SchoolCEO Spring 2020

SchoolCEO

COMMUNICATING IN A CRISIS

What unifies your district when the buildings are closed?

OUR STAFF: Executive Editor: David Allan Art Director: Sebastian Andrei Managing Editor: Joy Spence Writers/Researchers: Rheannon Burnside, Melissa Hite, Barrett Goodwin, Corey Whaley Graphic Designers/Illustrators: Corbin Lawrence, Blake Organ Video Producers: Ryan McDonald, Obatola Layiwola Social Media Manager: Jacob Neeley Apptegy CEO: Jeston George

PUBLISHED BY:

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 6

Sneakers to the Ground

In Topeka, Kansas, Dr. Tiffany Anderson’s unique approach to education is changing hearts, mindsets, and lives.

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Communicating in a Crisis

Pulling together guidance from the CDC, WHO, and crisis management experts, we’ll show you how schools can respond to COVID-19—and other long-term emergencies.

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Q&A: Listening, Learning, Connecting

We spoke with Dr. Sharon Contreras of North Carolina’s Guilford County Schools to learn how relationships change her district.

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Leading Through the Lens

Now more than ever, video is a crucial tool for communicating with your community. We’ll teach you how to build an effective video strategy.

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Leading from Home

Private sector experts share their best tips on how to work—and manage an entire organization—from home.

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SXSW x SchoolCEO

We spoke with four innovators slated to appear at this year’s SXSW EDU Conference and Festival. Here are their most exciting ideas for the classroom and beyond.

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Coping with COVID-19

In this installment of SchoolCEO Conversations, we’ll show you how superintendents are boosting morale amid extended school closures.

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Building Equity Structures

In this edition of Superintendent Perspectives, Dr. Paul E. Coakley of Oregon’s Centennial Public Schools shares how his schools are leveraging connections to address inequity.

Vol. 2 No. 3 © 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., 425 W Capitol Ave. Suite 800 Little Rock, AR 72201. Send address changes to SchoolCEO™, 425 W Capitol Ave. Suite 800 Little Rock, AR 72201. 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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Letter from the Editor Before the COVID-19 crisis, most superintendents we talked to felt like the world was becoming increasingly unpredictable. Now, that feeling has gone off the charts. We can’t be sure when school will be back in session or whether districts will need to close again in the winter.

What we do know is that school leaders have responded to COVID-19 by working around the clock to meet the needs of their communities. Amid school closures and shelter-inplace orders, we’ve seen an explosion in innovation, from school buses turning into wifi hubs to teacher car parades helping students feel connected.

We at SchoolCEO are not the ones in the thick of it, but we are feeling many of the same pressures. Most of this edition was written and edited from our homes. Zoom calls have replaced team meetings, and print proofs have to be delivered in carefully packaged plastic bags.

It can be easy to lose heart in these circumstances. The current situation exacerbates the barriers to learning many students faced before COVID-19. We don’t know what form those effects will take in the fall, and we’ll need to figure out how to adjust.

If the outpouring of compassion and thoughtfulness over the past few months is any indication, school leaders are equipped for the task, and our communities are stepping up to the plate. Perhaps our students will come back to school in a society that better understands that we all succeed when we come together—and the power a public school can have in its community.

From our team to yours, we want to say thank you for your perseverance, thank you for your responsiveness, and thank you for taking care of students who need your help more than ever.

We’ve got a great edition for you. Since the virus started making the news, we’ve been interviewing emergency management experts, superintendents creating new opportunities, and business leaders who have been working remotely for years. In “Communicating in a Crisis,” we lay out what the experts say is the best response to a long-lasting crisis. You’ll also find the stories of superintendents’ responses to COVID-19, along with a profile of one of my personal heroes, Superintendent Dr. Tiffany Anderson of Topeka Public Schools.

Don’t forget to take care of yourself.

Perhaps we can take a moment for hope. An international crisis like this will inevitably bring about major changes in our society. Fortunately, school leaders have worked for decades to give every student, no matter where they come from, a world-class education. This crisis will end, and the new world will be ours to make.

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David Allan Executive Editor, SchoolCEO

"You gain strength, courage, and conďŹ dence

by every experience in which you

really stop to look fear in the face."

- Eleanor Roosevelt SchoolCEO

Good News in Public Schools

Stratford, WI

Chino, CA

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Oscar, a senior at Stratford High School, enjoyed reading to preschoolers every day in preparation to become a teacher after graduation. When his district closed, he decided to continue story time remotely.

He now hosts “Story Time with Oscar,” an online show that allows his students to tune in and hear their favorite stories.

(Wisconsin Public Radio)

Before the Chino Valley Unified School District closed, high school choir students were preparing to perform in the annual Choral Festival. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, the festival was canceled. In a show of resilience, each student recorded their a cappella portion of “Over the Rainbow” at home, allowing the choir to perform together in a video that has garnered over 1.2 million views.

(Chino Valley USD)

Greenville, NC

Derby, KS

Koryn Dilday, an elementary teacher with previous experience in online teaching, has been helping educators across the country adjust to remote work. She’s hosted nearly 700 webinars for teachers nationwide and is hoping to show others the opportunities available through online learning.

(WITN Greenville)

Vivian, a sophomore at Derby High School, has decided to spend her time at home sewing face masks for hospital workers and local nursing home residents. She hopes to make about 15 masks a week going forward.

(Derby Informer)

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Glenelg, MD Amy, a high school sophomore, created an online music lesson platform called the Do Re Mi Project, allowing elementary and middle school students in her area to receive remote music lessons from high schoolers. Since the project’s start in February, more than 100 virtual lessons have been scheduled and 46 students have joined the platform.

(Baltimore Sun)

San Antonio, TX Rishabh, a junior at Reagan High School, helped city staff build an online COVID-19 self-screening tool for San Antonio residents. Over 31,000 people have completed the test on the City of San Antonio’s website. “I was just doing it as a volunteer with the city,” he said on the success of the screening tool. “It really just makes me feel good that I have done something for the community.”

(KENS5 San Antonio)

Sneakers to the Ground Leading a New Legacy of Learning in Topeka and Beyond Once again, there’s history being made in Topeka, Kansas.

The school system once at the center of 1954’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education case is now being led for the first time by an African American woman—and she’s well aware of the powerful message that sends her students. “Just seeing me walk through the door changes mindsets,” Dr. Tiffany Anderson tells SchoolCEO. Anderson has a long legacy of changing lives, along with an unrivaled passion for service.

And though she’s spent a majority of her 27 years in education as an administrator, she still considers herself a teacher.

“The title is superintendent, but, ultimately, I’m teaching and learning everyday,” she says.

When we sat down with Anderson, her humility spoke volumes—she keeps her thoughts and her heart centered on students, especially the most vulnerable. Through four superintendencies in three different states, she has facilitated and overseen transformative initiatives for tens of thousands of kids, all while showing up for her communities at every turn. With her business suit and signature white tennis shoes always on, this daughter of two retired pastors says service and purpose are ingrained in who she is. Fortunately for many students and counting, she’s a superintendent.

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Dr. Tiffany Anderson, Superintendent of Topeka Public Schools

Dancing in the Puddles Many years before her time in Topeka, Anderson—a St. Louis native—became the youngest principal in the state of Missouri at just 24 years old, at an inner city school where she says nobody wanted to go or work. “When I first toured the building, it rained inside the classrooms,” she explains. “I asked the teachers how they taught this way, and one said, Around the buckets, baby—how would you teach?”

Despite her respect for the teachers’ grit, Anderson wanted to change this acceptance of low standards and outcomes in the school, so she got creative. “You can either complain about the rain or dance in the puddles—I choose to dance in the puddles,” she tells us. In the case of Clark School, the issue was literal puddles. “I videotaped all of the mold and disrepair and rain in the building, and I put a label on it reading The Holiday Program at Clark School, because I knew that would get the attention of the St. Louis City administrative staff,” she explains. “In a district that size, you can’t assume they know what hundreds of buildings look like. But they saw the tape, and they were horrified. So they began fixing stuff.”

This would only be the beginning of Anderson’s work to improve schools. She also knocked on doors in neighborhoods surrounding the school, inviting residents on tours to see where their kids were learning. Support for the school soon began pouring in. During her time there, Clark School would see significant improvements and has now become Clark Accelerated Academy. Soon after, she led initiatives to reduce achievement gaps and increase graduation rates for students of color as the assistant superintendent of Rockwood Public Schools in Missouri. Then, Anderson was ready to take her brand of caring leadership to the superintendency. She started in Virginia’s Montgomery County Schools, where she refocused the district on college preparation. Under her leadership, every Montgomery County school earned accreditation.

Back in her home state, Anderson briefly and successfully ran an urban college prep academy before taking over as superintendent of Jennings Public Schools. Jennings, a suburb of St. Louis near Ferguson, was in desperate need of Anderson’s knack for community building. There she once again proved that high-poverty schools can also be high-achieving ones.

While in Jennings, Anderson oversaw initiatives to install free washers and dryers in district schools, open a community food pantry for families in need, and partner with Washington University to open a medical and mental health clinic inside one of the high schools. The successful academic results of addressing the community’s poverty are impossible to ignore. By the time she left Jennings, the graduation rate and college placement rate were both 100%. “That’s almost unheard of in a school with 100% poverty,” she says. Her work to uplift and support students and families experiencing poverty—while simultaneously improving academic outcomes—garnered national attention. In 2016, NPR praised Anderson “for embracing a holistic approach to solving the problems of low-performing students by focusing on poverty above all else, and using the tools of the school district to alleviate the barriers poverty creates.”

For Anderson, it’s vital that her work serves as an example to others. “We have to uplift these models of success—know who they are and where they are and talk about them,” she says. “That inspires everyone else who’s trying to find models they can learn from.” That, she adds, changes mindsets.

“When someone says that public schools aren’t, we should be able to say public schools are—they are great, they are innovative, they are amazing, and let me show you a few,” she says. “We should be able to do that without hesitation.”

Changing Mindsets, Teaching Purpose Anderson is constantly working to shift perceptions in her district to yield positive results. But that starts with understanding. “It’s all about relationships,” she tells us. “Kids will work for you if they trust you; they won’t if they don’t. Adults are the same way. I tell people, Seek to understand in order to serve. In order to change how I think or at least give me another perspective, you have to understand me, and I have to understand you.”

She carried her work to Topeka Public Schools (TPS), where in 2016 she became the first African American woman ever to lead the historic district. “That, in and of itself, changes a lot of minds about what a superintendent looks like in Topeka, Kansas,” she explains. “I am one of two black women superintendents in the entire state—that changes mindsets, too.”

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To make sure the district is serving all students, Anderson and her staff spend a lot of time looking at and addressing equity gaps. “Sometimes society might give an image of who you are that really isn’t who you are,” she says. “Our role is to help make sure you’re uplifted and supported in ways that allow you to see that you are pretty amazing and brilliant, and that your purpose in life is one that no one else can define for you.”

do well if I can do well—we’re all interconnected,” she says.

“Literally, your success is connected to me. Everyone reading this right now is connected in terms of making sure we uplift one another. Changing mindsets has a whole lot to do with understanding that for kids. How they succeed or fail is going to impact their teacher, their community, economic prosperity, and our nation. We can’t do well if our children don’t do well, and vice versa.”

TPS starts by teaching students about purpose. “We spend a lot of time looking at things like race, gender, and equity gaps,” Anderson tells us. They even start with kindergarteners, asking them things like, What’s your why? “When you’re grounded in your purpose and your beliefs, you further know who you are, why you’re here, and why you get to do what you’re doing,” she says.

Purpose seems to be an unstoppable driving force for Anderson. Not only does she serve as Topeka’s superintendent, but she’s also a lifetime member of the NAACP, is an adjunct college professor in both Kansas and Missouri, and was most recently appointed by the governor to the Kansas State Board of Education’s Postsecondary Technical Education Authority. On top of all that, she finds time to write about topics close to her heart, like ending the school-toprison pipeline. “The purpose of my job is to advocate for the marginalized,” she tells SchoolCEO. “To be a voice for the voiceless, and to ensure that we are a better world tomorrow than we are today.”

Currently closing out her fourth year in Topeka, Anderson regularly uses her commute to listen to the words of others who inspire her. “I listen to a sermon at least twice a day, once on the hour drive to work and once on the way home, and normally one of those is by Martin Luther King, Jr. In multiple sermons, he says, I can do well if you can do well, and you can

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Photo courtesy of Jennings School District.

All others provided by Topeka Public Schools.

Building a Human Experience In Topeka, which has a 78% free and reduced lunch rate, Anderson has incorporated several strategies based on her equity work in Jennings, including a mobile food pantry, a mentor program for high school seniors, and a school-based comprehensive healthcare clinic at Topeka High School through a partnership with the University of Kansas Hospital.

Just like Jennings, the district has also added washers and dryers to 18 schools for parents to use in exchange for volunteer work.

This good work not only helps the community, but also has a positive side effect: earning trust and support for the district.

“We spend a lot of time really looking at what we say, what we do, and how we message that,” she tells us. “Pretty much everything that works in a classroom as it relates to being a teacher leader—branding what you do, building relationships, making sure engagement and learning are at their highest levels— carries over into district-level experience. That’s really a key component of what we do in transforming the school or community, really looking at how we can build a human experience.”

experiences that let our community know we care very much about them as members of our Topeka School family.”

A relatively new initiative, the Dream Team attempts to fulfill dreams across the district. For example, a district custodian’s home was recently damaged in an accident. “The repair costs exceeded what his insurance check would be,” Anderson says. So the Dream Team approached both a local financial firm and a construction company for help. “Within days, the two of them together rebuilt the side of the home, renovated it, and bought new furniture,” she adds. “That’s one of our larger dreams. It has just been wonderful.”

“The purpose of my job is to advocate for the marginalized, to be a voice for the voiceless, and to ensure that we are a better world tomorrow than we are today.”

That experience can look many different ways in a district like Topeka, but Anderson says it still goes back to nurturing relationships in the community. “I believe schools are a business as well,” she tells us. “It’s the business of educating students. So when we talk about building a quality experience, we want to make sure that our students and our staff know they belong and know we love and care about them.”

One successful way Topeka Public Schools proves they care? Something they call the Dream Team. “If you have an issue or challenge and have a dream for something, you can submit it,” Anderson explains. “Our Dream Teamers—all volunteers from the central office—work to make dreams come true for people in the community. All of that’s focused on

At the start of each school year, TPS hosts an all-staff convocation at Washburn University.

This past year, they invited the custodian to share his Dream Team story. “You had 2,500 staff members being reminded of who we are,” Anderson says.

“We recognize that we’re all connected and only collectively can we do this work.”

On a smaller scale, a Topeka teacher recovering from surgery wasn’t able to decorate her classroom before school started, so the Dream Team stepped in. “They showed up before she arrived the very next morning and decorated her room in the way she was hoping,” Anderson says. Even though the dreams can range in size and scope, Anderson says it’s a special way to let people feel seen and heard.

“We want to make sure that you feel special and that you have an experience as a result of connecting with Topeka Public Schools,” she explains. “It’s very similar to companies that are highly successful by always working to make a better product or create an experience that’s more engaging and inviting. We as public schools need to do the same to make sure that learning is at its highest levels—and that our parents and those without children in school become partners and have avenues in which they can really have that experience.”

