your local station, visit apts.org/stations/find-your-public-tv-station.

2 Existing television broadcast towers transmit those signals over the airwaves alongside regular television signals.

3 Using an antenna and adapter, students are able to tap into those signals and access the content on a computer.

1 Educational content, such as video from a teacher, is converted from digital data to radio signals.

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Be the Backup Helping your teachers thrive in trying times

Just a few short months ago, teachers were being lauded as superheroes. As educators faced school closures, adapted to online instruction, visited students in teacher parades, and even handed out meals to families, the country saw a nearly unprecedented boom in teacher appreciation.

learning. And if they’re teaching face-to-face, they could be dealing with heightened anxiety, attempting to keep learning at its highest levels while keeping students—and themselves—safe. Facing all these challenges, your teachers may be at greater risk than ever of burning out.

In April, a survey of 2,000 parents conducted by educational STEAM brand Osmo indicated that 80% had gained a newfound respect for teachers during the pandemic. After helping their kids through online learning at home, 69% said they thought being a teacher was harder than their current job.

Even teacher pay became a hot topic; 77% of parents surveyed said teachers should be paid more. TV mogul Shonda Rhimes took to Twitter in March to express her own appreciation: “Been homeschooling a 6-year old and 8-year old for one hour and 11 minutes,” she writes. “Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.”

Teacher stress is worse than ever—but it’s also nothing new.

But as some teachers pushed to continue remote instruction in the fall, the public narrative surrounding educators began to change. Suddenly teachers were selfish, lazy, even cowardly. “No other group has shown as much contempt for its own work during the coronavirus crisis as teachers,” says conservative writer Rich Lowry in an opinions piece for the New York Post. “Doctors, health workers, cops, and firefighters have all put their lives on the line… [Teachers’] first and last thought has been of their own interests. They have sought to limit their labor while still getting paid—at the ultimate cost of the education of kids.”

For many teachers, the struggles brought on by COVID-19 have been the hardest of their careers. At the end of March, just as the pandemic began, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI) and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) surveyed 5,000 teachers nationwide about their emotional states. Their most-mentioned emotions were anxious, fearful, worried, overwhelmed, and sad; a staggering 95% mentioned anxiety.

95% 20% 8%

of teachers report feeling anxiety of teachers say they’re likely to leave teaching after this year of teachers leave the profession each year

You’ve probably heard this sentiment echoed in your own communities over the last few months. In some ways, it’s a natural response to the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in. “An early stage of grief is to be in a state of anger,” explains Dr. Christina Cipriano, Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Director of Research for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. “There’s so much to be angry about these days. Many of us continue to be angry at all the loss we are experiencing right now—not only the loss of life, but loss of experiences, interactions, routines, and careers.” And our teachers, she says, are “just there”—an available target for all that anger.

The stress of the current moment may even be driving many teachers from the profession altogether, potentially aggravating an already dire teacher shortage. In a May Education Week survey of 1,907 teachers across the country, 20% identified themselves as likely to leave teaching after this year; only 9% had planned to leave before COVID-19 hit. What’s more, 44% say their colleagues are more likely to leave teaching now than they were prior to the pandemic.

So now, even well into the school year, many of your teachers find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place.

If they’re working from home, they may be facing the disdain of some parents on top of the myriad challenges of distance

But COVID-19 isn’t just creating a new set of obstacles and stressors for teachers; it’s exacerbating problems that already existed. In 2017, long before the pandemic, the YCEI conducted nearly the exact same survey of teachers and FALL 2020

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their emotions. Even then, the feelings identified were overwhelmingly negative. The top four were frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed, and tired—not so different from this spring’s results. As Cipriano writes in a summary of the research for EdSurge, “the primary source of educator frustration and stress pertained to not feeling supported by their administration around challenges related to meeting all of their students’ learning needs, high-stakes testing, an ever-changing curriculum, and work-life balance.”

That frustration and stress has been reflected in turnover patterns. According to an Education Week analysis, all 50 states experienced statewide teacher shortages in at least one subject area in 2018—and those numbers are only set to get worse in the aftermath of COVID-19. Data from the Learning Policy Institute suggests that 8% of teachers leave the profession every year, pandemic or not.

So yes, your teachers are facing incredible challenges in the current moment. But as you probably know, they were already stressed. Throw in learning an entirely new mode of teaching, trying to help their own kids with online school, or even putting their health on the line for students, and it’s no wonder that some teachers are at their breaking point.

This is a huge problem—not just for your teachers themselves, but for your district. As the teacher shortage rages on, you can’t afford to lose your staff. That’s why it’s incumbent upon you, as a superintendent, to provide your educators with genuine, effective support. Doing so will take effort and resources, but investing that time and energy now can boost your teacher retention and keep your schools thriving long after we’ve gone back to normal.

If you’re not sure where to begin, never fear. Talking to the leading experts on teacher retention and social-emotional health, we’ve compiled the best tips we could find for making your teachers feel valued, supported, and prepared to deal with their current circumstances. You worry about supporting your teachers; we’ll support you.

Support your teachers’ social and emotional growth.

When we think about social-emotional learning (SEL) in the education space, we’re often focused on kids. More and more, schools are adopting SEL into their curricula, teaching kids to understand and regulate their own emotions right alongside multiplication and division. But to experience the kind of social and emotional growth needed to deal with traumatic situations like COVID-19, adults need to practice and master these skills as well.

