Emerging Questions for Schools in the Age of COVID-19

Here are some of the big questions facing schools as the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies. These are by no means exhaustive. [1]

RIGHT NOW (today through May):

  • How are our people (teachers and staff; students; parents + guardians) doing? How do we know? How might we take care of them?

  • When it comes to communications from our school, what are the needs of our diverse audiences?

  • Do we see this moment as an interruption of the status quo or as the start of a paradigm shift? What are the implications of each? How might the Board and the Leadership Team contemplate those questions together?

  • How does the closure of our school affect our local community? What’s happening to the pizza place, the coffee shop, et al.? What can we do for them?

  • Are we celebrating (virtually) each of our small wins on a daily basis?

NEAR TERM (April through September):

  • How should we think about recently admitted families (for 2020-21) and re-enrolling families?

  • How might we conceptualize models for 2020-21 enrollment changes of -10%, -20%, -30%? Will our state provide disaster relief funds if our updated revenue projections fall short of our anticipated operating budget?

  • If online learning has pulled the Overton Window toward blended learning, what do we need to do before the start of the new school year to adjust to new expectations?

MEDIUM TERM (June through December):

  • If COVID-19 follows the trajectory of the 1918 Spanish Flu and reactivates in the Fall / Winter, what is on our checklist for closing our campus again? Who has access to that checklist? When and how does it get updated?

  • How might a second and third COVID wave affect enrollment and philanthropy?

LONG TERM (September and beyond):

  • How will our responses to the preceding affect current and prospective parents’ perceptions of the value proposition of sending their child to our school? [2]

  • How will our responses affect the way that you identify, recruit, hire, onboard, and develop our faculty and staff?

FINALLY: No one person can be responsible for all of these questions. Who should be on our team?

What questions are missing? Please reply to this email with the questions that are on your mind.

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[1] As always, Jeff Selingo has some great bullet points about how colleges should think about this unprecedented moment. While he addresses higher ed, his insights are largely transferable across K12 independent schools and even some public / charter schools.

[2] One Head of School emailed the following hypothesis:

“This exercise forces our faculty to leverage technology and digital learning tools that will forever change and improve their teaching, whether in person or remote. At the same time, parents will more convincingly understand and buy our value proposition of community; sense of belonging; and social / emotional growth that happens for 14-18 y/o in face-to-face school environments and cultures like ours.”

The first proposition seems reasonable… if school leadership communicates a compelling vision to teachers while supporting their inevitable struggles with online teaching.

The second proposition depends enormously on execution, and even then it’s not necessarily a differentiator. Most of all, it only applies to current parents and some of their word-of-mouth referrals. Everyone else—ie, the future enrollment of the school—are unlikely to “convincingly understand” something that they didn’t experience and that other schools can market.

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Christian Talbot