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Creating trusting relationships goes beyond the TPS staff.

The district also works to partner with others to help students and community. “Once you build strong, trusting relationships, you really have the opportunity to make changes and, ultimately, move performance,” Anderson explains.

in our schools on a daily basis and the tremendous amount of talent and creativity in our classrooms.” Technology in the classroom levels the playing field, so to speak. “No matter how much money you do or don’t have, teachers are able to make learning exciting and fun,” she adds.

“Schools cannot accomplish what we need to accomplish alone, nor should we want to,” she says. “Public schools are the driver for economic vitality locally and nationally. So if you want to move the economic needle and have prosperity in your community, you really need partners to be engaged and to understand the why behind what you do.”

In terms of class time, Anderson says the old ways of sitting in rows and staying quiet are long gone. “Now it’s an active and productive classroom where you can hear and see learning happen,” she tells us. “Today, you’ll see a great deal of personalization and student engagement in education.

Classrooms are a dynamic place because we know so much more about the brain and how students learn.” We also know a lot more about culturally relevant pedagogy, Anderson tells us. “Schools today give you hope, they inspire you, and they help you look for what’s possible for the future.”

One example of these successful partnerships is a project called Impact Avenues. Working with local businesses, housing corporations, the City of Topeka, and the Kansas Department of Children and Families, this initiative provides housing and support services for students and families experiencing homelessness. “In Topeka, we have 400 to 600 homeless students in any given year,” Anderson tells us.

During her first year in the district, she required all her principals to spend one hour a month at their local homeless shelter to mentor people in the community and to learn about generational poverty. “It was so powerful,” she says. “Our graduation rate at our highest-poverty school eliminated the achievement gap last year, so close to 90%—black students and white students—are graduating at the same rates now, which is a first for Topeka.”

In addition, the college placement rate in TPS has continued to climb. “In my last district, that rate is now 100%, so we know we can get there—we’re just a little bit larger than Jennings,” Anderson explains. “It shows that this work can be replicated and that building relationships and bridges is a key component in ensuring success for everyone.”

Interrupting Poverty with Opportunity If you walk through the halls of Topeka Public Schools today, they won’t look anything like they did in 1954. “Schools have changed so much even just in my 27 years in education,” Anderson says. Despite widening income disparities— the free and reduced lunch rate is now above 70% nationally, indicating there’s more children living in poverty—Anderson says there’s something substantial helping make up for gaps in equitable learning. “Technology now rules the day,” she tells us. “What might surprise people is the innovation occurring 10

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The future is a focal point in Topeka Public Schools. The district currently offers a variety of career pathways, with up to 60 college credits available through courses in its high schools. “You can get an industry credential or you can graduate high school with your associate’s degree,” Anderson explains. “Every public school should have those opportunities—with virtual education, concurrent credit, and colleges partnering with public schools in some amazing ways, there is no reason why students should not be able to be prepared for college and career.” Anderson is careful to say “college and career,” because she believes students should leave their options open for the future.

“Individual plans should be created at a very early age,” she argues. “When students enter elementary school, we have career fairs and we talk about what they want to be and where they want to go. That should be drilled down to individual plans of study, at elementary and middle schools.”

These plans of study should focus more on curricular interests—STEAM, math, science, etc. “What are some very specific things that you enjoy doing? See, that’s personalization,” Anderson says. “That looks a little bit different than just having a career fair.”

Topeka middle schoolers are already interning and being exposed to career fields like biochemistry. “We have some creative ways of digitally tracking their individual plans of study,” Anderson explains. That includes giving young students career and college surveys to help point them in the right direction when they get to middle and high school. Then it’s about

exposing them to jobs they may not know about. “How would To do that, educators need to learn what makes their stuyou know you wanted to be a biochemist if you’ve never seen dents tick, what energizes them. “That student could be the a biochemist?” she asks. next scientist, the next mathematician, the next poet, singer, or artist—it’s about finding that part out and creating multiple “We really try to outline concepts, standards, and skills. And ways for students to get there,” she explains. then we explore what jobs are in each field,” Anderson tells us. “Some jobs you can get within a very short period of time, For Topeka Public Schools, proper preparation also comes and so we’ve grown a partnership with our local community with high expectations. “We ensure that we teach at the colleges.” highest levels,” Anderson says. “We ensure mastery is there, and then we offer college credit while you’re in high school As an appointee on the Postsecondary Technical Education so when you leave, you have many options available to you.

Authority, Anderson also helps make decisions about career It’s the path you choose to take; it’s not a matter of the path technical education in Kansas’s public schools and two-year choosing you.” colleges. “If you want students to lead, they have to be prepared with the skills they need to do that,” she says.

Providing their students with as many career options as possible is also about equity. “The best way to continue poverty Through a partnership with local energy company Evergy, is to reduce access and exposure—that reduces opportunithe district is now looking into creating career pathways for ties, and young people often find themselves in a cycle they jobs in wind energy and science. “That doesn’t take a four- can’t see a path out of,” Anderson explains. “We have an opyear college degree,” Anderson says. And high school stu- portunity to interrupt that, to disrupt poverty by changing that dents in the district are already interning at Evergy and being cycle, by giving opportunities, by exposing young people to guaranteed jobs right after graduation. The goal is to connect many different pathways and careers and letting them know students with their passions, which may mean a job that will that there are no barriers but your mindset. When you realize earn students a living without years of postsecondary study that, the whole world opens up for you.” or debt. “You’re not preparing them for college, you’re preparing them for life,” she tells us. “You’re preparing students to live a life in which their purpose can come alive.”

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Anderson leads from her heart and mind with a systemic approach to growth and change. When she speaks about her students, she looks you in the eyes as if you’re one of them, and it’s impossible not to feel like you’re being given a lesson by the world’s most sincere teacher—and perhaps you are.

“There are a variety of ways in which leaders can really think about how to engage other people in the work,” she explains.

“Ultimately, your purpose becomes a bit of your brand and who you are.”

When it comes to branding, Anderson doesn’t seem to have any issues. “No matter what state I’m in, most people know if they see a black lady with a suit and tennis shoes, that’s Dr. Anderson,” she says.

People have long been fascinated with the superintendent’s trademark white tennis shoes. “It’s really kind of funny,” she says. “When I was a teacher, I always wore a suit and tennis shoes to work.” Anderson was raised to dress professionally, “for where you’re going and not for where you are,” as she puts it. “And part of wearing tennis shoes is not only for comfort, but has now become a message—that you must be flexible and ready for anything that comes your way.”

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Often, Anderson wears the same pair of white shoes for the duration of each school year. “By the end of that year, they’re holey and torn and dirty,” she says. “You’ve got to be willing to get dirty—and it’s okay, because you know the holes and dirt got there while you were serving boots to the ground.”

Some years ago, Anderson started saving the shoes, writing the date on each pair at the end of the year. “When I was a superintendent in St. Louis, we had the Ferguson riots—and boy, do those shoes look bad!” she says. “Those shoes tell a story.”

The sneakers also let people know that Anderson is who she is. “I don’t need heels and dress-up clothes to show who I am.

And I can’t do this work in heels,” she says. “Sitting on the floor, doing crosswalk duty, running down the street to catch a parent, doing a home visit? I need to be ready to meet people where they are and do that humbly.”

Anderson shared this attitude with her late husband, Dr. Stanley Anderson, an award-winning OBGYN and robotic surgeon. Today, she says his memory lives on through her work with children. “He brought them into the world, and I took it from there,” she says. “I had 24 amazing years of marriage to another servant leader.”

In 2016, Anderson was given PricewaterhouseCoopers’

People with Purpose honor, along with an invite to that year’s Academy Awards. “I wasn’t going to go,” she says. “I didn’t need an award to know that what I do is purposeful. Then my husband said, If you go, you get to meet Denzel Washington, so I said, Baby, I’m going! And off to the Oscars I went.” Before her big trip to the red carpet, some of Anderson’s family members convinced her to ditch her white tennis shoes. “I had nice shoes on,” she says, “I had on heels and a ballroom gown, and what do you think people asked me on the red carpet? Where are your tennis shoes?” So she ran back to her hotel room and replaced her heels with her trademark white sneakers. “Now I’m standing there in photos with other people on the red carpet in a ballroom gown with some sparkling white tennis shoes on,” she says, laughing.

at the Oscars taught her an important lesson, one she likes to impart on her students. “Be who you are,” she pleads. “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are. Stand on it and know that you are authentically created to be brilliant and great, and that the world is better just because you’re in it.”

Despite her experience and success, Dr. Tiffany Anderson of Topeka speaks with the determination and heart of an educator who’s just getting started. “I was built to serve and to teach and to learn,” she says. “For people who know nothing about my career, just seeing me enter a room full of business suits in my tennis shoes sends a message: Don’t worry about what you’re wearing or what people are thinking about you.

Come as you are and be ready to serve—boots, or sneakers, to the ground.”

Always learning and teaching, Anderson says her experience

“I don’t need heels and dress-up clothes to show who I am...

I need to be ready to meet people where they are and do that humbly.”

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Communicating in a Crisis How schools can respond to COVID-19 (and other long-term emergencies)

Over the past few months, COVID-19 has tested the strength of schools’ emergency communications. School leaders have been called upon to act quickly, making strong decisions to protect students and families. But even in this tough situation, there are successes worth celebrating. In most areas, schools have led the charge in keeping staff and students safe, serving as an example for other organizations. As districts organize food services, adjust to remote learning, and provide emergency child care, they prove again and again the integral role public schools play in their communities.

Now there’s time to reflect on the initial response. At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, we aren’t sure how the next few months or even years will look—but we can look back on what we’ve done so far and learn how to better cope with further disruptions. Using resources from the CDC, WHO, and communications and emergency management experts, we built the following guide to help shape your emergency communications strategy. While core lessons may apply to broad challenges—a bus crash or a security threat—we’re focused here on long-term disruptions.

“Most people don’t think about this,” says K.C. Rondello, M.D., M.P.H., CEM., a disaster epidemiologist and Certified Emergency Manager at New York’s Adelphi University. “But in a disaster, information is as critically important as food or water. Communicating to the public is absolutely vital.”

First Signs of a Threat Build Credibility In the first moments of a crisis situation, most leaders go into overdrive: sifting through crisis management plans, organizing key leaders, and working to make one right decision after another. At this point, you might be tempted to hold off on communication until you have a little more information or a working plan.

These first days or even hours, however, are an opportunity to build the foundation for a strong communications response.

“In any kind of crisis, people are going to want a lot of information,” says Dr. James Kendra, Director of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. Over the past two decades, Kendra has studied the responses to international disasters like the waterborne evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11 and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. “They are going to need information that’s as specific as possible, that actually provides them with clear guidance as to what they can do,” he tells us.

Be transparent.

As you begin to communicate the details of an emergency, your goal isn’t necessarily to reduce unease or discomfort; your goal is to build your credibility. “You tend to see organizations minimizing the information or situation because they don’t want to cause panic,” says Kendra. “That inevitably SPRING 2020

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causes lack of trust. If people don’t get information from leadership, then they’re going to seek it from other sources. Then they will fall prey to rumors and inaccurate information.” In most cases, information will get out, and when it does, it will hurt your organization.

So what should you say? While the length and complexity of your communications might change as you switch from Facebook to email, there are four basic elements to include in every message.

but people also expect that leaders will be able to point out where the information is still unfolding—where it’s still ambiguous.”

Give your audience action steps.

From a mental health standpoint, research shows that providing concrete action steps for victims to take helps speed up recovery. “People want to be able to take steps forward.

They want to feel empowered,” explains Kendra. “So as part of your messaging, it’s key to tell people what they are able to do to protect themselves.”

Show empathy for your stakeholders.

Acknowledging your community’s pain, frustration, or uncertainty in just a sentence or two can help your message land. “If your audience is in a heightened state of emotion, they can’t hear your message,” says Dr. Barbara Reynolds, the CDC’s former Crisis and Risk Communications Senior Advisor. “They’re busy wondering: What if? Or, Do you understand what I’m going through? If you acknowledge in words that you understand how they’re feeling, they can calm down a little bit.” She provides a few examples: “It’s frustrating to not have all the answers in this uncertain time,” or “It’s heartbreaking to see the devastation that has occurred.”

What’s more, in a crisis, people are often willing to contribute.

“People can manage their anxiety and detrimental emotions better if they are contributing in some way,” says Reynolds.

“So give people things to do—hopefully things that are helpful to the response.”

If you feel uncomfortable assuming your audience’s emotions, drop the pronouns. “Instead of saying, I know you are afraid, I would say, I know some are afraid, or It’s understandable that people might be fearful,” she says. That way, you can comfort members of your audience who relate to these feelings without alienating those who don’t.

COVID-19 certainly isn’t the first situation where stigma has surfaced—it also emerged with SARS, which originated out of China, then with Ebola in West Africa. “Stigma is a societal issue,” Reynolds explains. “Individual people can be bigoted, but when a society starts to turn its back on or exclude a population group or profession solely because it identifies them with the risk, that’s stigma.”

For example, messaging during COVID-19 has often included action steps: wash your hands, avoid contact with others, stay six feet apart. Actionable messaging gives citizens a measure of control, even in a frightening and stressful situation.

If needed, address stigma.

Be transparent about your process for decision-making.

During a crisis situation, information is often incomplete. But instead of minimizing the situation or withholding information, it’s important to instead describe the process behind your actions. “It’s key for leaders to explain a rationale for their decisions: where the uncertainties are and why they’re making the decision,” says Kendra. Great communications explains what you know, what you don’t know, how you’ll find out more information, and how that information will feed into your decision-making process.

You don’t have to know all the information, but it is important to stay honest. “It gets back to that idea of transparency,” Kendra says. “People expect leaders to be informed,

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During the SARS outbreak, local health officials in Oregon reached out to Reynolds. A group of nail salons run primarily

by Asian women had asked for help; people weren’t coming to their salons anymore. So Reynolds advised the department to directly explain that these businesses were no more dangerous than anywhere else. Part of their messaging then aimed to decrease stigma. “All officials in a crisis response have a responsibility to address and try to push down stigmatization,” she explains.

Highline Public Schools: Combating Panic When COVID-19 started to become more urgent in the U.S., Washington’s Highline Public Schools stepped up to the plate, anchoring themselves as a credible source for their community. At the time, Washington was one of just a handful of states reporting COVID-19 infections in the U.S. We spoke with Highline on March 3, just four days after the first COVID-related death in their county.

“We’re trying to combat panic by providing current information as quickly as possible,” says Catherine Carbone Rogers, Chief Communications Officer at Highline. Over the weekend of March 1, she put together a communications plan to guide her team. An initial step in the plan was to send families a message from Highline’s superintendent, Dr. Susan Enfield.

“I want to reassure you that the safety of our students and staff is our top priority,” Enfield says. Her message contains key components of crisis communications messaging: a statement of empathy, an explanation of the team’s process, and links to credible information. “First and foremost, all our actions are guided by the local, state, and federal health authorities who are the experts in keeping our communities safe from public health threats,” the message reads.