At the YCEI, Cipriano and her research team “have always invested in teachers first” when it comes to SEL, she tells us.

Our emotions are linked to so many aspects of our lives: attention and memory, decision-making, job performance, relationships, and our health. It’s very difficult to teach effectively—especially right now—without the skills required to handle intense emotions in a healthy way.

“Educators need to be able to show up as their whole selves in their classrooms, especially during this sensitive time in our lives,” Cipriano tells SchoolCEO. “If we as adults aren’t able to regulate our fears and anxieties effectively, those feelings will undermine our ability to be emotionally available to our students.” That, in turn, could aggravate students’ own emotional difficulties, she says. “Our fears are going to manifest in the way that we engage with our students and children, which will impact how they, in turn, interact with us. We need to authentically express our emotions for our children, and provide them with a safe and welcoming learning environment where they can share their fears and frustrations.”

And teachers with emotional skills don’t just create healthier classrooms; they build healthier lives for themselves. YCEI’s research has found that the more a teacher develops their emotional skills, the more satisfied they’ll be in their job.

Teachers who have practiced and internalized SEL are less likely to burn out.

For more resources on providing SEL for teachers, visit www. schoolceo.com/SEL

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Of course, SEL is a complicated topic, one we can’t cover comprehensively in a single article. Right now, you can find several resources and programs online—many of them free—to help your teachers build their emotional skills. But to be successful, you need to provide your teachers with more than the resources themselves. They also need tangible support from you.

Commit to social-emotional learning as a leader.

The success or failure of your teachers’ social-emotional learning largely depends on you. If you’re not modeling what you expect your teachers to learn, it’s unlikely to stick.

“When leaders are not bought into social-emotional learning implementation, it does not get implemented with fidelity,” Cipriano tells us. “It takes more for the leader than to find the time and send the link; they need to go through it, too. They need to be in the narrative, have the experience, then model it in how they’re engaging with their school community.”

But the opposite is also true, according to YCEI’s research.

When administrators have developed emotional skills, teachers tend to have more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. Just as a teacher’s emotional health affects their classroom environment, your emotional health as superintendent affects the entire district you lead. (We’ll provide more tips about taking care of yourself on page 59.)

“SEL is not the BandAid for the pandemic.

But it is an onramp to school community resilence and thriving, now and in the long term.”

So as a school leader, you need training in SEL, too. Cipriano’s advice? “Invest in a program or an approach alongside a learning community,” she says. Many online SEL trainings group participants in cohorts, giving them a group to connect with and learn from. In particular, the RULER Approach to SEL, offered by the YCEI, centers on investing in adult SEL training first. “You can only get so far personally on Google,” Cipriano says. “Going through systematic SEL training as a cohort—especially as we’re going through this pandemic experience—and finding those connections is going to enable sustainable success, long after the crisis of the pandemic has passed.”

Grant teachers the time and space to work on their emotional skills.

Giving your teachers SEL—something meant to reduce their stress—will be pretty useless if it just becomes one more thing on their to-do list. If you really care about your educators’ emotional well-being, you need to offer them (and yourself) the time and space in their workday or week to actually do that learning. It’s a hard ask, we know, especially when teachers already have so much on their plates. But prioritize it. With better social-emotional skills, your teachers will be less stressed, more engaged with their students, and less likely to burn out—all of which make them more likely to stay in the profession.

According to Cipriano, investing the time and resources to provide SEL for your teachers can pay immeasurable dividends to your district—especially during a global pandemic.

“Thinking about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic and the compounding traumas of the time—when SEL is implemented systematically with an evidence-based approach, it can help to support those pieces as well,” she says. “SEL is not the Band-Aid for the pandemic. But it is an onramp to school community resilience and thriving, now and in the long term.”

Give teachers more voice.

As a Professor of Education and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Richard Ingersoll has spent his career studying the teaching profession, from patterns in recruitment and retention to the causes of nationwide teacher shortages. When we spoke to him in 2019, long before the pandemic began, he emphasized the importance of giving your teachers autonomy and input.

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“The data has long shown that a key factor in teacher retention is the issue of voice: how much input and say teachers have into the key decisions that impact them and their jobs,” says Ingersoll. “Teachers often have very little voice; school systems are often run in a top-down manner. The people on the ground get frustrated with all kinds of reforms and mandates that come down the pike where they’re not consulted.

It’s things done to teachers as opposed to with teachers.”

Building an Emotional Intelligence Charter allows teachers some say in what’s expected of them—and also offers the opportunity to share what they expect from you. Rather than coming up with top-down solutions to the stresses and challenges your teachers are facing, you can work together with them to find the most effective paths forward.

Decisions at the district level are affecting your teachers’ lives, not only professionally, but also personally—especially now. “The lack of autonomy was significant before the pandemic,” says Cipriano, “but now it’s coming up in different ways. Due in part to the rapid rate of change across the demands on the education system, educators are not being involved in the decisions being made.”

As California’s Turlock Unified School District closed its doors in late March, Marshall Beyer and Sitara Ali knew they had their work cut out for them. Beyer, the district’s Coordinator of Educational Technology, and Ali, an Educational Technology Instructional Coach, set out to create effective, virtual professional development for their teachers—as quickly as possible.

You may not be able to bring your teachers into all your decisions right away, but you can take small steps now toward including their voice and affording them greater autonomy.

“Sitara and I knew the makeup of our teachers,” Beyer tells us.

“We knew that there was a group that had some tech savviness, but there was a big group that didn’t. We needed to do something for those teachers.”

