The Most Important Thing

If we had known in advance that we’d be homebound for this long, with no certain return to life as we knew it in sight, many of us might nervously have joked that a reasonable goal for such a scenario, aside from keeping physically healthy, would be just being nice to our families! 

Indeed, managing home and family life in such close quarters proves challenging. But look how much more we’re trying to manage: our work, our kids’ school work, our shifting finances, our canceled and hoped-for vacations, our weirdly ‘Groundhog Day’ schedules, our social and personal lives (what’s left of them), our physical and emotional health, our hopes and our dreams, our grief and anxieties, and all the what-nexts, what-thens, and what-ifs…! 

With all this in mind, honestly, the first goal for this spring must be coming through this crisis as healthy as possible, with our families and selves (and our faculty and staff) intact. We’re going to continue to adapt and make the best of it, including academically and socially with our kids; but each and all of us getting through physically and emotionally healthy has to be our first goal and will best position us for a return to a more normal life. Whatever more we can accomplish, to use a southern American term, frankly, is gravy, or, if you prefer, icing on the cupcake! 

Keeping sacred our commitments around how we think and work together in a time of crisis can be ballast for our individual and collective ‘ships in the storm.’ Longtime school leadership mentors (and psychologists) Rob Evans and Michael Thompson recently offered to heads of school four guideposts for us in these challenging times:

1. Community – keeping connectedness = providing mutual comfort;
2. Clarity – managing expectations =  recognizing limitations in doing the best we can; 
3. Candor – being honest about what we know or can control and what we can’t = sharing struggles openly and without fear of judgment;
4. Empathy – understanding among us that this is a time of great mutual and individual challenges = recognizing it’s a marathon more than a sprint, with the goal being getting through this difficult moment alive and well!

So far, in my view, we’re continuing to manage pretty well. But not without serious strain. On everyone. Keeping our school core values central to our institutional decision making in-crisis is helping and will remain essential in our efforts. Learning by doing; collaboration; care for diversity; learning in and from Nature; creativity and innovation — these mean more now than ever!  As we review and assess our plans and approaches, we come back to these core values, remembering, for instance, that learning by doing involves experimenting, innovating, flailing, even failing, reflecting, and trying again to get ‘there.’ The process and the journey often are more important than the outcomes! This is learning how to learn, and we’re all getting a big helping right now of what is easy and harder in uniquely ‘distant’ and ‘close’ arrangements!

Approximately 24 school days in, the teachers and academic leaders continue to respond, listening and learning, innovating thoughtfully, doing the best they can, all the while managing their own children and lives at home. Thank you to teachers and to all of you for your grace and vocal support, which mean so much. We must keep reminding ourselves that this situation is so far from perfect or even manageable, and we can’t make it perfect. No one decision or way is going to best fit all. We can adapt at intervals, and we will strive to differentiate, with options and choices for children and families and office hours and support. Yet we can not try ‘every way’ at once or pivot too often. 

One of my biggest worries will continue to be supporting our teachers and staff. In order to provide time for them to re-balance and reflect and plan, I believe we will give teachers at least one if not two additional planning/PD days, and we’ll be announcing when soon. These may be a welcome break for students and some families too. Supporting students who for any number of reasons are not able to engage in remote learning as hoped or who are feeling isolated and lost in the chaos of Covid-19 is a top priority, and we are adapting curricula and program as best we can, finding additional means for supporting the learning. And we are trying to support and encourage parents who are trying to do so much in this trying time and recognizing that it’s darned near impossible, now more than ever, to be perfect parents, spouses, educators, and workers!  Yes, we fully recognize that parents more than ever are co-educators and how hard that is!

No, it can never be as it would have been this spring. But there is light, and we are that light, together! Our entire engaged, optimistic community and our connections are our greatest resources!  We’ll stay reflective about how we’re going about this, but we can try not to over-perseverate, remembering that the whole world will be recalibrating to meet and support kids where they are when we return to something like normal. Meantime, as we strive to make the best of it, each best idea or contribution to making it better will not necessarily come from ‘the School’ or a teacher but may be from a parent or even a child! It may not always be a ‘centralized’ plan or directive but smaller collaborations that make big differences. We each will make important contributions to make this spring the best it can be! 

Stay well, 

Jeff