She describes the frequency with which the district corresponds with authorities, extra processes like sanitation and safety lessons for students, and the district’s plan to prepare for possible closures. After almost every piece of unsettling information, Enfield uses different versions of the same phrase: “We will continue to keep you informed,” or, “We’ll send updates as they come.” Her message is clear: Here’s what we know. Here’s our plan to find out what we don’t know.

Here’s how we’ll keep you informed.

Work toward consistency.

During the Ebola crisis, Kendra had trouble with the term “an abundance of caution.” While leadership told community members to continue their day-to-day routines, they were also removing the seats of planes to deep clean them “out of an abundance of caution.” Because of this mixed messaging, the community wasn’t sure how risky the situation really was. “If people start hearing conflicting information from

different sources, that undermines trust in the overall process,” Kendra explains.

When different community leaders contradict each other, it hurts the credibility of the response. Part of building credibility, then, means working with other community organizations to unify messaging. Beyond that, districts also have a responsibility to unite communications internally, monitoring rumors within the organization.

Part of the challenge stems from our psychology. During a crisis, people tend to seek multiple opinions about the situation at hand, reports the CDC. Before we take steps to protect ourselves, we’ll try to confirm whether or not the situation is as risky as it seems. Only after seeking multiple perspectives do we make a decision.

Internal Consistency When you’re sending out information to hundreds of stakeholders, it’s easy for messages to get lost or jumbled along the way. An important strategy in effective communication is to make sure that all leaders in the district—those to whom students, parents, community members, and employees turn with questions—know their role in communication.

Terilyn Finders, Director of Communications and Legislative Affairs for Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost LLP, is a public relations expert with over 30 years of experience providing crisis communications guidance for schools. She compares effective communications to tossing a stone into a pond. When the stone lands, it sends ripples across the water. Like the “stone,” your message should start at a central point, then expand to different stakeholder groups in your community.

The idea isn’t to withhold information internally (which can quickly cause mistrust) but instead to reach stakeholders systematically.

As information works its way down from local officials through the school system, Finders recommends forming “huddles”—small, regular meetings with key administrators, like the district’s executive cabinet or other relevant leaders.

In cases like COVID-19, these members might include the district nurse and the director of maintenance.

These huddles meet once or twice a day at a consistent time to work through new information, forming a path forward.

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“Huddles can be by phone or in person, but districts need to make sure that the leaders of key functions are touching base to keep information current and consistent,” she explains.

In every huddle, there should also be an established point person for information. “Here is what I see working best: make sure that the district is clear on who their communications point person is,” says Finders. “That person should be a hub for all communication.”

The point person acts as a filter for all communications going out of the district throughout the emergency. So before the district posts on Twitter or sends out an update from the superintendent, the point person will make sure that messaging stays unified.

Once you’re ready to make an announcement, you may need to create several tiers, or “ripples,” to send out information.

The members of each ripple are up to you, but Finders provides a basic structure: key administrators, staff and internal groups, then the greater community.

For example, if you are sending a message to all families about how schools will be serving food during school closures, consider first contacting the Board of Education, district and site administration, and your food service division to let them know when you will be issuing the message to families and to whom people may send questions. This helps to clarify each team member’s role in communication and to avoid taking key internal leaders by surprise.

And when you think about staff, don’t forget part-time employees or volunteers. “All of these people should be getting updates from you—not just some of them,” Finders says. “I recommend you begin the school year with a review of communications protocols with internal audiences, clarifying roles and responsibilities,” she says. This is particularly important for site administrators, since they will likely bear the brunt of employee and parent questions.

Finally, as you prepare to send a notification out to the greater community, provide a space for engagement: a phone number to call with questions, links to more information, or the contact information of a communications team member. Dr. Tim Frazier, Faculty Director of the Emergency and Disaster

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Management program at Georgetown University, studies the importance of engagement during crises. “Engagement means you’re not just providing your community with information, but you’re providing the opportunity for feedback,” he explains. “And feedback can be very simple, like providing a hotline or weblink where stakeholders can go and post questions and leave comments.”

Allowing stakeholders avenues to ask questions helps alleviate anxiety. “It helps people have a sense of control,” says Reynolds. Again, even when questions don’t have a clear answer, creating this space for two-way communication welcomes the community into the process. “When things are uncertain, when you don’t have a lot of answers, the one thing you can do is tell people the process that you are using to get those answers,” she explains.

During the Ebola crisis, Reynolds helped comb through hundreds of constituents’ questions on live Facebook and Twitter chats. Not only did it help eliminate rumors, but the two-way communication also taught the CDC just what misinformation was out there. “You need to analyze what you’re hearing back,” she says, “and then adjust your message accordingly.”

But how do you know which questions are legitimate, and which are outliers? According to Reynolds, it’s more of an art than a science. However, she cautions against ignoring questions, even if they seem outlandish. “Sometimes you’ll think somebody is a real outlier,” she explains, “but then you find out that people really do have that misunderstanding.”

External Consistency When the crisis is affecting the entire community, not just your district, you need to build consistency with other organizations across your area. “We know that not every source is universally trusted by every group,” says Kendra, “so it’s key to have as wide a spectrum of people as possible delivering more or less the same information.” The more organizations that are communicating the same level of risk—the severity of a hurricane, for example—the more likely it is that your community will accept your district’s message.

Linking up with community groups also helps reach minority populations during a crisis. “If you look at vulnerable populations—the deaf, non-English speaking, or even low socioeconomic populations, there is almost always at least

one advocacy group in every community that deals with those populations,” explains Dr. Curtis Harris, Director of the University of Georgia’s Institute for Disaster Management.

These connections are best formed before a disaster hits, but if you’re faced with a crisis, it’s still worth reaching out. “If that hasn’t been done, it’s a good time to start,” Kendra says.

“It’s really never too late to make those connections, because those organizations can be key in building trust.”

Building consistency across the community also means linking up with the media. “It is critical that we broadcast utilizing multiple media platforms, so you reach as broad a range of the population as humanly possible,” says Harris. There are many resources available with best practices for working with the media during a crisis, but the same basic ideas hold true: Work to build trust with local news sources, and provide them with information in a timely manner. “In really dire events, the media can help carry critical information,” says Reynolds. “We see the media step up.”

Highline Public Schools: Staying Ahead of Questions As they began to address the COVID-19 outbreak, Highline took steps to maintain consistency. Before sending staff updates, the team connected with principals and administrators, “so that they knew the facts and what to say to people,” says Carbone Rogers.

The team monitored social media, responding to posts quickly and respectfully. Anticipating a higher volume of calls, they set up an impromptu call center staffed by three or four administrative assistants from different departments.

“Most of the questions were not necessarily health-related— they were about excused absences and cleaning protocols,” says the team’s Assistant Director of Communications, Tove Tupper.

The team addressed questions quickly.

Even if they didn’t have an answer, they let stakeholders know that their questions had been heard.

To get ahead of families’ questions, the team started posting frequently asked questions on Facebook and Instagram with a link to the district’s webpage. “We wanted that to be a resource for people to get information that’s accurate, timely, and calm,” says Tupper.

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Communicate regularly.

Setting a pattern for updates helps alleviate anxiety—even if you’re not providing new information. Rondello gives us an example: two planes stuck on the tarmac for an hour. In the first plane, the pilot gives a single announcement explaining that there will be a delay, but doesn’t check back in with passengers. After 45 minutes, travelers are growing angrier and angrier: they don’t know what is happening or where they are in line.

But in the next plane over, the pilot gives updates every 15 minutes, even if not much has changed. With each new update, she promises to let her passengers know when she gets more information. While both planes wait an hour for takeoff, the second plane’s passengers are much less anxious and upset than the first’s.

“It’s the sense that you haven’t been forgotten, that someone is looking out for you, and that when new information does become available, they’re going to share it with you,” explains Rondello. “That does an extraordinary amount to alleviate anxiety and fear and anger. Even if there’s not a lot to say that’s new, having a regular, established source that debriefs and provides information on some kind of scripted schedule goes a long way in dealing with the information vacuum.”

Depending on the urgency of the situation, your updates may be daily, weekly, or even hourly. Regardless of your frequency, tell the community when to look for an update, then stick to the schedule.

Stay visible.

Crisis communications literature recommends that each organization have a trained spokesperson ready to address the community. The point is simple: to put a face to the crisis response. When pepole see a trusted leader moving the situation forward, it can do wonders to build unity.

In a school, the nitty-gritty communications work may be completed by the communications team or district volunteers, while the superintendent is often the face of the response. This is where districts have a leg up over other organizations: schools specialize in building relationships.

When parents see their teacher, their principal, or even their superintendent, it provides security—a reminder of the community of faces working through the emergency.

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“Being visible gives us reassurance,” says Dr. Larry Barton, Distinguished Professor of Crisis Management and Public Safety at the University of Central Florida. With over 30 years of pioneering crisis management experience, Barton currently serves as a trainer for the FBI Academy. “As a school leader, you have that amazing opportunity to give us reassurance,” he says. Psychology shows us the power of familiar faces—it goes back to the mere exposure effect, the idea that we prefer things that we recognize.

Barton advises school leaders to take the time to figure out creative ways to stay in touch. He suggests asking students, staff, and volunteers to film questions on their phones to then send in for the superintendent to answer on video. “This is the time that we can do some wonderful, imaginative things.

So we’ve got to shake the trees. We’ve got to show that we care about all of our constituents, and do our best to make it informative,” he tells SchoolCEO. Leaders do best, Barton says, when they gear communications toward stakeholders’ specific needs during a crisis.

“Bring up the topics that they’re not going to see coming from the governor or the White House. Talk to them about their needs. That’s where a great school administrator is going to shine,” he says. Finally, he recommends archiving updates in a central location, like a page on the district’s website. “That way teachers, maintenance staff, volunteers, school crossing guards, and suppliers can access it within a day or so.”

Highline Public Schools: Daily Updates When we connected with the Highline team just days after the situation had escalated in Washington, they had already built a plan for regular updates. “We’re going to do daily updates at least this week to staff and families just to give them something everyday, even if it’s not really new,” Carbone Rogers tells us. “We want to keep people in the loop and let them know we’re on it.”

At first, daily updates weren’t part of the plan. “Part of it is just being adaptive,” says Carbone Rogers. “We had a plan to do day-of communication, but then we looked at one another and said, We need to keep doing this. We can’t just have oneand-done communication.”

To get all crisis information into one central location, Highline’s team compiled resources onto a central page on the district’s website: “a repository for all the updates that keep people current,” says Carbone Rogers. “We’ve posted the messages that we’ve sent out to families in case anybody missed them.” The team revised the page multiple times a day, adding a timestamp so that visitors knew when the page was last updated.

As the situation escalated, Highline began sharing daily updates with their community to help alleviate anxiety.

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Remainder of the Emergency Maintain and Adjust After the first few weeks of crisis communications, life begins to settle back into a predictable rhythm. Even though your community’s day-to-day may be far from normal, the upheaval and transition felt in the first few days or weeks of the emergency often subside. In light of COVID-19, many districts will stay in this communications phase through the end of the school year.

By this point in the emergency, you’ve already built a strong foundation for crisis communications. Your stakeholders know where to look for updates, how often they’ll be hearing from you, and how to reach out with questions. While you’ll maintain the basics, it may be helpful to make a few adjustments to better suit your audience’s needs.

We connected with Highline again at the beginning of April, just after Washington’s governor announced that schools would remain closed through the academic year. “Now, we’re at a place where we’re trying to introduce some kind of routine in our next steps,” Carbone Rogers tells us. Like many districts across the country, Highline is finding ways to innovate while maintaining the communications strategies that made their original plan strong.

Throughout the emergency, Highline has kept the stories of #HighlineHeroes front and center.

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Highline’s sports teams are finding new ways to honor old traditions.

Split your audience into groups.

As your audience forms new routines, it may be necessary to adjust your strategy to fit their needs. CDC guidance recommends splitting your audience into smaller groups during the “maintenance� phase of emergency risk communications. Schools do this naturally. As the situation develops, principals begin to reach out to teachers, who then reach out to individual families. Soon, principals and teachers become families’ primary points of contact, and communications at the district level may fade.

At the district level, you can help pass the baton by giving families a heads up on any changes in your communication stream. Before teachers reach out to parents and guardians, for example, advise caregivers to look for an email or phone call. Generally, let your audience know before making changes in your communication plan, avoiding any periods of time with an information vacuum.

Once your audience is split into groups, continue with the same tenets of emergency communications used in the initial stages: provide updates, stay visible, and allow opportunities for two-way communication.

The district guides families through any adjustments in communication.

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Monitor your community’s communications needs.

At Highline, the team wasn’t sure what type of information families preferred to receive—so they asked. Setting up an online survey allowed them to learn how the community was feeling about their communications. “You need to evaluate what you’re doing to make sure you’re hitting your targets,” says Carbone Rogers.

The vast majority of respondents requested communications as needed, which helped the team plan. “We no longer need to have something on a regularly designated day,” she explains. “We can just put out an update when we have something to communicate. We don’t want to be too frequent and have people start tuning us out.”

As stakeholders started to fall into a regular routine, the Highline team disbanded some communications structures, like the emergency call center. “After about the first week or so, the calls really fell off,” she says. “By then we were communicating every day, so I think we were meeting that need.”

Though they disbanded the call center, the team continues to monitor social media. Usually, they try to answer questions with a direct response or a link to more information. But if the message is confrontational, they’ll pull the conversation offline. “We’ll send a direct message or ask them to call the communications office so that we can address their concerns,” says Carbone Rogers. By monitoring social media, the team is also able to keep tabs on the community’s needs and concerns.

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The Highline team conducted surveys asking families about their concerns and communications preferences.

Keep up employee morale.

During an emergency, staff face many of the same fears and uncertainties as students. In order to continue to support families, employees need a network to fall back on.

Recognizing this need, Highline recently launched a wellness campaign for staff. Once a week, a district leader films a video about a new social and emotional wellness strategy to send to employees. Strategies from those videos are converted into social media posts, and then summarized in a staff update at the end of each week. “We’re trying to communicate to our staff that we really are concerned about their well-being right now. It’s hard to learn a whole new way of teaching, of working, of relating to the people who you work with,” says Carbone Rogers.

Highline’s superintendent, Dr. Susan Enfield, is leading the charge, bookending the program with wellness tips of her own. “It’s more important than ever for our superintendent to have a visible presence,” says Carbone Rogers. The team is finding new ways to connect with employees, providing a supportive environment through the crisis.

The district also makes sure to highlight staff’s work in the response. “It’s really important for morale,” Carbone Rogers tells us. Across the district, employees have stepped up to the plate to support families, and Highline’s communications team makes sure to tell those stories. “We want to also encourage others to follow their example, because it’s going to take all of us,” says Carbone Rogers. “One way to do that is to make people feel valued and appreciated for going out of their comfort zones.” When the community can see staff hard at work, it helps build trust in the organization.

They keep employees visible, sharing stories about their service and effort to safely connect with students.

“One of the roles that leaders have in a crisis situation is to strengthen resilience and ask more of people—ask them to be their best selves.”

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Before the Next Threat Leverage Growth After an emergency, one of the best ways to move forward is to take a little time looking back. “That’s an aspect of empowerment. Even if an organization is caught by surprise today, they don’t have to be caught by surprise next time,” says Kendra.