Let teachers drive their own professional development.

Build an Emotional Intelligence Charter.

To make sure you’re considering your teachers’ feelings and needs as you make decisions, Cipriano and her colleagues at the YCEI recommend building what they call an “Emotional Intelligence Charter.” This will be a living document in which leaders and teachers can work together to agree upon how you all want to feel about work, and how you will behave to achieve those feelings.

To build your charter, begin by asking how all your teachers want to feel at work. Try to narrow it down to a top five that you feel represents the whole faculty. Then, work through that list, asking for specific, actionable ideas as to how you can create those feelings in the workplace. For example, say your teachers want to prioritize a work-life balance, especially if they work from home and those lines blur. “If you want to set boundaries, set them together,” Cipriano suggests.

“Commit to how often you’re going to check your email, or what should be the norm for response rates. That way, you aren’t feeding into a system where everyone is continuously overtaxed and under-resourced.”

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Just a week after Turlock closed, Beyer and Ali began releasing their first professional development series for teachers.

But instead of telling the teachers what they should be learning, they asked teachers what they wanted to know. “A lot of it was based on teacher feedback,” Beyer explains. “We would ask them what they wanted, take that feedback, and put a PD together.” Sessions covered everything from engaging students over Zoom to building a Bitmoji classroom—whatever teachers were interested in.

Teachers could also choose how they consumed the information Beyer and Ali shared. They could watch video presentations, listen to an audio podcast version, or simply look at slides and handouts—whatever helped them learn best.

“There’s all these different modes in which students learn, whether it’s visual, auditory, or something else,” Beyer explains. “We wanted to provide those for teachers as well.”

The choice of whether to participate fell to the teachers themselves as well. The sessions weren’t mandatory. “We felt that giving teachers that choice of whether to attend or not put it all in their hands,” Ali says. “Some teachers, especially our new teachers, don’t need that extra help to learn how to navigate those tools.”

Provide opportunities for feedback and self-reflection.

Nearly every source we talked to gave us some variation on the same phrase: This year, every teacher is a first-year teacher. As many teachers continue to adjust to online instruction, others are struggling to manage an in-person classroom full of masks, plastic shields, and other (potentially distracting) protective elements. Still others are working with hybrid models, trying to teach online and in-person students simultaneously. Many are wondering, Am I even doing a good job?

Marshall Beyer, Turlock’s Coordinator of Educational Technology, walks teachers through their virtual setup in his instructional videos.

Virtual professional development turned out to be a smashing success—so much so that teachers are clamoring for more. “Even before school started, when our district announced that we would do distance learning, teachers were reaching out to both of us asking for more training,” Ali says.

Beyer credits that positive reaction to the fact that Turlock’s professional development put teachers in the driver’s seat.

“We also found that when we made it about things that they wanted, we were getting more buy-in,” he says. That principle, he says, carries over into the classroom environment.

“We were trying to translate that to teachers: When you are creating assignments and you’re giving your students choice, they’re going to be bought in more, too.”

Beyer and Ali told us that even when the pandemic ends, they’re likely to continue providing professional development online—precisely because it gives teachers so much control. “Our teachers deserve that flexibility,” says Ali. “They have kids at home. They have lives. They need to be able to choose when they learn best as well. Some are better in the morning, some are better in the evening. Some are better when they wake up at 2 a.m. with their new baby. It depends on what works for them. We will keep our virtual PD series going because it fits everyone.”

“I think teachers are really, really tired, and they’re working harder than they’ve ever had to work,” says Dr. Mary Ann Wolf, President and Executive Director of the Public School Forum of North Carolina. “But I don’t know that they’re often getting that feedback to know what’s working.” Teachers need feedback, not only to affirm their hard work, but to help them improve in this new environment.

The strategy Wolf recommends is deceptively simple: if you want feedback, just ask. “School districts can survey parents and students just to see how they’re doing, what’s working well and what’s not,” she tells us. “I often think that kids might go along with things and not really voice frustrations they’re having, especially high school kids. Surveying families, but especially students, can be really helpful.”

But, as Wolf points out, “you do have to ask.” You can’t just expect your students or parents to provide unsolicited feedback—especially in such a chaotic time. “No matter who’s doing the asking—whether it’s the teacher, the principal, or the superintendent—if we don’t ask questions for feedback, we might not get it,” she says.

You can also provide feedback from within your district, adapting structures you might have used pre-pandemic to our new reality. “In a school setting, principals, coaches, and other teachers can engage in learning walks: going into a classroom not to evaluate, but to learn and have a discussion about what they saw,” Wolf says. “That is possible online.

It just feels different. In some ways, it’s almost easier online; you can quickly Zoom into a classroom and see how things are going.”

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Long before the pandemic, entrepreneur Adam Geller had the same idea: Wouldn’t feedback for teachers be easier in an online space? “We know the best way to help teachers get better is through direct feedback on their actual teaching,” Geller tells us. “That’s what the research says. And the thing holding that back from happening in a K-12 school setting is that it’s really hard to have the right person in the right place at the right time.” That idea inspired Geller to create Edthena, a platform which allows teachers to film and share their instruction with colleagues, coaches, or administrators for timestamped feedback.

Crucially, catching a lesson on video also allows teachers to watch themselves at work, affording a unique opportunity for self-reflection and analysis. Geller illustrates this through an anecdote he heard from Laura Baecher, a researcher at Hunter College. “Imagine if teachers were artists, and we told them all about their brushstrokes, about the feeling that their painting evoked, about what we took away from it—but we never showed them the painting they made,” he explains.

