Priorities and Practices for Crafting School Statements

"To write or not to write" isn't the right question

This is Talking Out of School, a weekly newsletter about schools, change, leadership and being a human in the 21st century. Thank you to all the subscribers who support this work!

If a subscriber passed this on to you and you’re enjoying this work, please consider a free subscription. More subscribers means growth and growth increases my ability to attract interesting guests to be interviewed, more readers to send me interesting ideas, more community members to start a resourceful comments section etc. 

Hello readers!

On the one hand, I did not quite manage my time well in a busy week, so here’s Friday’s post a day late. 

Stony Creek Strategy news

On the other hand, it’s good to be busy! I’m grateful to welcome new subscribers. And I’m grateful for all the ideas and support as I talk to school leaders (and leaders beyond the school walls) for launching new paid subscription tiers in addition to the free tier of Talking Out of School in 2024. More information coming in the next few weeks.

Priorities and Practices for Crafting Effective School Statements

Given the amount of conversation around university-level institutional statements in the past few months, I was not surprised to see this article in a recent issue of New York magazine. Jonathan Chait’s thesis is that universities and schools (and he does specifically include schools) are contributing to societal divisiveness by publishing statements in response to political events. And he contends the answer is simple - just stop doing it.

The example he uses is poignant and from his wife’s hometown of Teaneck, NJ, which has a large Jewish population and a growing Muslim population. The Washington Post covered it in this detailed story. However, when you compare the Post’s story and Chait’s opinion piece, I think Chait cherry picks his evidence. (And spoiler alert, the Post story includes a hopeful ending brought about by two high school girls, so it’s well worth the read.)

To bottom line it, Chait’s point is the Teaneck superintendent of schools created a flash point in publishing a statement and then that upset boiled over into what one bystander called “WWE Wrestling behavior” in a subsequent school board meeting. 

But school statements don’t have the power to ignite fires if the tinder wasn’t already pretty dry to begin with. The narrative in the Post story has a different angle and flavor, which is frankly much sadder - were we really all getting along or were we really just avoiding tough topics and crossing our fingers?

Publicly responding to a national or world event is nerve wracking and the stakes feel very high. You don’t want to be the school the Post writes about. However, I don’t think the real issue here is whether or not to be in the statement-writing business. I think it’s about how schools use their roles as leaders of a community to provide acknowledgement, a little perspective and maybe even comfort to help people process a very confusing and often unsettling time. 

And it’s about understanding your constituents and where they’re coming from - including the ones you may be personally inclined to disagree with. Unfortunately, we’re in a place where most Americans associate a value system with a political affiliation. And political beliefs in 2023  manifest in very visceral and emotional ways.

And perhaps most of all, schools need to build multiple robust, regularly used communications channels with constituents so you have structures in place before you’re on the phone with your board chair or comms director with your stomach in a knot. And this is quite doable and something that is not complicated when your goal is to connect and create relationships and not to navigate highly emotional, political and value-laden topics. And it goes without saying, to build these robust channels you need a professionalized comms director and an adequately resourced communications function.

I think there are lots of solid reasons to abide by the advice in this fine NAIS piece. It all makes absolutely perfect sense - except the context keeps shifting. More and more, I’m convinced the old rules don’t apply. Or at least they apply imperfectly, like a beautiful jacket that no longer fits and you keep trying it on, hoping it fits. And at a distance it looks OK, but close up, it’s just not working. And really, what I’m writing about here is in addition to the advice in the NAIS piece.

So what is a more nuanced way to approach this other than “to write or not write an institutional statemen?”

First off, it’s establishing that the overall goal of school communications is about fostering relationships between constituents and the school. And by constituents I mean everyone from prospective families to faculty and staff to current students and families to alums.

Accept that national and global events will happen that disturb and upset your constituents. Likely they will have up close, graphic information about these events sent directly to their phone. People have a very personal connection to their phones so the impact is even greater and more emotional than the old days when we saw highly curated images through television. For those of us oldsters, imagine the coverage and content around 9/11 now. Yikes. And that’s for me thinking about it as an adult - think about a fifteen year old getting a firehose of this content.

Students who have phones will have access to these images, although it will be highly variable as to who is seeing what. But we also know there’s a high emotional contagion rate among kids, and teenagers in particular find it clarifying and galvanizing to identify strong emotional collective experiences.

Schools are some of the strongest communities we have right now. In an era of division, institutional distrust and continued recovery from years of social isolation, school communities, where families are brought together in the mission to educate their children, are still largely cohesive, mission driven communities. As a result, school leaders - particularly heads, but this applies to any school leader who has a lot of contact with families and represents their child’s day to day life - are all de facto community leaders. 

So if your constituents are impacted by a global or national event, at a certain point if you choose not to communicate at all, you are saying something. And that “something” is a blank projection screen over which you have no control.

But if you have those robust, multiple communications channels, you can much more easily make a decision about which constituency needs to hear from you and what you can offer them as a community leader. And true- communicating with all constituencies with the same broad statement about national or global events - “the official statement” - outside of your usual communications routines will likely be very rare.

As to the content, my rule of thumb is never write anything you couldn’t calmly and confidently defend in terms of the school’s mission and values. The point is not to communicate in such a bland way as to reach no one. It’s to leverage the school’s mission and values as a reminder to the community of why you’re all here and why these communities mean so much in difficult times. It’s to demonstrate empathy and understanding that community members may be struggling and direct them towards avenues of support. It’s pointing a way forward with how we can use the educational mission to broaden our individual understanding and provide meaning in a confusing and upsetting time.

And the head is not the school - the head is the chief representative of the school. There may be political opinions you believe are deeply moral but that is you as an individual. It’s different when you’re channeling the institution. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference, but it’s your job to think it through and hopefully you have a skilled comms director by your side.

This is all easier to work on when you are not in the middle of sorting through your own emotional response to a major national or global crisis.

So, don’t kick the can down the road. Really take a realistic look at your communications function. I’d recommend doing getting your policies and procedures in order sooner than later because you never know what’s right around the corner. In January, 2020, we were still blithely planning a trip to Asia that spring. And communicate any policies at a time when you’re regularly communicating policy shifts or changes to your constituents. Don’t have your political crisis response be “we don’t respond to political crises anymore.”

And as a head, put some time into thinking about how your values and the school’s values come together so you can express it in an individualistic and authentic way. And be sure to pay close attention to places where you are not as aware where your values may be interpreted as political opinions. This is tricky and in 2023, it is for sure threading a needle. It takes time and a lot of reflection. It takes practice in articulating these thoughts in writing. And I am at work creating a simple, asynchronous“writing boot camp” to help kickstart the process for heads contemplating their points of view on leadership communications.

There are moments when people crave a moral authority to make them feel a little less alone, that someone is paying attention, and that ultimately, even if it’s hard right now, things will be all right. And sometimes as leaders, it can be hard to find that surety that indeed, things will be all right. Anyone who leads through the pandemic, particularly in a boarding school context, knows exactly what I mean. But it’s finding a way to authentically express how and why your community will find a way through to the other side. It’s about providing some meaning and some hope by offering connection at the local level even when things are haywire outside the school walls.

See you next week -

Julie