Reflection is a time not to point fingers, but to look for ways to grow. “Be very candid in looking back at how an organization performed, in a non-disciplinary, non-punitive way,” he says.

“Use this as an opportunity to do some advanced preparation for the next event.”

Celebrate the response.

In order to develop resiliency after the initial stages of a disaster, Reynolds suggests building pride around the community’s ability to fight back. She gave the example of the Boston Marathon bombing. After the attack, the community rallied around the tagline, “Boston Strong.”

“One of the roles that leaders have in a crisis situation is to strengthen resilience and ask more of people—ask them to be their best selves,” says Reynolds. “Sometimes rallying around a mascot or a motto, something that makes us feel like a community, can do that for us. It’s important.”

Crisis management literature makes one thing clear: in emergency situations, people will rise to the occasion. “It’s a question of allowing people to find their place in the response.

How can they help? And that goes back to that idea of giving people something to do. If you point them in the right direction, people will take off and do good things,” says Reynolds.

Unite with the greater community.

In some ways, preparedness doesn’t even have to look like a printed plan. “One community I was familiar with would invite 40 or 50 representatives from the community every couple of months,” says Kendra. Instead of focusing on a complex plan, the group would listen to a guest speaker or complete a tabletop exercise. “More important than any of the written planning was the long-term sense of commitment to one another as a community, of being able to manage an emergency when it happened,” says Kendra. The idea is to reflect on your weaknesses, keep your community ties strong, and build bridges when necessary.

Teach your community to expect more emergencies.

Dr. Carol Cwiak, Associate Professor at North Dakota State University’s Department of Emergency Management, researches the student piece in the puzzle of emergency preparedness. According to Cwiak, one of the first steps in emergency preparedness is simply understanding that disasters will happen in your lifetime.

Take Japan, a world leader in disaster preparedness. On September 1, 1923, a joint earthquake and typhoon razed buildings across Japan’s Kantō Plain, resulting in over 100,000 deaths. Committed to change, the country declared September 1 Disaster Prevention Day. Cities were rebuilt more structurally sound, preventing the level of destruction seen in 1923. Today, emergency preparedness is woven into Japanese culture. The city of Tokyo, for example, published a preparedness manual widely circulated through the city. “It is predicted that there is a 70% possibility of an earthquake directly hitting Tokyo within the next 30 years,” it reads. The guide has tips for everything from CPR to making diapers out of plastic bags. In short, Japan constantly reminds citizens that natural disasters are a matter not of if, but of when.

Use the community you’ve built in the current crisis to prepare for the next emergency. “One of the issues that we’ve had in emergency management historically,” explains Harris, “is that everybody does siloed planning.” Districts plan for their schools. Hospitals plan for their patients.

As a result of this diligence, Japan’s fatalities from natural disasters have decreased dramatically; their tactics are working. This type of preparedness is called risk ownership—taking personal ownership of the need to prepare for a disaster, or a risk—and is something Cwiak follows closely.

What you’re looking for, Harris explains, is a whole community concept: everybody operating toward the same goals and outcomes. “A disaster doesn’t affect a single entity,” he says. “It affects an entire community.”

“We know that people who own their own risk are invested in preparing for any number of events and understand that these events will happen in their lives,” says Cwiak. “That, in and of itself, creates more resilient citizens.”

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The Good News in COVID-19 There’s a hope, Cwiak explains, that COVID-19 has helped us practice the skill of owning our risk. “Here’s what I think is going to happen with COVID-19,” she says.“The sense of risk ownership is going to increase, and it might be one of those rare instances where it increases at the adult level.” Simply put, we’re learning to accept our role in preventing crises—and we’re learning that collectively, we can make a change.

At Highline, Catherine Carbone Rogers stays positive.

“Teamwork has been so important at the leadership level—having that trust and the ability to work with each other and hold it together as a team. Every team has probably seen where their strengths and weaknesses are, and that gives them an opportunity to know how they can improve and also how they work well together.”

This period has been tough. But more often than not, we see communities stepping up to the plate with administrators leading the charge—parents gaining more trust in their schools, communities rallying around kids, and teachers supporting students.

A Quick Guide to Risk Ownership What is it?

As we grow up, we quickly learn what problems we should prepare for personally. The government doesn’t insure our cars, for example—we take steps to prepare for the risk of an accident.

“Society has kind of framed the notion that the government should be taking care of emergency management,” Cwiak says. Of course, the government has a role—and an important one—in mitigating risk. “But the foundation of all risk ownership sits with citizens and individuals. And every time you give that risk ownership away, you increase the likelihood that you will not have a positive outcome,” she says.

So it’s pretty simple: we need lots of people working together during a disaster. It breaks down to ratios. If everyone in a county of 100,000 leaves the work of emergency management to one local official, the ratio of people working to mitigate risk is one to 100,000. “That ratio is not effective. There’s no way one person at the county level can fix the problem,” Cwiak explains.

We’ve seen individuals taking responsibility for the needs of their communities. And that, in and of itself, is a muscle we’re learning to flex as a society.

What does transferring risk look like?

Essentially, transferring risk is knowing what needs to be done, but waiting for someone else to force the decision. In the initial COVID-19 outbreak, some organizations waited for restrictions that required they close their doors. This, Cwiak explains, is waiting for “coverage” on your decision—shifting responsibility to another entity.

For more communications resources, visit: www.schoolceo.com/covid-19

How do you build risk ownership?

To build ownership, individuals first need to know that they can take steps to solve the problem at hand—to have agency. Agency, boiled down, means, “I can.”

“So for kids at the youngest ages, you start to construct messaging in that space: you can. What can you do? You can cover your cough, you can not touch your face, you can wash your hands for 20 seconds. This is in the ‘I can’ space. And then ‘I will’—I will do these things, I am washing my hands,” says Cwiak.

The idea is to teach students that they may need to deal with a large-scale disaster again in their lifetime—but also that they are capable of doing so, and that they have a responsibility to do their part.

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Superintendent Q&A: Listening, Learning, Connecting Dr. Sharon Contreras, Superintendent of Guilford County Schools

When Dr. Sharon Contreras stepped into the superintendency at North Carolina’s Guilford County Schools in 2016, she hit the ground running. Traveling more than 500 miles to visit every school in a 72,000-student district, she conducted a listening and learning tour so extensive that she ultimately observed over 1,000 classrooms and met with nearly 100 community groups.

As the first African American Latina to be Guilford’s superintendent, Contreras is a trailblazer. She’s thoughtful and strong, unafraid to speak up for the kids and families she serves. Her strength in building community connections has garnered her widespread recognition, including the NAACP Community Service and Freedom Awards. She’s also been a member of Chiefs for Change since 2018.

We had the chance to speak with Dr. Contreras about how she builds lasting community partnerships, connects with every student, and communicates her district’s successes.

How did you get to know the needs of such a large community?

The goal of that initial listening and learning tour was to form and shape the priorities for our new strategic plan.

Stakeholders were very open and transparent. They told me what they felt we did right, what we should improve upon, and simply gave me advice about how I could be successful. When I got here, there were 192 goals in the strategic plan—we got that down to six, so that the goals were actually achievable.

I also established a superintendent’s transition team, made up of 100 educators, parents, business leaders, community members, and a national expert. They helped me make sense of all of the data I was collecting—I didn’t just sit there and drink punch and eat cookies with stakeholders. We actually had members of the transition team analyzing the information we were receiving, much of which was anecdotal, yet still very important. We spent months analyzing the data before we presented it to the community.

How do you maintain the relationships you built?

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partnerships, and as a result of the tour, thousands of individuals became members of various stakeholder advisory councils, whether for gifted children or career technical education (CTE), etc. Those people stayed involved.

That connection-building is really important for superintendents because, inevitably, you’re going to face an issue where you will need the community to say, That decision may not have been a great idea, but we know that the superintendent’s intentions were pure. That is critical. Maintaining basic human relationships—which you develop during those listening tours—really helps when you face challenges. And in a district this large, you’re going to face challenges.

Four years into my superintendency, I still meet with individuals through my stakeholder groups and task forces. I’m also very active in the community—I speak at churches and synagogues; I attend community events and participate in panel discussions; I’m on the board of two local chambers of commerce. And through this involvement, I’m able to grow connections. One thing superintendents have to understand in large districts is: Yes, you are the educational leader, but you are not the chief academic officer or deputy superintendent for instruction. Your job is to get out and work with the community to garner support for the district’s mission and vision.

How are you able to communicate with such a large stakeholder group?

I have three task forces: one each for teachers, principals, and students. I think that helps a great deal in that they get to hear directly from me—no one can deliver the message like the superintendent. So each month, I meet with more than 150 teachers, psychologists, counselors, and support personnel to discuss why I make the decisions I make and to get feedback. That does a great deal for rumor-busting.

The same happens with principals, and with my external communications group—we call them key communicators. I also have more than 100 students that I meet with bimonthly.

They are student leaders at the high school level, and I stand there for hours answering their questions. I don’t leave until their hearts and minds are clear. They get to ask me anything about why we do things and why decisions are made. It clears up a lot of confusion.

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Why are the task forces important?

I believe if people get to know you, even when they disagree with you, they will at least know your heart. It’s about leading from the heart and treating others how I would want to be treated. So I try to work closely with the community and spend as much time as I can sitting down and talking to them.

Sometimes it’s just about hearing their concerns. I had one parent that kept calling my office. My administrative assistant said, “She’s cursing; she’s upset.” So I finally took the call, and she was still cursing, and I couldn’t even make sense of what the issue was. I said to her, “You know, it hurts me when you speak to me like this, because I’m human, too.” Then the woman just broke down crying and said, “My washer and dryer are broken. I can’t get out. I have a disability. I’m just overwhelmed.”

You can’t take things personally. People are struggling every day to raise their children. When you’re living in poverty, unemployed, or have a disability, raising children is more difficult. We have to be sensitive to that instead of taking offense at everything.

How do you address equity in the district?

We have a laser-like focus on equity. We’re working to promote equitable school funding and to eliminate deficit-thinking in employees and in the community. We do that by looking at the disparities in academic outcomes for students. We’ve done several studies on this, and we see that irrespective of where you go to school—whether it’s primarily made up of students of color or white students—students of color still experience significant achievement gaps. We still see a gap between even the wealthiest students of color and white students. We use this data to see how we can make our schools more diverse.

But that alone isn’t enough. We also try to think about how we work with teachers to ensure equity for those students, because even in the highest-performing, wealthiest schools, we see that students of color tend to be in remedial courses.

They’re not in advanced placement or IB courses to the same extent as white students. We started eliminating remedial math and English classes. We work to train teachers on racial equity, and then we spend what limited funds we have on the development of teacher content knowledge

and pedagogical skills. We spend a lot of money to ensure our teachers know how to teach all students, whether they’re gifted, impoverished, an English learner, or a student with special needs.

One thing I would say we do that is different than other districts: we are addressing disparities in operations. We’re looking at who we hire and how we hire, and we’ve learned that, of all of the employees who make $25,000 or less, 40% are African American while 17% are white. I can tell you that number at every level, all the way up to my position. We do that because we understand that academic outcomes are related to the socioeconomic status of the parents. And most of our employees who make $45,000 and below, and certainly those making $25,000 and below, are parents in the district. So how do we ensure equity in hiring and make certain that our employees who are also parents have access to higher-paying positions?

We’ve also looked at our non-employee expenditures, like purchase services or contracts. Only 3% of those contracts go to black and Latino businesses, which are more likely to hire members of their own communities. That’s inequitable—the money is not going back to those communities in an equitable way. We pay close attention to that because even though our job is not directly economic development, we contribute to economic development. If our parents have good, solid jobs, they can participate more in their students’ education—and there’s probably less stress and trauma in the home.

Photos courtesy of Guilford County School District.

What challenges and successes have you seen with implementing equity?

I think it is very difficult, as a person of color, to talk about equity. When white superintendents speak about equity, they are praised by their communities. When superintendents of color do that, we are criticized as only caring about black and brown students. That speaks to where we are with race relations in this country—that anyone would believe that superintendents of color do not care about 100% of their students.

But we’ve seen lots of successes, and more people are getting involved in our equity work. White employees, employees of color, and community members are being very outspoken and discussing the issues we’ve uncovered over time. It was very uncomfortable for the community to see so

many inequities in the data, especially since this is Guilford County in Greensboro, the home of the Greensboro Four and the sit-in movement. We all take great pride in that, but here we are 60 years later with these gross inequities. These conversations make us feel bad, but we still have to have them.

In doing so, we’ve been able to expand student access to AP and IB programs, as well as placement in some of our schools for gifted students. We’ve totally rewritten our fiveyear plan for gifted education to make sure we are identifying more students of color. Right now, we have the largest percentage of students of color in gifted programs in the state.

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In terms of staff, how do you encourage women in your district to take on more leadership roles?

Only a very small percentage of superintendents in this nation identify as black, female Latinas. I try not to think about that. I just approach my work as an educator. However, it means a great deal to others who are inspired by my identity. Most of my experiences are very positive, but I’ve been at meetings where I’m asked to pour the coffee or take notes as the only woman in the room, and that happens more than one would think.

I’ve also never turned down a call from someone working on a dissertation on women in the superintendency, because I think providing information to others who want to pursue this path is incredibly important. We have to constantly contribute to the body of research and literature about women in the superintendency. I also make a point to mentor. I have at least two mentees per year through AASA’s Howard University partnership. I work in particular with women of color who are aspiring superintendents. And I try to hire women into the C-suite—because that is a barrier to becoming a superintendent—and to high school principalships, where there’s also a dearth of women and women of color. Many boards of education see that as the pathway to the superintendency. So I try to provide as many opportunities for women as possible.

I always share Shirley Chisholm’s quote, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring in a folding chair.” I just encourage women to push and not give up when they face barriers.

Your kindergarteners will graduate into a very different world than the one we know. How are you preparing them for the future?

We are preparing them by developing our teachers not so much to impart knowledge, but to help students be critical thinkers. We want to help them work together cooperatively, think about how they should work on teams, how to make great decisions, and how to contribute to our democracy.

That is helpful. Instead of just developing teachers to become great math educators, for example, we are actually developing them to prepare students for a world we can’t even imagine. To do so, we’re also renovating facilities to allow for this innovative learning.

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When you walk through the hallways of Guilford, what do you see?

The first thing I see are very gifted and talented students who are charming and funny and have such great potential to be successful. And you see that immediately. You see those who are artists, orators, those who excel with sports—it just runs the gamut. And it inspires me to work harder to make sure they can attend the college of their choice or have the career of their choice. I see greatness unfolding before my eyes every time I walk into a school.

I also see the talented educators who do so much more than teach. They are really investing in their students’ lives. I see them listening to students and having deep conversations, because they understand that investment will pay lifelong dividends. Our teachers count their successes not just in test scores and grades, but in a child’s smile, in a child’s change of attitude, in the new sense of confidence that our children have that comes from knowing that someone believes in you and loves you deeply. That’s what I see every single day.

Whether you’re sitting at your desk or on the go, boom, boom, boom—there you go, done. I’ve said what I needed to say to my community. It’s perfect for us.

It’s easy for people to want to use.

Public Information Officer, Grayson County Schools

Leading Through the Lens

As COVID-19 drives us apart, video can bring us together.