“That’s essentially what we’re doing when we go in to observe a teacher. We’re telling them all the things that we see, but

As Turlock began the year virtually, Superintendent Dana Trevethan prioritized professional development with an opening webinar.

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we aren’t letting them see what is happening in their classroom environments.” When teachers can watch themselves teaching, they can see the work of art they’ve created—and how they’d like to change it.

As teachers fight to adapt an uncertain, unfamiliar circumstance, feedback is even more crucial than before. Your educators need your help finding avenues for feedback—whether from you, your community, or themselves.

Uplift your teachers to your community.

You know better than anyone that despite the negativity some in your community may feel, the vast majority of your teachers are giving their all. You’ve seen them working long hours to adapt lesson plans, taking on extra training to learn new technology, and paying for hand sanitizer and masks out of their own pockets. No matter how public opinion has changed since March, teachers are still superheroes. So it’s up to you to convey that to your district community.

At Highline Public Schools in Washington, the communications team has been working hard since the spring to make sure teachers get the recognition they deserve. “We started right away when COVID happened,” says Tove Tupper, Assistant Director of Communications. “When you say schools are closed, it gives the impression that nothing’s happening. But in reality, it’s only the buildings that are closed. That doesn’t mean our teachers aren’t working and our students aren’t learning. We really wanted to make sure that came to life on our social media.”

#HighlineAtHome gives the community a transparent view of teachers’ daily lives, spotlighting their hard work.

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Highline is making special use of Instagram. With the hashtag #HighlineAtHome, they share photos of educators in their own houses, showing their online teaching in action.

The district also gives the school community opportunities to uplift their educators. For this year’s Teacher Week, the Highline team highlighted outstanding teachers and their accomplishments, as told by their principals and peers. Students and families got in on the action through Instagram stories, where a question box asked them to shout out their favorite teachers.

When the YCEI conducted that initial survey of teacher emotions in 2017, they also asked teachers how they wanted to feel. Among the top answers were valued, supported, effective, and respected. Every day—but especially right now—you should be working to instill those emotions in your teachers. You should be helping them grow as people and professionals, supporting their ideas and decision-making, and making sure your community sees their dedicated work.

It’s a hard time for your teachers, but they’ve always had a harder time than most. Now it’s up to you to make their jobs a little easier.

Highline encourages both staff and students to shout out their favorite teachers, then shares the affirmations on Instagram for all to see.

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S M A L L but

MIGHTY How four superintendents are leading small, rural communities through COVID-19

Small school districts are the foundation of U.S. public education. In 2019, Census Bureau data indicated that 56% of U.S. students attended a school district with an enrollment of 1,500 or less—many of them located in rural areas. According to an annual report by the Rural School and Community Trust, one out of every five public school students attended a rural school district in the 2017-2018 school year.

While rural schools serve more than 9.3 million students and make up around 53% of school districts in the nation, they’re often granted less funding and resources than their urban counterparts. As a result, superintendents in small districts often can’t afford to hire additional administrators, forcing them to serve as their district’s CEO, CFO, and CMO all in one.

When the coronavirus shut down schools and altered public education forever in March, the role of the rural and small school district superintendent intensified. These leaders have dealt with the same seemingly insurmountable challenges as their peers—but with a drastically limited pool of resources. This fall, rural and small district superintendents faced an even more daunting question: How do we reopen?

We spoke with four superintendents of rural and small school districts to learn about their experiences reopening schools in the midst of a pandemic—finding out their greatest challenges and lessons learned along the way.

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LaGrange Highlands School District 106, IL • Enrollment: 926 students • Nearest Urban Center: Chicago (18 miles) • Geographic Size: 2 square miles Dr. Amy Warke

Holly School District RE-3, CO • Enrollment: 304 students • Nearest Urban Center: Colorado Springs (196 miles) • Geographic Size: 438 square miles Jackie Crabtree

Starting her second year in the superintendency at LaGrange Highlands, Dr. Amy Warke formed five subcommittees composed of 31 staff members to find the best solution for reopening this fall. After state guidance changed several times, the team settled on a hybrid model of A/B days with Fridays set aside for remote instruction. Communication has been a key part of their reopening plan—Warke’s team makes sure that all of the district’s stakeholders receive accurate, effective information in a timely mannner.

Like many rural superintendents across the country, Superintendent Jackie Crabtree had never put together a district reopening plan before this fall. She and her team settled on in-person instruction five days a week, while also offering students a virtual option. Included in Holly’s reopening plan is temperature checking, which Crabtree has turned into a fun morning ritual, especially for her elementary students.

“Some mornings I’ll sing a song; I’ll make up a little rhyme for the students,” she tells us. “We know this is crazy, but we can have some fun, too.”

Moshannon Valley School District, PA • Enrollment: 842 students • Nearest Urban Center: Pittsburgh (109 miles) • Geographic Size: 94 square miles Dr. John Zesiger

Hollis Milton

Because the district is small (and 75% of families requested face-to-face instruction), Dr. John Zesiger and his team in Houtzdale, PA, are providing in-person learning five days a week. One fourth of Moshannon Valley’s families have chosen to learn virtually, making for a smooth transition into the 2020-21 school year. “I’m really pleased with everything so far,” Zesiger says. “We’re able to provide in-person instruction for all students who want it in a safe environment.”

