Cory Notestine (right) has introduced wholistic wellness practices to the regimen in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he is executive director of student success and wellness.  PHOTO COURTESY OF COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO., SCHOOL DISTRICT 11.

Last fall, education leaders were fielding guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, federal and state education departments, the White House, school boards, state and local health authorities and fellow grocery store shoppers on how to reopen schools safely. At no point did they align. At best, a handful of strategies seemed reasonable.

At that time, I remember speaking with our school district’s chief of staff about the complexities of mask-wearing. She turned to me and said, “Just make the best next decision. You’ll have a chance to make another one.”

That advice stuck. No decision regarding COVID-19 will be perfect.

Finding Silver Linings

Reopening a school district to students and staff is a complex process, especially when the planning timetable is compressed into two months, as it was in my school district in Colorado Springs, Colo., and others at the start of 2020-21. How do we serve all students well as we reinvent their schools?

One consideration is a concept known as rapid innovation cycles, which contribute to educational progress while fighting a failure-to-launch mentality. Rooted in the applied research about school methodology at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, we used these recursive cycles for design thinking in our district. We did so to gain empathy for our school community and to put in place some new ideas. We experienced failure and then tried to find silver linings that could be used to start the next school year.

The late science fiction writer Octavia Butler wrote: “I realize I don’t know very much. None of us know very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.”

My past experience in school counseling did not prepare me to be an epidemiologist. Knowledge of vaccinology wasn’t a requirement to succeed as executive director of student success and wellness in a 25,000-student school district.

What I knew from my work as a crisis coordinator and years as a school counselor is that our ability to regulate emotionally would be impacted because the daily routines we use to find balance had been tossed aside. My role as executive director means overseeing experts in counseling, family systems, multi-tiered systems of support, social-emotional learning, nursing and trauma.

The Colorado Springs, Colo., School District promotes social-emotional learning practices that yield stronger teacher-student relationships. PHOTO COURTESY OF COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO., SCHOOL DISTRICT 11.

We held a strong desire to get it right when we resumed school, mostly in person, last fall — not just for the students, but also for the families desperately needing to return to work, for the economic impact school closures were having in Colorado Springs and for the mental health of everyone.

School districts can use the opportunity of reopening to create something better. Since the year started, we’ve launched new programs on wholistic wellness with support from Kaiser Permanente and local partners, rolled out telehealth services that can be activated by a student in school or at home, and provided new professional learning on SEL, trauma, engagement and desperate out-comes exacerbated by the pandemic. For students, the reopening provided a sense of normalcy with consistent routines, friendship and some semblance of control that comes with knowing what tomorrow will look like.

Communication Priorities

Communication is especially important during times of uncertainty because it builds and maintains a connection while building trust. Communication plans should be developed defining the audience, frequency, modality and sequential order of distribution.

Administrators should be in touch with more parents as the date for reopening draws nearer. Our department developed guidance on conducting student/family outreach and support visits safely. Such connections will prove especially valuable for students in transition years — kindergarten, 6th grade and 9th grade — when learners are most vulnerable and susceptible to being underserved.

Our team created videos, in partnership with a local university’s counseling and human services department, aimed at parents and caregivers teaching basic skills on coping, holding conversations, giving grace and asking for help in uncertain times. (The videos can be accessed at www.d11.org/domain/5173 and www.d11.org/Page/13577.)

Colorado Springs’ superintendent, Michael Thomas, said early in the year he was “compelled to do what we always needed to because the pandemic illuminated how quickly students could slip away if we did not execute.”

When the next school year begins, districts should be looking out for the more desperate outcomes of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, or BIPOC, students compared to their white peers. These disproportionate outcomes go well beyond course performance, including chronic absenteeism and aberrant behavior. While it’s easy to cast a wide net to address SEL competencies, honing the focus on a few that are essential and have a strong relationship to student achievement makes better sense.

Individualized Needs

When planning for reopening, our staff needed to collect data, but doing so only after determining what to survey and how to act on the results.
We learned you cannot address all concerns without suffering setbacks. Still, it is important to inform your community of your decision-making process, as well as what was learned from the survey. Districts need to explicitly state the actions that will be taken based on community input and how they will affect student achievement.

Last summer, the staff and I engaged in multiple design teams, looking to redesign our educational system in two months. Two ideas centered on what it took for staff and students to emotionally and physically return to our buildings.

We launched surveys to all stakeholder groups. One SEL survey across all employee groups asked questions such as “How are you managing your stress given everything that is going on right now and those things that are being asked of you?”

Our intent here was that supervisors develop empathy for those they support and then work individually with staff who had additional needs, an MTSS model for adult learners.

The second strategy was to implement an individualized plan for every student, called Learning Alliance Plans. Teachers reached out to a designated group of students within their school and determined what they personally needed for learning to happen upon their return.

Sophie, a senior at Coronado High School in Colorado Springs, identified ways teachers reduced her stress “by spreading out assignments and allowing for more exploratory learning as opposed to task completion assignments.”

By no means did these two measures solve every problem, but they were our first attempt to reach the human side of learning and work.

Students in Colorado Springs, Colo., receive social and emotional support services to boost their achievement. PHOTO COURTESY OF COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO., SCHOOL DISTRICT 11.

More Than ABCs

None of us fully realized when schooling resumed that the rules governing student success, commonly flagged by attendance, behavior and course performance, had changed, probably forever.

Worse yet, we failed to inform the students about changes in the game of school and the rules they learned to mask engagement and success because of virtual learning platforms, hybrid schedules and rolling closures. In fact, those students who sat in the back or on the fringes managing to get by, faking engagement by simply showing up and turning in work yet going relatively unnoticed by teachers no longer would be deemed “average” but rather failing.

Students we had failed before the pandemic now are not only disengaged but losing hope the educational system will ever serve them or meet their needs. This reckoning is causing sleepless nights, but student service offices in school districts now carry responsibility for social-emotional skill development, which is correlated to student achievement.

Moving Ahead

The pivotal work of author John Hattie in Visible Learning for Teachers identified school-related factors that influence outcomes. While his most recently updated list of 252 influences can feel overwhelming, we’ve begun to narrow our focus in Colorado Springs, turning our attention to just five: self-efficacy, student-teacher relationships, self-management, emotional regulation and sense of belonging.

As we continue to lead through the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve all turned over rocks that we cannot place neatly back into their voids and expect magic to take care of what we found or do the hard work that remains. If we hope to sustain the desired changes in education brought about by the pandemic, educators should focus their attention on understanding engagement, an umbrella term often overused and misunderstood, and narrowing in on a few SEL strategies shown to lift student achievement.

CORY NOTESTINE is executive director of student success and wellness for Colorado Springs, Colo., School District 11. He is the 2015 National School Counselor of the Year. Twitter: @CoryNotestine