For most of us, the current COVID-19 crisis means physical separation. We’re staying isolated in our homes, connecting with our loved ones and coworkers mainly from afar. But while we’re all dealing with the loss of face-to-face communication, an exciting opportunity is emerging.

Now, more than ever, video is an important tool for connection—not only between friends and family, but between school leaders and their communities. And video-conferencing apps like Zoom aren’t the only way to build connection through the camera. At a time like this, pre-recorded addresses, personalized video messages, and other video content can keep school leaders visible and present in their communities—even as they’re isolated in their homes.

Even before the novel coronavirus hit the U.S., video had become an integral part of the average American’s day-to-day life. When we’re bored, we turn on the TV or scroll through YouTube; when we need to work, we jump on video conference calls. Today, video makes up about 80% of all consumer internet traffic, and the amount of mobile video we consume increases by 100% every year. The growing demand for video naturally means that marketing using video will be more successful. Research shows that web pages with video are 53 times more likely to reach Google’s front page than those without. People stay on pages with video nearly three times as long, and the presence of video increases a site’s organic search traffic by 157%.

For Kristen Bryant, who manages Strategic Partnerships for video-software company Wistia, it isn’t hard to see why video is so impactful. “Video is the most human way to be in a room with someone when you can’t actually be there,” she tells us. “Seeing someone’s face and being able to leverage body language and verbal communication—that is really powerful in building connection.”

What’s more, “parents now are a younger, more millennial audience,” Bryant says. She’s right. According to a report from the National Retail Federation, 50% of today’s children worldwide have millennial parents, and more than a million millennial women become moms every year. This demographic needs something more engaging. “A lot of them often expect video to be part of communications now,” says Bryant.

More importantly, video presents a great opportunity to follow a cardinal rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell. “If you can show people the faces of the kids, show people that impact, it pulls at a totally different place from a viewer’s perspective,” says Bryant. “They’re more likely to share it, too. Just think about it—if your fifth-grader is in this video, you’re going to want to put it on Facebook. All of a sudden you have more people working to spread your message, and that’s a huge opportunity.”

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Slowly but surely, school leaders are catching on. “We find in this day and age of ‘TLDR’—too long, didn’t read—that if we send out a video message versus an email or letter, it can come across a little bit differently,” says Dr. Susan Enfield, superintendent of Washington’s Highline Public Schools. “It can touch people in ways that words on a page can’t.”

What should I use video for?

The way we see it, schools can use video for two primary purposes: storytelling and communication. For many districts, storytelling through video comes more naturally; they know they should be telling student stories, and they instinctively understand how powerful clips of smiling kids can be.

But because it’s so personal, because it conveys dimensions like tone and body language as well as words, video can also be an extremely effective method for communicating the information your community needs to know.

Dr. Charles Dupre, superintendent of Fort Bend ISD in Texas, was reluctant to introduce video into his communications.

“I’m a prolific writer, so I’ve always written lots of emails to staff and to parents,” he says. “But over the years, my communications team has told me that nobody reads past the first couple of paragraphs.”

Dupre’s staff wanted him to switch his communications to video—and for good reason. According to a report by market research company Forrester, the clickthrough rate on emails that include video is 200-300% higher than those that don’t. People won’t necessarily read a long email—but they’ll watch a two-minute video. Plus, 2019 research from video marketing firm Wyzowl suggests that consumers retain 95% of the information they receive from a video, but only 10% of what they read as text.

Dupre wasn’t convinced at first, but an encounter with a parent changed his mind. “I had a mom one time say, You know, I love hearing from you on a regular basis, but you really need to stop sending such long-ass emails,” he tells us with a laugh.

“So I finally started listening to my team.”

Now the long emails have disappeared, replaced by “Checking in with Charles,” a monthly video update. It looks much like something you might see on ESPN—Dupre works down a list of topics, hitting the highlights of the district’s news. “That’s what people need to know, it’s what they want

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to know,” he tells us. “And I’m telling you, I’ve gotten constant positive feedback about that little touchpoint.”

How do I start?

Many school leaders hesitate to jump into video simply because they’re intimidated. There’s the cost to consider, not to mention the technical know-how they assume they need to get started. But here in the digital age, the process of creating a video is much simpler—and cheaper—than it once was.

According to Bryant, there’s no reason to hesitate.

“I think the first takeaway for anyone who wants to get started using video is that it is definitely doable without a lot of budget—as long as you have a lot of intentionality,” Bryant tells us. “You can get started with just a phone or a webcam if you really want to.”

The way you set up your shoot, she says, is more important than having the best equipment. “You have to be thoughtful about light,” Bryant advises, “but that could be as simple as facing a window. Make sure the camera is eye-level. And make sure you’re in a quiet place.”

Like any other part of the video process, getting started takes more planning and forethought than anything else. “If you’re intentional about what you’re going to say and where you are—a quiet room that’s well-lit—that alone is enough for a talking head video in a lot of instances,” says Bryant.

Of course, if you want to get more sophisticated with your video production, you can take it a step further. Wistia’s website includes a do-it-yourself equipment guide for even better self-made videos: they recommend an HD camera, a recorder, a boom mic and stand, and a softbox lighting kit. If you’ve got the budget, you could even hire a full-time videographer for your communications team, or at least hire someone for a few days to get the footage you want.

The bottom line is that a successful video strategy has no startup cost—you can spend or save as much as you want.

How do I get comfortable on camera?

Asked about her comfort level on camera, Dr. Enfield is very frank. “Nobody’s comfortable being on camera,” she says.

“It’s awful!”

on video. “Being on a video is almost like public speaking in some ways—particularly if you’re communicating things that are important to people,” Bryant says. “You don’t have to think about yourself being really good on camera as much as feeling like you’re a good communicator.”

And if you’re already a good communicator, you already know how to prepare. “I would encourage people to create some talking points beforehand,” says Bryant. “I personally don’t like fully scripting something—that can throw people off if they feel like they’ve missed a line. Just have your bullet points, prepare for the conversation that you want to have, and pretend like you’re talking to a friend, even though you’re looking into a camera.”

But like Enfield, you can get better over time, provided you’re intentional about it. She tells us about a segment of her superintendent training program which involved giving a speech three or four times—on camera. “Then we would have to sit down with a speech coach and watch the video and get critiqued,” she says. “Brutal! Absolutely brutal, but incredibly helpful. I think it’s just practice.”

While being the face of the district isn’t always easy, Enfield says it’s more important than ever that districts engage with staff, students, and families to broadcast calm during the COVID-19 pandemic. “There are some days now where I am so preoccupied or exhausted that the last thing I want to do is be ‘on’ for a video message,” she tells us. “I always want every message to be perfect, and I can’t even come close to perfect right now. Then I remind myself that what people need at this moment is connection, not perfection. So ready or not, I keep hitting the record button.”

How do I build an effective video strategy?

There’s another ingredient that makes Enfield’s time on film a bit easier: passion. “I’m a big believer in speaking genuinely and from the heart,” she says. “Obviously we have to be knowledgeable when we’re talking about our work, but I think you need to be able to talk about the work of your district without notes. I find that I do better when I’m not using notes or a prompt, and I can speak about the work that we’re doing—make it a little bit more natural.”

Before you can begin building your video strategy, you need to decide “what growth means for you and your school system,” says Bryant. What are you hoping to accomplish through video? Are you looking to build greater brand awareness or greater brand affinity?

According to Bryant, Enfield’s hesitation is pretty common. “I meet people all the time who are excellent public speakers, who are giving keynotes to thousands of people, and then they get on camera and they clam up,” she tells us. “I do think that there’s a disconnect for some people, where they’re like, I’m not an actor.”

Brand awareness is exactly what it sounds like: you want people to be aware of your schools. After all, your community has to know your schools exist before it can support them.

Charter school leaders, in particular, might be concerned with developing brand awareness and introducing themselves as an option.

The trick, she says, is remembering that as a superintendent, you probably already have the skills you need to succeed

But for public schools, you ultimately want to drive brand affinity; you want your community to develop affection and

Know the difference between brand awareness and brand affinity.

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even preference for your brand. “Are people referring their friends to your schools? Is every family having a really great experience? What does teacher retention look like? Is this a great place to work? All those things are really affinity-driven metrics for school leaders,” Bryant says.

So what does all this have to do with video? “A lot of video now is being shared on social media, and a lot of that content coming from businesses is for the purpose of brand awareness,” Bryant says. “But we think this community aspect of affinity is really the future of video, and you’re just not able to do that in two-second clips.”

Bryant believes that one of the keys to building brand affinity through video is “understanding that not everyone is going to watch the whole thing.” Though the latest marketing wisdom says that shorter videos perform better (two minutes is generally considered optimal), reports from Tubular Insights and BuzzSumo indicate that the top-performing YouTube videos and Facebook Live streams clock in at around 15 minutes.

“What we really care about is that the people who stay actually get value,” Bryant says. “If the people who do stay become advocates, people who are really invested in you— that’s going to be a more powerful way for you to grow in the long term than chasing after that viral video.”

“If you show your personality, people really like that. They want to know you— they want to know you’re human.”

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Wistia doesn’t ignore the kind of shorter content meant to drive brand awareness. They post short ads on Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. But they’re not afraid to make longer videos geared toward driving brand affinity, which are hosted on their site. “If you’re on our website, we want you to spend time with us,” Bryant says. “We’re doing longer-form videos so that you can spend time with the brand and get to know us better.”

Think about possibilities for episodic content.

If you’ve ever binge-watched a TV series, you know how easily you can get attached to a show’s characters. It makes sense; you’ve spent so much time with these people, over hundreds of episodes, that it feels like you know them personally. In the same way, episodic video can make your audience feel as though they know you and your schools on an intimate level—even if they’ve never met you personally.

“Episodic content is a great way for people to spend more time with your brand,” says Bryant. “It’s a great way to build longer and stronger relationships with your customers and your community.”

Of course, for this strategy to work, your content has to be engaging, relevant to your audience, and a good reflection of your district’s personality. At West Bridgewater Public Schools in Massachusetts, Dr. Patty Oakley had to learn this lesson the hard way. She’d been interviewing staff for “Superintendent Spotlights,” but the Q&As, clocking in at about twenty minutes, weren’t getting much attention.

“Twenty minutes of just an interview… people weren’t watching it,” she says. “And if they were, they were really bored.”

So Oakley mixed up the format; instead of conducting a traditional interview in a classroom, she hit the road. “We started the Carpool Karaoke version of Superintendent Spotlight,” she says, “which is just like James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke.

I pick up the people, and we drive around the town of West Bridgewater. We share information, and then we’ll sing a song, then we share more information, then we sing a song.”

This offbeat strategy has worked wonders. Even though the videos haven’t gotten any shorter, “everyone wants to see the silly things that we’ll do, so they watch the whole interview,” Oakley tells us. “We get great information out there, but it’s in a fun way.”

That sense of fun—and the frequency with which she appears on her viewers’ screens—makes Oakley a more approachable figure, too. People feel like they know her. “I think if you show your personality, people really like that,” she tells us. “They want to know you—they want to know you’re human—and social media gives you that outlet to show who you are and that you care. You’re not just the superintendent sitting behind a desk.”

Incorporate personalized video.

It’s easy to think of video as a broad medium, a way to reach hundreds of people at once. But as Bryant says, “targeted messaging is a pillar of marketing in a lot of ways”—and a medium as personal as video can help you focus your message on one person at a time.

“Our inboxes now are so cluttered. People reach out with all these automated messages all the time,” says Bryant.

“Personalizing a video is really an awesome way to break through the noise.” And like any other use of video, personalization is a way to build a deeper relationship—and therefore cultivate brand affinity. “I think that in the context of schools, it’s another entry point. What is this community? What do people care about? How do they carry themselves? It’s just another insight that they have, and as a recipient of that video, I then feel like I know a little more about you and therefore can really build a stronger connection.”

Imagine sending a short, personalized video to welcome a family who’s just enrolled in your district, or to encourage a star teacher to apply for your job opening. Actually, that’s “one of the latest best practices” in hiring, says Tom Darrow, founder of recruiting agency Talent Connections. “Even just with your phone, make a little video and tell them about the opportunity at your school.” If you send a job posting in an email, your candidate might disregard it as spam, but with a custom video, “they can see you. They can hear you. They don’t think it’s a scam. They don’t think it’s just a volume game. They really feel like you’re pinpointing and targeting them,” Darrow says. And it works. “Studies have shown that when you send an email with a video, the response rate is three times what a normal response rate can be.”

Where should I post?

When it comes to where to post your videos, the obvious choice, of course, is social media. It’s not a bad option— posting to social media is a great example of meeting parents, students, and community members where they are.

According to research from TechCrunch, Facebook garners over 8 billion video views per day, and last year, AdWeek discovered that Facebook Watch receives 75 million visitors every day, most of whom stay for 20 minutes or more. If you already have a steady following on your Facebook page, you’ll want to include video in your social media strategy— while also keeping the platform’s downsides in mind.

“Sometimes things on Facebook or on other social channels are a little bit more fleeting,” says Bryant. As your videos disappear down your feed, they can become harder to find—plus, she points out, who knows whether Facebook will be around forever? On the other hand, “you have full control over how you want your district’s website to grow over time.” Social media video is still a great tool for building brand awareness, one you should definitely utilize—but you’ll probably want the bulk of your video to live on your own site.

What about a district YouTube channel, you might ask? Well, a YouTube presence will certainly make it easier for people to discover your content. The site has more than 2 billion users—that’s about one-third of the internet. For some districts, YouTube has presented an opportunity to grow a strong following. In Colorado, Jeffco Public Schools’ channel, JPS-TV, even won the district an Emmy.

But there’s a potential catch: “YouTube wants people to stay on YouTube,” says Bryant. “People are going to get lost on YouTube and see other things that are way more related to their interests and their search history than the topics you want to address.” Ultimately, “you want people back on your website”—not lost down a rabbit hole.

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A platform like Wistia, on the other hand, allows you to embed videos directly onto your site, giving you the chance to build affinity for your own district brand. You won’t have to worry about moderating Facebook comments, keeping videos from drifting down your Twitter feed, or losing viewers to their YouTube recommendations. You’ll even be building your website’s search volume, which will boost your search engine optimization (SEO) results.

Following a multichannel approach, you may want to include videos on your website, on social media, and on YouTube.

Just know the pros and cons of each platform, and decide what will work best for you.

Build brand affinity through video.

When Dr. Oakley put together West Bridgewater’s first flash mob-style Back to School video, she knew she was once again projecting her personality, but she didn’t realize she was also beginning an annual tradition.

“A few years ago, I decided to do a Welcome Back dance video and surprise everyone,” she says. “My friends say that I dance like Elaine on Seinfeld, so I’m not the best dancer— but I’d seen other people do things like this and thought, Why can’t we do that?” Parodying a Justin Timberlake song, Oakley and her team of district office administrators danced and serenaded their students and staff into the new school year. The video garnered nearly 7,000 views.

“Well, you’ve gotta be careful,” Oakley tells us, “because the next year, all the parents were like, We can’t wait for the Welcome Back video!” Though initially intimidated by the pressure to one-up their past efforts, Oakley and the West Bridgewater team have learned to have fun with what’s now a tradition four years running. “Each year we’ve been doing it, adding more people—teachers, kids,” she says. And the payoff is more than just engagement.