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West Feliciana Parish School District, LA • Enrollment: 2,212 students • Nearest Urban Center: Baton Rouge (40 miles) • Geographic Size: 403 square miles

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While West Feliciana has a medium-sized student population with over 2,000 students, the district is spread out across rural Louisiana. After being diagnosed and hospitalized with the coronavirus in March, Superintendent Hollis Milton made it a priority to ensure the return to school was as safe as possible. One out of every five West Feliciana students are learning from home, while 80% of students chose face-to-face instruction. All students, regardless of their choice, participate in remote learning every Wednesday.

What’s been your district’s greatest challenge and greatest strength?

Warke: I think our biggest challenge is also our biggest strength: our size. We are a tiny district, and we don’t have many people to do a lot of the necessary work. However, our size allows our staff to have an intimate knowledge of what needs to be done and how. It propels us forward and allows us to adapt.

The thing that drew me here is the community. While we don’t have a large staff, they’re able to get work done within their teams and solve problems. Research shows that when students see that sense of community, they’ll build that community, too. It’s been a huge strength in how we’ve gotten through the past couple of months. Everyone has relied on one another, divided up tasks, and worked together. It’s been extremely rewarding.

Crabtree: The challenge has been working with all of our stakeholders to make decisions. Before reopening, we often received different guidance from state and local groups. For example, our state health department and our local health department would give us different messages, which made it difficult to rapidly communicate those changes to our community. We felt wrong no matter what we did. Thankfully, I’m part of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, where all of the rural superintendents in the state work together to come up with solutions or to simply bounce ideas off one another.

That really has been a blessing. We were all facing the same things, at least to some degree, because we didn’t have the resources that some of our peer districts did, like extra teachers or curriculum directors.

When I was writing our reopening plan, it took me longer than some other districts. I had to resubmit it over and over again.

It was heartbreaking—some nights I just felt extremely lonely. However, I worked with my colleagues in the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance to see what they were doing and thinking, which helped me get our plan approved. No matter how hard it gets, we’re able to be there for one another. They have been just such a great support system. We actually have a group text now! It feels good knowing that we’re not alone, because a lot of the time it can feel like we are.

Milton: I would say our greatest strength has been working together to reach a common goal. A majority of our parents wanted us to get back to school, and from the beginning, we

kept saying that was the district’s goal as well. Over the summer, we worked 15-16 hour days: administrators, teachers, and support staff all working together to figure out the best solutions for reopening. We kept our communication lines strong. We made sure to share updates and make parents part of the solution.

Our greatest challenge was that it took a Herculean effort to accomplish all of this, especially during a time of uncertainty. We had to visualize every activity from a safety aspect.

For example, a football game in the age of COVID is a lot of hard work. It took a lot of thought, creativity, and constant reminders of what our district and our greater community both wanted: students back in school.

Have you made any changes for this school year that you see yourself carrying on after the pandemic?

Warke: One thing I hope stays is the adoption of some of the dynamic learning pieces my staff have used over the past few months. Our teachers have been able to engage with our students in creative ways, and not just with pencil and paper.

They’re getting creative in the way they learn about their students and share about themselves. I hope these mind shifts continue, and that we don’t revert back to the way we did things before.

Even my teachers really like this. For example, at my middle school, my English language arts teacher and my social science teacher are teaching interdisciplinary units. Before the pandemic, I wouldn’t have even thought to have them collaborate with each other, but now, they’ve said, I don’t want to go back to not doing this—it’s made my unit richer. One of our middle school science teachers has been holding socially distanced science nights for our students at school and learning over Zoom. Everybody has loved it! I hope that “out of the box” thinking sticks around.

Zesiger: This fall we made the decision to film all of our sports games and broadcast them online. Many school districts have done this, but what sets us apart is that we’re not charging anyone. We know that sports are important here; our small, tight-knit community usually comes out in droves for a football game on a Friday night.

After our governor said we weren’t allowed to have any spectators attend the games, our tech department found a FALL 2020

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streaming service that would cost parents monthly to subscribe. Knowing the economics of my community—six out of 10 students are on free and reduced lunch—I knew that wasn’t an option. So I went to our board, told them that we needed to pay for this service, and they were completely supportive. They knew it was important for us to allow parents, grandparents, and community members to watch their sons, daughters, and grandchildren march in the band at halftime, play football, or cheerlead from the sidelines. We want our families to see that whether we win or lose, our real victory is just being on the field.

perintendents in my group for them to use if they happen to have a case. We’re just all looking out for one another. People who normally would have done their own things in their school districts are now collaborating with other school leaders. So it’s this new awakening for some superintendents.

We’ve been trying to coordinate and consider what other people are doing and thinking. The communication between our teams has increased, and they have been such a great support system.

What’s your biggest takeaway from this experience?

Zesiger: Before this, many took school for granted. Now that we’re back, it’s been great to see students really excited to be here. They seem ready to learn. There’s a fear right now that at any moment we could be forced not to be here, and as a result, relationships are more appreciated by our students, by our staff, by our families. So I’ve been really encouraged.

The positive to come out of this might be an appreciation for school: what we are, what we do, and what we provide.

Warke: Relationships and communication are key. I’m working at keeping that in the forefront. You don’t know what other people are dealing with. This experience has really shown me that I need to seek to understand—and help other people do so as well.

This morning I had a meeting with a parent who was upset, and finally I just said, You’ve said so much, but not once have you sought to understand. Not once have you asked us what we are doing for our students’ learning. If learning were your main focus, wouldn’t you have asked that?

