Lessons for Leaders from the 2020-21 school Year: Building Public Confidence in School Reopening
COVID-19 undermined public confidence in our schools’ ability to provide safe, high-quality education to our nation’s young people. Starting at the beginning of the pandemic, district leaders had to make decisions about how to implement mitigation measures and reinvent schooling in response to an evolving understanding of the virus and what could be done to stop its spread to children and families while still supporting high quality student learning.
This report from the Beyond Crisis Schooling Project draws on data from two project phases:
1) Documents collected from 674 districts during the March 2020-June 2020 school building closure in Maine and Pennsylvania (n=7,142); and
2) Interviews with 52 school leaders from both Maine (n=24) and Pennsylvania (n=28) across geographic areas and other district characteristics
We use these two datasets to understand what lessons can be learned from the experiences of district superintendents working to build public confidence in district decisions in response to COVID. We hope that these lessons will be useful to both district leaders and policymakers responding to issues related to public health or other types of crisis schooling.
Download the report here:
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