“It just promotes so much great camaraderie and school spirit, because everyone’s looking forward to the video when they come back to school,” says Oakley. “It gets parents excited. It gives people this feeling of pride. At the end of the day, what we do isn’t all about the scores we get on assessments. It’s about making people think, I want to send my kids there. I’m excited about getting back to school.”

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At its best, video is more than just a way to communicate. It’s more than a way to spread brand awareness. It’s a window into your school culture, “an onramp for people to feel like they can get to know you,” says Bryant. And the more they know you, the more your audience will love you.

At its best, video is more than just a way to communicate.

It’s more than a way to spread brand awareness. It’s a window into your school culture.

Leading From Home Running a school district is hard work.

How do you do it from your house?

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As we on the SchoolCEO team began our transition to remote work, we couldn’t help thinking about you: dedicated school leaders all over the country, making hard decisions from your home offices. If we’re having a difficult time adjusting, you surely have it even worse. You’re not just working from home—you’re leading.

So we talked to several private sector experts, pulling together some of the best tips for everything from supporting your staff to staying positive. Here’s what they had to say.

Supporting Your Staff Show them you care. “It is more important than ever to reach out to individuals in your company,” says Brian Carlson, co-founder and CEO of e-learning provider eThink Education. “Not only are we remote, but we’re also dealing with an unprecedented health crisis throughout the globe.

Families are in difficult situations. We have employees whose loved ones have lost their jobs, whose kids are now home.

They’re under additional stress. You need to be flexible with those people, but as a leader, you also need to reach out.

Take five minutes to pick one person in your company that you have not spoken with today and check in on them.”

Be accessible. “For teachers, it’s best practice to set office hours,” says Rich Henderson, Director of Global Education Solutions at tech company Lenovo. “They might be available for video conferencing between certain times, and parents and students can request a time during those office hours.

That goes for administrators as well—you should be setting open office hours for your staff to come to you with questions or concerns.”

Promote best practices around security. “Teachers are still dealing with K-12 students—minors,” says Esther Yoon, Product Marketer at Zoom. “Just like at school, where you have security measures to protect your students, in a virtual environment, there still needs to be that same mentality. One of the most important things that superintendents can do is communicate best practices around security. Make sure you require a password. Don’t post your Zoom meeting link on a public forum, where anyone can just hop on, unless you have the right parameters in place. We have a lot of capabilities in Zoom that can protect teachers. So I would encourage superintendents to take on that leadership role by keeping security top of mind and making sure they’re aware of our security features.”

Provide resources. “I think the number one thing that managers can do right now is provide a very comprehensive and concise list of resources,” says Yoon. “A lot of K-12 teachers are scrambling to find things on their own because they haven’t gotten a really clear how-to on e-learning. Plus, not only are many teachers trying to transition their whole curriculum from this in-person experience to remote, which is a challenge in itself—they’re also doing video conferencing for the first time ever. If superintendents spent a couple of hours aggregating the best resources, it would save their teachers a lot of stress and anxiety.”

Communicating Clearly Over-communicate. “You have to be proactive with your communications,” says Tom Popomaronis, Vice President of Innovation at Massive Alliance and a veteran of remote work.

“It’s easy to go dark sometimes. Everyone’s accessible in an office, and being remote makes it easy to wait for someone to message you. Going out of your way to provide ample oversight or feedback on a project goes a long way for your colleagues and yourself. You’re still present digitally.”

Turn on your video. “Body language is a significant part of your communication,” says Yoon. “It’s a majority of how you communicate and how you respond. With video on, you can see if someone’s distracted. You can see if they’re nodding in approval. If you just jump on a phone call, you’re losing so much in visual communication.”

Keep communication focused. Kerry Hannon is a bestselling author and speaker whose forthcoming book, Great Pajama Jobs: Your Guide to Working from Home, focuses on remote work. “Be respectful of each other’s time,” she tells SchoolCEO. “You absolutely have to have scheduled communication, but it doesn’t have to be about minutia.” Having trouble maximizing your communication? “You might keep a budget for a week of who you’re calling and what you’re doing,” Hannon suggests. “Set a timer if you have to. From there, you can ask yourself how you can streamline your communication.”

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Preserving School Culture Keep everyone connected. “You have to find a way to connect your employees together,” Carlson tells us. “That’s part of your culture. So if you want people to feel connected, like they’re part of the team, video communication is very important, even if it’s just for fun. Last night, for example, we did a virtual happy hour. Everyone got together on video and had a drink, brought their kids to say hi—anything to get away from work for a second. That was very helpful for the group, because we’re all in isolation right now on top of being remote.”

Stay focused on your values. Julie Morgenstern is a New York Times bestselling author of six books on productivity and organization, including her most recent, Time to Parent. “As a leader, your job is to always hold up the flag,” Morgenstern says. “What is your mission? What are your values? During your addresses, in every meeting, challenge your people: This is our mission. We have these obstacles.

Let’s brainstorm new ways to achieve that mission in these unique circumstances. That way, you keep reinforcing and rearticulating your identity, and you maintain that culture.”

Be authentic. “People believe that their background, their pets, their children, should never really interrupt their work environment,” says Henderson. “But I’ve found the exact opposite to be true. I’ll be on these important phone calls with educators, and my son will come over. At first I was very tempted to say, Daddy is on a really important call. But now, I just let him interrupt me. We’re all trying to do our best. I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to have this perfect environment, and that’s not the case. You’ve just got to get in it and be yourself.”

Engaging the Community Provide your community with personal updates. “I’m on the board of my high school, and the head of school is adorable,” Hannon tells us. “Every morning, he does a nice little video walking around the empty campus, talking to a student or teacher. He might also share a short video from a teacher saying hi to the student body, showing her dog under her desk, or sharing some fun insight into what it’s been like teaching remotely. Be creative about how you might do a daily message to your school.”

Point to community resources. “One way that superintendents can bring people together at this time is by pointing their families and teachers to resources in their 46

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communities,” says Kathryn Haydon, award-winning educator and founder of Sparkitivity. “Where I am, we’ve had a local music venue offer free streaming concerts. The art museum is offering some online programming, and the Nature Center is still open because they’re big enough to accommodate social distancing. Superintendents could really build a lot of great community will by sharing those types of resources with their families.”

Look for the helpers. “Highlight people or organizations in your community who are making an effort to help in this crisis,” says Hannon. “For example, shine a light on organizations who have donated computers or tablets for kids. It makes that organization feel really good that someone’s realizing what they’re doing, but it also shows that you’re part of the community and in touch with people.”

Staying Productive Respect the workplace—even if it’s in your home.

“People think working from home is staying in your pajamas, working in your bed—and people do that, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t advise it,” says Popomaronis. He says it’s key not just to work in a dedicated office space, but also to minimize distraction. “You really need an incredible amount of discipline to be effective,” he says. “I’ll proactively block out distractions by turning on Do Not Disturb mode on my phone or my computer. I’ve also gone as far as setting up a firewall for myself during office hours so I can’t look at certain websites—like I’m my own parental control. It’s about respecting the workplace like you would the office.”

Don’t be afraid to restructure your workday. “It’s very important to get out of the mindset of the eight-hour day,” says Haydon. “Think about all the extra things you usually do during the workday—your commute, meetings, side conversations—that aren’t necessarily productive time. When you’re home, other things can fill those gaps.” Haydon emphasizes this in Sparkitivity’s training on working from home with kids. “You don’t necessarily have to be sitting at your desk for the entire typical work day,” she says. “You might get up very early to do some high-focus work while your family is asleep, then take a break once your kids wake up to get them situated, then go back to your desk. It’s very important to have some flexibility as to when you work.”

Take it week by week, not day by day. “When you’re not in an environment where you’re working together face-to-face all the time, a lot of the guidance we’ve seen is about organizing your work into chunks of time,” says Henderson. “So look at that schedule and what you want to accomplish over the course of a week, instead of looking at it day by day.”

Set clear boundaries with your family. “When you’re working in a home with a lot of people, everyone needs to have their own personal space,” says Haydon. “You need to have ground rules as to when you can bother one another.”

Taking Care of Yourself Leave your desk. “For 15 minutes to every hour I work, I go on a long walk with the dog,” Popomaronis tells us. “In an office, you’re getting up, walking around, having water cooler conversations. But at home—one day I had a long project and I literally sat for five straight hours working on it. My feet were numb. You can’t neglect your health, but it’s easy to do when you’re by yourself without the typical distractions. So be proactive with your health. I set a 15-minute timer and do a loop, stretch the legs and the mind, get some fresh air.”

Practice mindfulness. “If you’re a person who does meditation or yoga, try to do that,” Hannon suggests. “It’s a solitary thing, but you’re quieting down that anxiety and finding a sense of balance, because things are so stressful right now.”

Looking on the Bright Side Solitude promotes creativity. “In the science of creativity, alone time can function as incubation time, which brings forth new ideas and solutions,” Haydon tells us. “So this is an opportunity to be thinking, What are some new ideas that I can put forward when we get back to school, or even right now? How can I keep moving forward? The people thinking that way will be the ones who come out of this ahead.”

Your staff will be more willing to try new technology.

“We’ve been seeing this shift already in education where the teacher’s desk is no longer really the center of the classroom,” says Henderson. “We’ve seen this natural shift to address different learning styles, to address the different needs of students. We’ve been introducing digital tools, and now, after this situation, any hesitation that there was in trying new technology and trying something new is thrown out the window. You really have to take the risk.”

You’ll learn about yourself. “I’m a big fan of remote work,” says Hannon. “I think there’s so many good things to learn about yourself and about your work habits, your time management habits, your discipline, your communication skills.

You’re never going to regret getting better at time management, or drawing boundaries between work and family, or communication. When we get back into the workplace, you’ll have learned something about how you work best.”

Replace your commute with self-care. “When you’re remote, that time that you were otherwise spending commuting can go back into your pocket for self-care,” says Morgenstern. “Rather than waking up and immediately going off to the races, use that time for yourself, for exercise or listening to music—anything that’s going to fuel you up.”

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SchoolCEO We spoke with four innovators slated to appear at this year’s SXSW EDU Conference and Festival. Here are their most exciting ideas for the classroom and beyond.

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a really effective pipeline for the recruitment and retention of teachers of color,” she tells us.

Lead to Teach

Shareefah Mason

A New Hiring Pipeline: Finding and Keeping Teachers of Color “Right now the teaching workforce is 81% white female,” Shareefah Mason tells us. “And of course, that doesn’t match the diversity of students across the nation.” When kids don’t have teachers who look like them, it can negatively impact the way they learn. “Thirty percent of students of color are more likely to attend college if they have a teacher of color in their primary years,” she adds.

Mason, Social Studies Department Chair at Dallas ISD’s New Tech High School, is on a mission to change the way schools find and keep teachers of color. But when the New Orleans native relocated to Dallas after Hurricane Katrina, education wasn’t even on her radar. “I had just gotten my master’s degree in organizational management the year before,” she explains. “I was probably going to go into human resources.”

After being transplanted to Dallas, however, Mason found an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. “There was a free alternative certification program for Hurricane Katrina evacuees that Dallas ISD offered, so out of pure boredom, I went to take classes because I love to learn,” she tells SchoolCEO. Fourteen years later, she is now one of the most distinguished educators in all of Texas and has won local, state, and national teaching awards. In January, Mason was named a 2020 Presidential Leadership Scholar.

Outside the classroom, she’s not only on the Texas State Board for Educator Certification, but also spends much of her time presenting at conferences and working with education partners to help other young people of color find their way into teaching. “My passion right now is trying to develop

Mason is currently a Research Fellow for Teach Plus, a leadership organization giving voice to teachers in several states.

She’s previously partnered with them to find and present solutions to this specific recruitment and retention issue. This has allowed her to see firsthand what’s driving teachers of color out of the classroom. “What they’re saying is they’re not being prepared, they’re not being mentored,” she explains.

“Their experiences aren’t valued, and there aren’t enough opportunities to lead from the classroom.”

To improve recruitment and disrupt this high turnover, Mason is launching a project called Lead to Teach. “What I want to do is partner with school districts to help them truly develop intricate policies to build this pipeline that is so necessary,” she says. A big part of this project is bringing educators together to share effective ideas and strategies. “It would give them the opportunity to share their already successful practices and to refine those together so we’re implementing the best practices for recruiting and retaining teachers of color across the country.”

Mason is hoping to bridge some of these gaps for teachers of color by guiding districts through a four-pronged approach to recruiting and retention, using rubrics she’s created for each strategy.

Understanding Needs: “The first rubric allows superintendents, principals, and board members to understand what effective teachers of color need to bring to the table,” Mason tells us. “In essence, it’s what every teacher needs to bring, regardless of race.” This rubric outlines the unique characteristics districts should look for in new hires: diverse experiences to meet students’ needs, intuition and understanding to minimize issues in the classroom, and a recognition of the importance of collaboration. “Another component is being kinesthetic, especially in urban settings,” she adds. “What I mean is you have to go to church plays and to basketball games and allow students and parents to see you in the community.”

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tells us. “We have to really dive deeply into how we’re preparing our teacher candidates in alternative certification programs and traditional education programs, as well as what we continually feed them when they become teachers. I think the ball is definitely being dropped there. We have to have more purposeful professional development centered around student needs.” Mason believes that if teachers understand how to be successful in an urban environment, they can translate those skills into any other setting. “It’s important that all teachers have this foundational knowledge because we may never know where a teacher ends up,” she says.

Mentoring: “Each urban district should create a distinguished teacher of color mentoring program,” Mason says.

“Teachers of color in years 0-3 would meet with distinguished teachers of color selected by their district every quarter to provide a safe space for dialogue, professional development, and innovative strategies and anecdotes.” This initiative, Mason tells us, “will provide the support teachers of color need from those who understand their plight and can provide the motivation necessary to encourage them to remain in the profession.”

Giving Voice: “The last part is to develop a teacher of color state legislative cohort,” Mason says. “This would allow teachers of color to feel their experiences are valued and that they have the opportunity to lead from the classroom.” Currently, Mason says teachers who go to the capitol only have three minutes each to express needs, which often leads to confusion in the implementation of any funds granted. “With my idea, teachers of color would be able to meet with state legislators in the off session to talk about what the problems really are, where the money really needs to go,” she tells us. “They would be able to devise a true, solid plan that would allow legislators to disperse money accordingly and appropriately so we can truly see change for students across the board.”

Mason is actively seeking partner districts to pilot her Lead to Teach program. She has also created the Building the Bridge Fellowship to bring administrators and teachers together and is working on grants to fund its implementation.

“There has to be a nuclei formed around teachers, instructional deans, and principals of color to figure out where professional isolationism is being created, why mentorship is not where it needs to be, and why these teachers don’t feel 50

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prepared,” Mason says. “This program puts everybody in the same room.”

Mason wants to help as many districts as possible find the right teachers for their kids—and give them the best chances for success. “We can overlook things like pay because we know we’re giving back,” she tells us. “We know we’re empowering a generation of children who will one day rule the world and that matters to us.”

For information on being a Lead to Teach pilot district, email Mason at shareefahmason@icloud.com.

“We have to really dive deeply into how we’re preparing our teacher candidates...as well as what we continually feed them when they become teachers.”