That completely diffused her.

It helped her reframe where she was coming from, and then we had a great conversation.

How do you think COVID-19 has changed your district?

“This experience has really shown me that I need to seek to understand—and help other people do so as well.”

So often we actually have the exact same goals. We might have a different perspective, and that’s fine—that makes the world better. But we have to seek to understand one another.

This whole experience has really reinforced that idea for me: the importance of truly listening and trying to figure out the root cause of the problem at hand.

Crabtree: I have seen people come together to share ideas, through my BOCES, through my groups. Just before this meeting, I was sending out a form letter to some of the su-

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Milton: This has accelerated the use of technology in so many ways. That’s in part because of virtual learning, but it’s also part of the in-person classroom. Right now we can’t do lessons in a traditional cooperative learning environment, but you can leverage technology in that classroom so that even though kids are sitting six feet apart from one another, they can work on the same project.

So we’re seeing a lot of innovation happening in classrooms as teachers build this new arsenal. That phrase, Necessity is the mother of invention—we’re seeing that all over the place in education right now. When this is all over and we don’t have to be afraid of this virus anymore, I think all of us are going to step back and say: What did we learn? What do we need to keep? I believe we are going to be forever changed for the better as a result of this experience.

What can educators in urban areas learn from rural and small school districts?

Warke: I feel what urban school leaders could learn from us is collaboration. I have the best team here that I have ever worked with. In our district, everyone wears several hats, and we’re willing to do whatever we need to ensure that our kids have a successful year.

Once we realized that we’re all interdependent, we all started talking, working together to come up with the best solutions.

It’s a blessing because it takes all of us. Whether it’s making big decisions or doing presentations in front of our board, our team is sitting together, hearing everyone’s collective thoughts, and receiving feedback.

Zesiger: There’s a myth that rural schools serve broken communities—like we need to be fixed. After going through this, I’m here to say we’re not broken.

In a rural school district, you could be in coveralls or a tuxedo, and you’d fit in. We look out for each other. I would say I know 70% of the 800 students in my district by name. Families approach me when they see me in the community, and they call my personal cell if they have an issue. That sense of cohesion and community is something that urban education leaders can focus on and build in their own communities.

Milton: Be as close to the work as you can. I am so fortunate because I can go out there and check temperatures and hear how families are doing on a daily basis. I think that can be more difficult for urban districts.

Despite how busy we all are, it is so important to get out to the schools. Even if it’s only popping into a classroom and saying a quick hello, or spending two minutes talking to a parent about a concern, it goes a long way. It builds an arsenal—a collection of experiences that allow you to make decisions and communicate effectively. You’re able to get a better sense of what’s going on. That’s a strength we can leverage.

Rural school districts, by nature, are small ships. We can dramatically change course and make a 180-degree turn very quickly. Larger ships can’t do that; it’s more of a gradual change. Those are the strengths we leverage: fostering relationships and adapting quickly. In a system that is built on close relationships, you pick up on things in real time, allowing us to move faster and get a true sense of what is out there, what is coming, and what is important to our families, students, and employees.

Crabtree: The advantage has definitely been our connections with the kids. We already know all their names, their favorite colors, if they just had a breakup—whatever it might be.

It really adds value to what we do. So we’re able to take extra time for social-emotional needs, and we have those support systems in place. We don’t just have one school counselor checking in on students; we have multiple adults in their lives that they can connect with.

This past summer, we had several students who were having a hard time. A few local organizations offered their services, including childcare, so that their parents could get a break and their families could recharge. Having those connections in larger districts would be so beneficial.

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Leading From a Full Cup Self-Care for School Leaders

Over the past few years, you’ve probably been asked an all-too-familiar question: Are you practicing self-care? You shouldn’t mistake this for just another buzzword or health fad, though. Self-care is anything we do deliberately to take care of our mental, emotional, or physical health. Intentionally practicing self-care is critical for everyone from stay-athome parents to corporate executives. And it can work for you, too.

According to The Broad Center, the average tenure of an American superintendent is only about six years. We don’t have to tell you why—especially not in 2020. Your job is intense, nonstop, and highly stressful. Taking care of yourself can easily fall by the wayside, but the experts all agree: you need to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

As a school leader, caring for yourself may feel borderline selfish. Your obligation is to your students, staff, and community, and you don’t have time to worry about getting enough sleep or practicing mindfulness, right? A 2019 survey conducted by The Harris Poll found that one in four Americans feel guilty when practicing self-care. Not only that, but a whopping 44% of those surveyed said self-care is only possible for people with “enough” time.

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But effective self-care practices don’t actually take much time. You can easily integrate many strategies into your daily work or home life, and doing so can make all aspects of your life less stressful and more healthy. It’s no surprise The Harris Poll also found that nine out of 10 physicians say you should consider self-care an essential part of your overall health.

So are you taking care of yourself, or are you running on an empty tank?

It’s about you.

It’s important to know exactly what we mean when we use the term self-care. It isn’t one specific activity or practice, and it definitely doesn’t look the same for everyone. According to Psychology Today, self-care includes “a wide variety of tasks tailored to meet your diverse needs. Self-care is subjective.”

For example, meditation and yoga may work wonders for your spouse, but not for you—and that’s okay.

With this in mind, developing your own self-care routine should first start with an assessment of your needs: Am I getting enough sleep? Am I taking time for mindfulness? Do I get enough physical activity? When’s the last time I did something for fun that didn’t involve my job? How’s my general attitude?