“If we can let students learn without thinking they’re being taught, then we’re going to re-engage a whole slew of kids who see no value in education anymore, who see no real-world relevance in what they’re learning,” he explains.

Gerald Solomon

After launching, the program became so popular among California high schoolers that there was a demand for middle school and CTE curricula as well. “We now have full state credentials for all curriculums for high school, middle school, and CTE. And it’s 100% free to every school, every afterschool program, every youth development organization, and every library in North America,” Solomon tells us. “Because that’s who we are—our return on investment is the impact on kids. It’s not in our pocketbooks.

But that’s only the beginning. Since launching just 18 months ago, NASEF is now in 48 states with nearly 10,000 students in almost 800 school clubs. And, as a result of its success in the U.S., NASEF has recently signed MOUs with Mexico, Japan, the British Esports Association, and will be working with Israel next. “We’re going global,” Solomon says.

Laylah Bulman

Online Gaming & Schools: A Win-Win for Academics—and Fun We know video games haven’t always been an educator’s best friend. When they aren’t distracting students in the classroom, they’re depriving them of sleep at night.

But through the National Scholastic Esports Federation (NASEF), online gaming is now playing a groundbreaking— and highly academic—role in classrooms all over.

NASEF is funded by the Samueli Foundation, whose Executive Director, Gerald Solomon, helped start the STEM Learning Ecosystems Initiative. This project seeks to reinvent how kids learn, how systems educate, and how the workforce is developed. “About two years ago, just by happenstance, we learned there was this thing called esports,” Solomon tells us. After looking at the numbers, he realized that gaming could be a perfect Trojan horse for school kids.

He gives much of the credit to Program Director Laylah Bulman, a former principal who knows a lot about making learning fun. She worked for LEGO Education to implement hands-on instructional systems across the Southeast and is also the director of the Florida Scholastic Esports League.

“What Laylah has done in Florida has become the model for what we’re doing across the country,” Solomon explains.

“The great thing about our curriculum is it’s extremely flexible and highly scalable,” Bulman says. “It looks different from class to class, and it reflects what’s happening in the community.” Solomon adds that some people call it a “scholastic playground,” but stresses that their approach focuses on learning first and foremost. “It’s really about how you connect passion and play with purpose,” he says.

Not Just a Game NASEF’s curriculum is a set of nearly 40 modules, all regarding different aspects of four major domains: Entrepreneurship, Content Creation, Organization, and Strategy. “If you think of a sports team, you need event planners, you need social media experts, you need web developers and data analytics—that’s our curriculum,” Solomon explains. “But we tie it in through gaming so kids can have fun learning.”

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“The modules are all aligned to jobs within the esports industry,” Bulman says, noting that as careers change, their modules will follow. It isn’t just about teaching kids to be competitive gamers—players are actually a minority in the program. Learning comes first, so there’s no play during the school day. “That’s done in clubs,” she notes.

Organizing modules into these domains helps teachers utilize the material and integrate it into their own lesson plans and teaching styles. NASEF competitions, which take place only after school, also involve every student, no matter their area of study. “Our tournaments don’t look like traditional esports tournaments,” Bulman says. “Teachers want to physically see students making artifacts of work and examples of their web pages, merchandise, ecommerce sites, or strategy and data analytics.” During a competition, students actually gather in quadrants around a game player with surrounding examples of their work, like fan art on easels. “And they love it,” Bulman adds.

“It’s an equity issue,” she says. “If you have an esports class, tons of kids want to be in that environment but may not be gamers. The after-school club portion is ample opportunity for kids to express their interests, explore work, hang out with one another, and find a cool space in their school.”

NASEF also finds ways to open up the world of gaming to students who can’t afford to play the same way as some of their peers. “Kids who are playing League of Legends usually have to pay to unlock more characters,” Bulman explains.

“We provide it unlocked. That’s huge for kids. They can explore all these characters that otherwise would take them hundreds of hours a day to unlock. Here they can explore if they like gaming, they can get better at gaming, or they can just run the club.”

And while you may expect esports to appeal mostly to boys, many programs are seeing girls step into various roles. “We have a lot of girls who are gaming, for sure,” Bulman says.

“But in terms of leading, we’re seeing girls run these clubs. In fact, the two leaders of the University of Central Florida esports teams are girls—which reflects what we see in K-12.”

The Samueli Foundation gave a three-year grant to an outside research company to study the impact of NASEF’s curriculum, and the results couldn’t be a stronger endorsement for scholastic esports. “The data is off the charts as it relates to social-emotional learning, communication skills, critical 52

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thinking, you name it—all the characteristics you want to see people develop,” Solomon explains.

Because of widespread school closures surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak, NASEF has recently had to pivot their program online—but they’ve quickly formed unique partnerships to keep learning fun and fruitful. “Typically, we have teachers in schools activate clubs, because our purpose is to have kids getting together,” Bulman explains. “Right now, because everyone is dispersed, we’ve opened our materials to various streams for kids to learn things like content creation.”

“For the next couple of months, we’ve created a theme called From Competition to Community,” Solomon says. “We’re giving all the materials out for free. And with the help of Twitch, Microsoft, Flipgrid, and Earpod, we’re creating daily activities—45-minute sessions with 15-minute health and wellness breaks everyday—and we’re opening that up to everyone. We’re doing trainings on everything from how to become a club to how to use Minecraft in a way that deals with economics to COVID-19.” NASEF has also set up a free professional development channel on Zoom for teachers who preregister, along with a channel for kids to learn how to collaborate on projects and play games together from home.

For NASEF, it all comes down to providing free, equal access to any student, especially those who may otherwise be disengaged or disinterested in school. “Esports brings kids together in a safe, welcoming space where they can not only share what they’re passionate about through play, but also explore ideas and careers that are going to be highly relevant in their futures,” Bulman says. “This is not about game time,” Solomon adds. “This is where kids are. Go to where they are, speak their language, and do it through an academic lens. Be intentional about inclusion and diversity in how you bring kids together. When you do that, and you don’t prejudge, and you give kids the opportunity to build their own community—the world is their oyster. It’s amazing what they can create.”

For more information on how to bring NASEF’s curricula to your schools, visit esportsfed.org.

my first year,” he tells us. “We had 18 armed police, 48 security officers, and about a 17% graduation rate.” Ritz says many of his students had already been in prison. “They were all overaged and undercredited, and I didn’t know what to do,” he adds. He was also tasked with teaching science, which he had no background in. Desperate, he put a call out on the internet for help. Four weeks later a huge box arrived at the school. ”I opened it up like a kid on Christmas morning, and inside were these things that looked like moldy onions,” he says. “I had no idea what they were.” He shoved the box behind a big radiator in his classroom and forgot all about it.

Stephen Ritz

Farming in the Classroom: Feeding Hearts, Minds, and Communities “No one is the luckiest guy on earth more than I am,” Stephen Ritz tells us with a big smile. He’s wearing a black T-shirt that reads “Sustainable Gangster” in bright green letters and a cowboy hat made of what we hope is fake cheese. Ritz is a lifelong educator and the founder of Green Bronx Machine— an urban farming nonprofit he started in his classroom that has now become a global phenomenon. “It’s changed everything for me,” he says.

Ritz grew up wanting to be a pro basketball player. “This is the last year I’m willing to accept a call from the NBA!” he jokes.

But he found his true calling off the court. “I started my first year teaching at South Bronx High School—it was the only standing building within an eight-block radius in the poorest congressional district in America. That’s where I found out I have a gift with children and that I love teaching.”

Ritz eventually left NYC, overwhelmed by the “sheer desperation that was life in urban America in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” he explains. He moved to Arizona, where he worked with Native American kids, connecting with them on a social-emotional level through project-based work and basketball. This was a game-changer. “I decided I was going to dive deep into public education,” he says. After getting a master’s in special ed, he taught briefly in Arizona before making his way back to the Bronx.

He wound up in what he says was the “worst” high school in New York City. “They had 256 felonies in the building during

A couple months later, something strange happened. After a fight broke out in his class, a student reached under the radiator hoping to find something to throw—and instead pulled out a handful of yellow flowers. The fight ended immediately.

“It was this big, diffusing moment. We looked in the box and it had hundreds and hundreds of flowers in it,” Ritz tells us. It turns out the box had been filled with daffodil bulbs. “We were all just fascinated we could grow stuff in our classroom.”

This eventually led the class to planting community gardens in abandoned spaces around the city. “These young people were really strong and energetic, and they didn’t want to be in school,” he tells us. “So we started building gardens right at the cusp of the city parks movement—and it was the perfect opportunity to get them jobs.”

Two years into gardening, Ritz and his students visited the first Whole Foods Market in NYC and were all stunned. “I myself had never seen so much food!” he tells us. “Plants, vegetables, fruit—most of our knowledge in the Bronx is relegated to a small bodega with no fresh fruits or vegetables.”

In fact, living in a food desert had been impacting Ritz’s health. “My metabolism slowed down,” he tells us. “I’d stopped playing basketball, started drinking soda, and I was eating what was available to me in my community—I had no idea what real food was.” Ritz says fast food had become his go-to, something he had in common with far too many of his students. “We didn’t know any better,” he adds.

But on that trip to Whole Foods, they were introduced to a healthy and lucrative opportunity. “We saw white people—which was rare for my kids—and they were spending money!” Ritz says. “And it was cash, it was credit cards—and we said, Hey, we want some of that! We can grow that.” Whole SPRING 2020

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Foods then gave them the opportunity to sell their own produce in the store as long as they could grow it responsibly.

Thus, Green Bronx Machine was born. It would not only give students hands-on, project-based learning, but also help them supply their community with healthy, sustainable food.

Four years later, a much healthier Ritz gave a talk at Columbia University called From Crack to Cucumbers. “I brought a bunch of young people who used to sell drugs but found that there was more money and a better lifestyle in the fresh whole food movement,” he tells us. “Kids should not have to leave their community to live, learn, and earn in a better one.”

After winning the National Indoor Gardening Championship with the country’s first edible classroom, Ritz and his students began getting national media coverage, which got even more kids engaged—and fed. “In a small classroom we were able to grow enough food to feed 450 students routinely using 90% less water and space,” he tells us. “And if you expand their palates, you expand their minds. Healthy students are at the heart of healthy schools, and healthy schools are at the heart of resilient communities.”

Photo courtesy of Stephen Ritz.

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After Ritz and some of his students were invited to a gardening expo in California, they ended up finding quite a surprise—and a way to expand their work. Ritz knew, as they pulled up to a “warehouse full of hipsters,” that this wasn’t a typical farm show. “Lo and behold, it was a marijuana show!” he tells us, laughing. Ritz decided to use the situation as a learning opportunity. “So we started looking at different technologies,” he says. “And I saw this amazing piece of tech: tower gardens!” These vertical, aeroponic gardens each grow 28 plants at a time without soil. “So I said, I could use that in classrooms and change the world,” he says—and that’s exactly what happened. The following year, Green Bronx Machine helped place 8,000 tower gardens in classrooms across the country.

“When you put a seed in a child’s hand, you’re making them a promise that it will grow into something great, just like them.

Seeds and students are potential.”

The Machine at Work You can see Green Bronx Machine’s academic impact in the data. After turning an underutilized school library in the South Bronx into an innovative health, wellness, and learning center, the school saw a 45% passing rate increase on New York state science exams. The program’s wide reach and impact also speak to its success. Over 500 schools currently use GBM curricula, and students have grown (and eaten) over 85,000 pounds of vegetables in the Bronx alone.

The GBM curricula centers on the art and science of growing fruits and vegetables in the classroom. “This is not an after-school program,” he says. “This is a build-in.” This whole-school instruction includes day-to-day lessons that teachers can use to maintain and grow gardens in their classrooms. “The kids think it’s their job to farm and grow vegetables—which is great, because if they grow them, they can eat them,” he explains. “But, really, their job is to learn through very project-based, social-emotional lessons.”

Not only is this curricula aligned to Common Core, but also Next Generation Science Standards and the International Baccalaureate. “We don’t do galas, we don’t do fundraising— the assets are our curricula,” Ritz says. “We offer a lifetime site license, data, maintenance, and ongoing professional development with a one-time fee. And it gives you a complete year’s curriculum that every single teacher in the school can use.” Ritz says he designed this curricula to transform outcomes aligned to attendance along with teacher satisfaction, retention, and tenure. “And in 500 schools, we have 500 satisfied teachers,” he adds. “We’re lean, mean, efficient, teacher-oriented, and results-driven.”

Outside of the health and social-emotional benefits of its work, Green Bronx Machine also teaches students about the importance of time, perseverance, and resilience. “When you put a seed in a child’s hand, you’re making them a promise that it will grow into something great, just like them. Seeds and students are potential,” Ritz says. GBM students also get experience in a wide variety of subjects through farming.

“They’re selling products and creating marketing,” he says.

NYC, and in less than four years, they’re now outperforming city- and statewide in every single performance indicator,” he says. “And we made the cover of Time for Kids.”

Getting students to eat healthy has also gained the attention of Anthem, the nation’s largest provider of Medicaid to high-needs communities. The company is currently scaling GBM into 22 cities across 19 states. “They looked at our data aligned to social determinants of health and realized we were really changing outcomes,” Ritz tells us. “I have kids in the South Bronx who are vegan, which is crazy.”

GBM not only feeds student farmers and their families from its Bronx classroom, but also grows enough food to send 100 bags of groceries a week to food-insecure cancer survivors.

“We’ve targeted other high-needs communities around the country—I go in for a one-day professional development and leave the curriculum and links they need,” Ritz says.

When we spoke with Ritz, the joy he finds in his work was obvious. It became undeniable when he told us he doesn’t even take a salary. “I decided to embed myself in public school for free,” he says. “I’m a full-time volunteer.” His work, however, has given Ritz some life-changing opportunities. He’s not only met the Pope, but also former First Lady Michelle Obama, who, of course, shares his passion for sustainability and healthy eating. “She says the way we treat our children is indicative of who we are as a nation, and that it all starts with food,” Ritz explains. “That really resonates with me.”

But it’s the students who inspire Ritz most of all. “Projectbased learning works because kids like to get dirty, touch things, blow things up, make, tinker, and hack,” he says.

“The hacks these kids are coming up with around technology to grow food are amazing. And they take ownership of it. Project-based learning like Green Bronx Machine works because students want to be involved and engaged. We’re transforming the world.”

To learn more, visit GreenBronxMachine.org and check out Ritz’s bestselling book, The Power of a Plant.

Like its founder, Green Bronx Machine has countless recognitions and awards, but the impact it’s made on students and their communities reaches far beyond any trophy or magazine cover. “We took the poorest-performing school in all of

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SchoolCEO Conversations: Coping with COVID-19

How superintendents are boosting morale amid extended school closures First, it was one week. Then, it was two. Then a month. Now, most districts around the country are facing a bitter reality: schools closing for the remainder of the academic year. But as we all adjust to this new normal, school leaders are finding incredible ways to do what they’ve always done best: focus on the well-being of their students. Here are a few star superintendents who stood out to us.

superintendent. Lovingly known as “The Suit Guy”—a reference to his colorful, patterned suits—his visibility and consistency have given him a valuable asset: credibility. So when COVID-19 closed Washington’s schools, Nelson knew it was his job, as a school leader, to set the tone for the closure.