Asking yourself these questions can help you find the right activities for your personal approach to self-care. “You can’t show up to be a leader and guide others unless you can first take care of yourself,” says Jacob Morgan, TED speaker and best-selling author of The Future Leader. “Whether it’s eating healthy, exercising, meditating, or taking time for yourself— do whatever it is that you need to be your best everyday.”

Morgan breaks self-care down by four key areas of need: mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional. “As a leader, you need to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself in all four of those areas,” he says. “I think now more than ever, we need to really pay attention to mental well-being, but if you don’t physically feel good, it’s going to be very hard to take care of yourself in those other aspects of your life.”

Get your zzz’s.

Approaching self-care can seem overwhelming if you’ve never taken the time for it. But don’t worry—no one’s expecting you to immediately drop into downward-facing dog or start meditating like a pro on day one. Again, this is about finding what works for you and your specific needs as a leader—it doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes self-care is just getting a few extra hours of sleep a week or taking time to relax and unwind after a stressful workday.

When you’re the leader, it’s all too easy to put self-care on the backburner in favor of work. “One thing that’s common with leaders operating at the very top of any industry is that we’re so focused on getting the job done that we don’t take the time to make sure we’re operating from a full cup,” says Karima J. Mariama-Arthur, an attorney, author, and the CEO of WordSmithRapport, a boutique professional development consulting firm. “That means, at a very basic level, doing things like making sure you get enough sleep, and that’s more difficult than it would appear.”

The CDC recommends that adults get anywhere from seven to nine hours of sleep a night, citing that getting less sleep has been linked to the development of a number of chronic diseases and conditions. “We tell ourselves, Oh, I’m going to get better sleep, but we never have a plan,” Mariama-Arthur says. “But sleep is foundational; it affects your mind, body, and everything.”

Judging from the leaders we’ve spoken to, you probably already know you need more sleep—but actually making that possible is the problem. For practical, science-backed tips on getting your recommended amount of quality sleep, we looked to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Some of their advice is fairly basic, like exercising regularly and waking up at the same time every morning. But we’ve tailored several of their most helpful recommendations into a list we think could be beneficial to school leaders: • Establish a consistent bedtime routine. Whether it’s taking a bath, reading, or maybe even stretching, it’s important to cue your body and mind that it’s time for rest.

• Don’t go to bed unless you’re sleepy. If you don’t fall asleep after 20 minutes, get up. Tossing and turning has never helped anyone, so fold some laundry or do something else simple and relaxed until you’re actually sleepy.

• Keep your bedroom cool. You should always try to keep your bedroom dark and at a cool temperature to sleep comfortably. Studies find that most people sleep best in a room at around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, though this depends on your preferences.

• Be careful what you eat and drink at night. Don’t eat large meals in the evenings and avoid consuming caffeine after 3 or 4 p.m. Also avoid alcohol altogether close to bedtime. That glass of wine may help you unwind, but it will disrupt the quality of your sleep.

• Turn off electronic devices at least 30 minutes before bedtime. Because you’re in constant demand, we know it’s tempting to use this time to catch up on emails or check the news. However, the artificial blue light from smartphones, tablets, and televisions can disrupt circadian rhythms and suppress the release of melatonin, which helps you fall asleep.

Take care of your body and mind.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says less than 5% of American adults get their recommended 30 minutes of physical activity each day. Only one in three gets

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enough physical activity per week. Being physically active is often unfairly associated with a need for weight loss or body transformation, but that’s not what we’re here for. This is about keeping you feeling good and ready to lead, and moving is a big part of that. So any physical activity you choose, be it walking, cycling, swimming, or golf, do it at your own pace and do it your way. There are no rules for taking care of yourself as long as your strategy is working.

Regular physical activity is advantageous for your body and mind—aerobic exercises like walking or cycling reduce stress, lower the risk of heart disease, help manage your blood and insulin levels, improve sleep, and can even keep your cognitive skills sharp as you age. Fitting exercise into your busy day may seem impossible, but it can actually be as simple as an evening stroll with your dog. After all, we don’t want you stressed out about finding time to de-stress.

No matter how much you’re moving, though, your diet can have tremendous effects on your health and daily well-being. We’ve all heard it a million times: You are what you eat. But it turns out it’s truer than previously thought. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that food not only affects our bodies, but our minds as well. Many scientists now argue that diets high in sugar and processed carbohydrates could worsen mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. For optimal health, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health recommends you focus on a “high-quality” diet of unrefined, minimally processed foods such as vegetables and fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, and healthy sources of protein. We know it doesn’t sound fun, but eating better could pay huge dividends when stress gets out of hand.

Focus on positive self-talk.

“Never default to the negative, because those around you will also default to it,” Morgan advises. As you know, staying focused on the positive even in times of extreme stress can be a lifesaver in a position like yours.

We don’t mean you should pretend everything is sunshine and rainbows when it’s not, but it’s essential to your health to maintain positive emotions like gratitude, and it makes you more helpful to others. To do this, Morgan says to be mindful of your inner voice. “I think it’s really crucial how you talk to yourself,” he says. “Are you constantly beating yourself down? It really matters for a leader.”

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According to the Mayo Clinic, negative self-talk can come in many forms: • Filtering. You magnify the negative aspects of a situation and filter out all of the positive ones.

Example: You had a great, productive day at work. You were even complimented on your performance. But that evening you focus only on a parent complaint and forget the praise.

• Personalizing. When something bad occurs, you automatically blame yourself.

Example: Your assistant superintendent is in a bad mood, and you assume it’s your fault.

• Catastrophizing. You automatically anticipate the worst.

Example: A teacher resigns because she’s too overwhelmed. Your first thought is, What if I lose my entire staff?

• Polarizing. You see things only as good or bad.

There is no middle ground.

Example: You feel that you have to be a perfect leader or you’re a total failure.

To help you avoid negative self-talk, the Mayo Clinic has some practical tips that we’ve tailored for school leaders: • Check in with yourself. Periodically stop and evaluate how you’re thinking. If your thoughts are mainly negative, try to find a way to put a positive spin on them.

• Look for the humor. Give yourself permission to smile or laugh, especially during difficult times. Remember that despite our most challenging moments, there are still things to laugh about.

• Surround yourself with positive people. Make sure the people in your inner circle are positive and supportive. Negative people may increase stress and make you doubt your ability to manage stress in healthy ways.

• Practice positive self-talk. Follow one simple rule: Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to someone you love. Be gentle and encouraging with yourself.

Set boundaries.

Sometimes just tuning out the chaos and giving yourself time to think and breathe can work wonders. “The world is full of distractions,” Mariama-Arthur reminds us. “It’s important that we can set boundaries so we’re not distracted by the things that take away from our best work, even if that work is taking care of ourselves.”

It’s impossible these days not to constantly be on our phones or on social media. You also need these tools to execute your job effectively. But as you well know, getting lost in your phone can be incredibly distracting, and also distressing.

Morgan has strict rules when it comes to protecting his mental health in these regards. “Pay attention to how much social media you’re using,” he advises. “Go on there maybe once or twice a day to get your updates and be done with it, because it can quickly send you into a spiraling, never-ending, negative rabbit hole.”

Work can be a distraction, too—not just from your home life, but from taking care of yourself. Establishing healthy and reasonable boundaries around when you work and when you don’t work is important. Make sure you block out times when you aren’t checking emails or fielding phone calls, and stick to these boundaries so those you work with know your routines as well.

Rely on your team.

Self-care isn’t always just about what you can do; sometimes it’s about recognizing what you can’t do, especially when things get overwhelming or unpredictable. Mariama-Arthur advises working closely with those you trust or even forming a committee of advisors. “It could be any individual or colleague with a breadth of experience,” she says. “They’re able to give you critical feedback, to guide you, and to give you proper advice so that you can implement and execute your plans competently. I think sometimes people forget that you don’t have to do it all yourself.”

In unpredictable times, trusting your team to take command can be a huge asset. Hollis Milton, superintendent of West Feliciana Parish Schools in Louisiana, has definitely learned the importance of having a strong, collaborative team this year. Not only was he hospitalized with COVID-19 back in March, but he also had heart surgery on the first day of the new school year. “What helped me is I’ve got a great team,” he tells us. “They stepped up for me and made everything

work. They took stuff off my plate and said, This doesn’t need to go to him. We can handle this. They’d never admit it, but I know how much they did, and I always want to step up for them, too.”

Practice mindfulness—it works.

The term meditation usually gets an array of reactions, but this can be attributed to a fundamental misunderstanding of mindfulness itself. The people behind the popular meditation app Headspace are working to fix that. The company defines mindfulness as “the quality of being present and fully engaged with whatever we’re doing at the moment—free from distraction or judgment, with an open mind and an open heart.” For school leaders, this practice can be a self-care game changer.

Headspace describes meditation as a “training in awareness and getting a healthy sense of perspective.” It’s not about clearing your mind or turning off your thoughts; it’s about observing your thoughts without judgment and hopefully better understanding them.

“By increasing your awareness and compassion in yourself and with others, you’ll be better equipped to note your own thoughts and feelings and the feelings of others,” says Alice Nathoo, Headspace’s Head of Social Impact. “Specifically in education, we see the important role schools play not just in academic learning, but in improving young people’s emotional intelligence, and healthy social connections with each other.”

Mariama-Arthur swears by the practice. “Taking that time helps with self-care, sure, but it also helps you achieve bigger goals. It’s shocking how many areas can be touched by focusing your thoughts even on the most abstract things. It can change your life.”

Fortunately, Headspace has recently turned its attention to schools, hoping to help combat the anxiety and overall health toll the pandemic is taking on educators. “Headspace is committed to supporting every educator and student in the U.S. through our Headspace for Educators program, which currently offers free access to all K-12 teachers, administrators and supporting staff,” Nathoo tells us. Not only does the company’s signature app have beautifully designed and animated guided meditations, but also offers its

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users “mindful movement exercises (mindful walks and runs), breathing and wind-down exercises, Sleepcasts, soundscapes, and more.”

Does the app work, though? Well, the proof is in the pudding.

“In 25+ published studies in some of the leading mindfulness peer-reviewed journals, Headspace has been shown to have favorable outcomes, including reduced stress, improved focus, increased compassion, and decreased aggression,” says Nathoo.

“During the current global health crisis, our teachers and caretakers are particularly overburdened,” Nathoo says.

“We have focused our efforts on supporting this group because of the positive impact they can have on so many young people.

Educators are under more pressure than ever, and it’s our small way of supporting this community in their sometimes stressful and crucial role.”

All K-12 educators can sign up at www.headspace.com/educators for free access.

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