Story Time with the Suit Guy

The videos not only engage Enumclaw’s students and parents, but also provide teachers with invaluable professional and emotional support. “All of our elementary teachers are now connecting that as part of their daily work with students,” Nelson says. “And it helps them realize their superintendent’s in it with them.”

Superintendent Mike Nelson, Enumclaw School District, WA Superintendent Mike Nelson is a beloved fixture in Enumclaw School District. He’s been there 21 years, nearly 14 as

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A former elementary teacher, Nelson went back to his roots.

“It just comes naturally to me to read a story,” he says. So each school day since the closure began, he’s hosted “Story Time with the Suit Guy,” reading a children’s book live on the district’s Facebook page. With a calming presence reminiscent of Mister Rogers, he welcomes the district’s kids into his office and shares a story. He often includes an accompanying activity, whether it’s hard-boiling an egg, planting seeds, or making Rice Krispie treats.

They’ve also seen ripple effects in the greater Enumclaw community. When a local author started selling books to raise money for a food bank, a resident donated $100 to send a single copy to Nelson—and pledged another $100 if he’d read the book for Story Time. “So as a result of reading that book, $200 went to the food bank,” Nelson says. “Those little ripples are fun.”

Nelson’s emphasis on reading hasn’t stopped at Story Time.

“One day,” he tells us, “I started thinking—We’ve got to get people united in this community. What if we did a reading challenge?” So the district introduced “Read Together, Learn Together,” an initiative encouraging the entire Enumclaw community—even those not directly connected with the schools—to read more and keep track of their reading time.

“People go to our website and log their minutes,” Nelson explains. By June 19, the official last day of school, Enumclaw hopes to have read a collective 10 million minutes.

For Nelson, both Story Time and the reading initiative are about more than just literacy. “Our kids are watching us right now,” Nelson says. “How are we modeling how to be resilient, how to be kind and compassionate during times of adversity, how to have empathy for one another?” Sometimes, it’s as simple as reading a story.

Taking the Classroom Outside Superintendent Dr. Howard Carlson, Wickenburg Unified School District, AZ Like many districts, Wickenburg Unified is working to provide for their families’ physical needs during this trying time.

They’re providing food for pickup and delivery, distributing Chromebooks, and working with local providers to supply internet access to families who need it. But once those needs are met, says Superintendent Dr. Howard Carlson, “we’re starting to shift our focus toward the social and emotional support that our families and students need.”

“Oftentimes they’re locked at home, and although they can get outside, they’re not able to connect with others in person,” Carlson tells us. “We’re trying to figure out ways to make sure kids can stay connected and healthy.” For some families, that means wellness checks, or digital meetings with counselors who can provide resources. For others, it simply means moving the classroom to the backyard.

“We aren’t just delivering an educational opportunity,” Carlson explains. “We’re trying to tie in scenarios where students get outside and do something. It couples the educational component with the social-emotional component, dealing with that mental health piece—getting outside, getting in nature, getting into the sun. That’s a real innovation, because normally when kids go to school, they go to a classroom and they learn. Here, you have an opportunity to get them outside.” This approach to learning forces teachers to get creative, but Wickenburg’s staff has jumped at the challenge. “Our high school art teacher climbed one of the peaks out here, and, along the way, took pictures of the various wildflowers—then made that into a lesson around painting wildflowers,” he says.

An Enumclaw student intently watches Nelson’s Story Time video from home.

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Even the district’s social media has turned to nature for inspiration. “We’re in Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, and this is a beautiful time of the year,” says Carlson. “Wildflowers and cactuses are starting to bloom. So on social media, we’re sharing a lot of pictures of that natural beauty, trying to shift everyone’s focus beyond the virus.”

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!” reads one Facebook post, accompanied by photos of vibrant pink flowers and the open desert sky. “We hope everyone is finding time to enjoy their surroundings.”

When Education Isn’t #1

Carlson knows that his staff needs the benefit of fresh air just as much as his students—which is why he’s practically requiring them to spend time outdoors. “I think it’s going to be of vital importance—telling people they need to get outside,” he tells us. “Take a walk, walk the dog, whatever the case may be. You need to be able to get that fresh air. That’s going to help keep us centered as we go through this.”

At Anderson School District One, the COVID-19 crisis has demanded a shift in priorities. “As the superintendent, it’s very hard for me to say that education isn’t the most important thing,” says Robbie Binnicker. “But right now, it’s not.

We’ve got families that are really struggling with new challenges, whether that be sick family members or parents losing their jobs or older kids having to watch younger siblings.

Right now, education should not be adding stress and anxiety to people’s lives.”

Superintendent Robbie Binnicker, Anderson School District One, SC

That philosophy has been the district’s guiding light since South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster closed all the state’s schools on March 15. In the district’s response protocol, they list three main priorities: safety first, anxiety reduction second, and learning third. Reducing anxiety, for Anderson One, means providing thousands of meals for kids, both onsite and at bus stops. It means continuing to pay all staff for as long as possible. And it means making sure the stressors of this situation don’t negatively affect a student’s long-term academic success.

“We don’t have any way to know right now why a student isn’t turning in quality work,” Binnicker explains. “It could very well be a motivation issue, but it could also be a myriad of other things that the kid doesn’t have any control over.” So for this fourth quarter, the district is changing their grading system; instead of letter grades, assignments will receive one of two distinctions: “Meets Expectations” or “Needs Improvement.”

At the end of the school year, teachers may add zero, one, or two percentage points to a student’s third quarter grade average; that will be their final average for the year. This quarter can only help students academically, not hurt them.

Wickenburg’s Facebook page shares natural beauty to lift community spirits.

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“We tried to find a balance so that there was an incentive for kids to do their work without it causing nervous breakdowns,” says Binnicker.

The district has many ways of looking out for the emotional well-being of its students and families. “Early on, every school divided their kids up and gave them to staff members who really couldn’t work from home—teachers’ assistants, attendance secretaries, receptionists, one-on-one special education aides,” Binnicker tells us. “For three and a half hours a day, all of those employees are calling and checking on folks, asking, How are things going? Do you have enough food? Are you having issues with the light bill?” Not only do these checkins show families the district cares, but they alert Anderson One to any potential problems that might keep students from working—issues with technology or other stresses at home.

Most families get a call at least once a week.

“The people making the calls are getting a lot out of that, and the parents and kids love it,” Binnicker says. “It’s great PR for our district.”

Like any educator, Binnicker wants to make sure his students are learning. But “you’ve got to keep the main thing the main thing,” he says. “You’ve got to know that you’re making things as good as you possibly can for the students. That’s the goal that keeps every educator going: knowing you’re making a difference in the life of a kid.”

“You’ve got to know that you’re making things as good as you possibly can for the students. That’s the goal that keeps every educator going: knowing you’re making a difference in the life of a kid.”

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Superintendent Perspectives: Building Equity Structures Guest Writer: Dr. Paul E. Coakley, Superintendent of Centennial School District

A few years ago, one of our principals at Centennial School District in Oregon found that his school’s math achievement data had gone up 2%—which seemed great at first glance. However, when he disaggregated the data by race, the numbers showed something unsettling: not one AfricanAmerican male student in the school met grade-level standards in math. Instead of sidestepping the issue, the principal stood in front of his staff and the school board, acknowledged that the numbers were hard to look at, and asked his staff to do the same. On that day, his team made a commitment to move the data.

Due to gentrification in Northeast Portland, we as a district have grown more diverse in a span of about five years.

From 2010-2014, our student population was almost 70% Caucasian. Now, 57% are students of color, 43% are English learners, and more than 53 languages are spoken throughout the district.

I became Centennial’s superintendent four years ago, after two years as assistant superintendent. I have the pleasure of serving with one of the first boards in our county to create and adopt an equity policy, adding systems and structures into our operations to create schools that serve all students.

We don’t view equity as just a tool for improving student achievement—equity is the lens through which we make every decision, from student learning to hiring to resource allocation. We aim to create safe, effective schools for our students, and we have created structures at every level of our system—from our budget to professional development—to deliver on this promise.

Working through the systems and structures put in place at the staff, administrative, and community levels, the principal and his team were able to move those indicators quite a bit in just one year. But it never would have happened without him calling out the data, acknowledging the problem, and having his equity team and teachers own the issue at hand. Instead of being upset or feeling defensive, they recognized, This is something we need to change.

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Starting the Conversation First, we wanted to tackle the demographic mismatch between teachers and students. While we have around 57% students of color, 94% of our faculty is white. So we started with professional development, then made adjustments to our hiring practices.

In Portland, the teaching candidate pool isn’t large, so recruitment is competitive. We’ve taken a look at our classified staff and considered, What are the barriers keeping them from teacher certification? Most can’t take classes during the day, for example, or prefer classes to be held on our school campuses. We’ve examined our interview questions and even added a performance section to our interviews, asking candidates to teach a model lesson or to roleplay different classroom scenarios.

Based on our disproportionate student outcomes, we enacted a three-day summer workshop for current staff members with the goal of getting them comfortable talking about race and equity. About 70% voluntarily attended. We wanted to build a foundation for difficult conversations around the challenges we’re facing at Centennial. It’s a practice that’s now ongoing—and often, it gets personal.

At the start of every professional development session or staff meeting, for example, we do what’s called a “grounding activity.” We might watch a video or read a poem, then partner up with colleagues to discuss how the activity relates to our work as educators.

In one grounding activity, we showed a clip from comedian Michael Jr. called “Know Your Why.” In the video, Michael calls on an audience member to sing a few bars of “Amazing Grace.” The audience member does so, quietly, a little nervous. Then, the comedian asks him to sing “Amazing Grace” to his uncle, as if he were reunited with him after many years, to which the man sings so passionately that the audience erupts in a standing ovation. “When you know your why,” Michael says, “your what becomes more impactful.”

At Centennial, we expect every staff member to know their why and have the courage to share it. These exercises provide a moment to reflect, recenter, and connect with the other educators in the room—and prepare to have hard conversations.

The initial three-day workshop was just a starting point.

Instead of training only administrators in culturally responsive practices, we deliver equity training directly to our teachers as well. Some had already built culturally responsive practices into their classrooms; for others, it meant breaking routines they’d held onto for decades. So we worked together to create standards for cultural responsiveness, even adapting the Danielson rubric to measure teachers’ success in incorporating inclusivity.

Now, we’re seeing more culturally responsive classrooms, which provide students with a sense of belonging and bolster higher levels of student engagement. Teachers are changing their greetings as students enter, introducing more call and response, and providing more opportunities for students to move around the classroom and talk to one another.

One teacher asked each student to bring a paragraph about their family to class; she then laminated the stories and kept them on the students’ desks as a reminder to bring their full selves to school.

Some teachers even went the extra mile, acquiring a graduate-level equity certification. Teachers completed the certification process in groups, and many of those certified went on to serve on equity teams at their individual school sites.

Building Equity Teams After we laid the groundwork for tough conversations with professional development, I set the expectation for every school to develop an equity team to work in collaboration with their School Improvement Plan (SIP). This team audits their individual school site, looking at academics, structures, discipline, and attendance. Then, they decide on goals, which go straight into the school’s improvement plan. Those goals directly impact classroom practices for the benefit of all students.

When our principal found a disparity in math achievement data for African American male students, for example, he approached his school’s equity team. Over the next school year, he worked with the team as well as coaches, parents, and district-level administrators to come up with strategies to support struggling students. One strategy was partnering with REAP Inc., a nonprofit organization that works collaboratively with school staff to reduce disparities and improve outcomes for students of color. They also provide restorative justice professional development to schools in partner SPRING 2020

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districts. REAP Inc. was already a partner in our schools, but the team found ways to better utilize the partnership to support the SIP goals. The school’s equity team also met with parents, deciding on supports that could be enacted at home, and tried to identify barriers to things like attendance and relationship-building. This is just one example of the team at work.

To make sure our equity teams continue to grow, we’ve also started professional development for those teams. Each team completes a book study—so far, many have looked at Excellence Through Equity and Transforming Culture. A lot of that training comes from our district-level equity team, which looks at issues in achievement, attendance, and discipline across Centennial.

“We don’t view equity as just a tool for improving student achievement— equity is the lens through which we make every decision, from student learning to hiring to resource allocation.”

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In 2013, the board passed the district’s first equity policy, which reflects the school board and district’s commitment to equity. However, school boards are constantly changing.

Each year, as we lose or gain members, we must work to get newcomers on board.

Board relations are key to reducing disparities, but every board member has their own values, beliefs, and experiences. It is important to learn their passions; value and utilize their strengths; have open and honest conversations; and provide information that builds their will, skill, and capacity to engage in conversations about equity and inclusion. In Centennial, we began disaggregating our data by race and identifying racial disparities to begin closing those gaps.

Since this was a new concept for many, it was important to explain the why, so we could begin to address our achievement gaps.

Now, our board meetings are deep, meaningful, and student-centered. They celebrate the diversity of our district.

Several board members have participated in a countywide equity cohort, and we now hold two meetings a month: one formal board meeting and one work session to ensure ongoing professional development. As a team, we’ve also created a series of questions to act as a lens through which to examine each administrative decision we make. As you’ll see, the questions don’t allow equity to fall to the backburner.

• Who are the racial/ethnic and underserved groups affected, and what are the potential impacts?

• Does this ignore or worsen existing disparities or produce other unintended consequences?

• How does this advance the district’s priorities?

• How have you intentionally involved stakeholders who

are also members of the affected communities?

• What are the barriers to more equitable outcomes?

• How will you mitigate the negative impacts and address barriers?

Incorporating this equity lens into our everyday protocols has allowed our schools to begin addressing disproportionate discipline and to find alternatives to exclusionary discipline.

We’ve scaled the use of this decision-making lens throughout the district. Our CFO and Budget Committee use the lens when examining the budget. Principals use it to guide their schools and leadership teams.

When it came time to start on a new strategic plan a few years ago, we looked through the equity lens. The process took a year, but I’m proud of the fact that we didn’t just start with the achievement data—we also gave perception surveys to students, community members, and staff. Equity kept showing up in every single category, a constant theme—so equity became the foundation of our strategic plan.

Connecting with Community Groups We can’t do this work alone, so we have built strong partnerships with culturally specific organizations. Centennial School District received the African American/Black Student Success Grant from the state in partnership with REAP Inc. We also have a partnership with Latino Network, a Latino-led education organization whose culturally specific practices and services lift up youth and families to reach their full potential. This partnership has provided opportunities for community members to meaningfully participate in the decisions that affect their students and families.

First and foremost, our work centers around connection.

One of my favorite stories is about a student who hardly spoke through his whole high school career. During his junior year, he had to miss some time at school. Staff kept reaching out to him, and for a portion of time, teachers reduced his workload so the student could focus on his mental health.

Just before his graduation the following year, this student gave a four-minute speech to his classmates, explaining that he could speak all along but wasn’t quite comfortable doing so. It was only after spending time away that he understood the overwhelming support from teachers and classmates. “I realized this is a really caring community,” he said. “Everyone’s here to support me, and I’m not by myself.

It’s not me against everyone.”

Photos courtesy of Centennial Public Schools.

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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.

Subscribe today to receive our August edition.

It’s free for school leaders.

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