Top Five Ways to Deliver Bad News

No one likes giving someone bad news - but treat people with respect. Plus, a short reflection on the five year anniversary of the covid pandemic.

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Hello everyone -

Typically, I prefer wading directly into things but with Covid, I have a tangle of unpleasant feelings that I don’t enjoy revisiting - anger and sadness with nowhere to go. I know mistakes were made and there were bad or not thoroughly thought out decisions that led to other bad decisions at the top levels of the public health establishment. Like that the 6 foot rule was kind of arbitrary as was “fifteen days to stop the spread.”

I also remember talking to my niece, whose good friend is a deeply experienced epidemiologist and researcher at one of the world’s leading research centers in London, someone I shared my fear of pandemics when running a boarding school years before after an ebola outbreak when I was over there on a visit. He told me (and I paraphrase) “it’s statistically unlikely to have a “hot zone” like situation - an airborne disease with a high mortality rate.” And when the situation in northern Italy blew up, I remember asking my niece what her friend thought and she said, he wasn’t sure how concerned to be. It certainly wasn’t the ebola mortality rate of 50%. As it stands now, the covid mortality rate is 1% and recorded deaths due to covid is 7 million worldwide, with 1.2 million in the US. By comparison, globally flu kills about 2M people in a five year time span.

In March 2020, though, if the mortality rate had turned out to be similar to the 1918 pandemic, the mortality rate would be 2.5%, an even more colossal tragedy than it was. I think about that a lot when I think back to decision making in the spring of 2020.

I’m not excusing the mistakes but even in the expert class, we as humans are subject to the fog of war. Bad decisions get made at high levels about important issues all the time.

The unfocused anger I feel is mainly towards what my parents lost in the final years of their lives when they were not at full steam but more or less engaged and mobile. Did the pandemic hasten their decline? I have no idea. They were very old in 2020 and today my mom is very, very old. My dad was definitely already declining. But the pandemic was really hard on them; they didn’t deserve what they got.

I am also just plain old sad about a few things. Our school team had killed themselves to do outstanding work in the years before the pandemic and we were firing on all cylinders. We had just started the silent phase of a capital campaign, the first major ask was knock it out of the ballpark successful and we had also successfully re-engaged a major influential donor. If it wasn’t oversharing and gauche, I would share the photo I still have on my phone of my back of the napkin predicted NTR result for fall 2020, based on raw number and the trends in our yield numbers. I gleefully sent the photo to the DEM and the CFO.

The napkin was from the bar of the fabulous SoHo Grand hotel, where I got an affordable room to go to a one man show with my niece, tickets I ordered before the contagion had started to spread. You could feel the panic starting to spread in the city and I left before noon the next morning, not to return for months. I had no idea we would be doing graduation on Zoom in a few months. It was such a heartbreak to not be able to celebrate the glorious class of 2020 together. And that was just the beginning in a series of heartbreaks large and small that seemed to go on for a long time.

Life always has its compensations and joys even when your luck looks like it’s in a one way trip down the drain. New doors open. New horizons emerge. New relationships happen that wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. But we’re all a little beaten up and crabby now, all a little close to being on that last nerve.

There are books coming out that are harshly critical on school closings and the teachers’ unions and while I know these stories deserve to be told and that independent schools are the examples pointed to as to how pandemic schooling should have been done, I never like to see the teaching profession beaten up. It is always punching down. The public wants kids’ achievement to improve but they don’t see how denigration and contempt are preventing the profession from being respected as a path to leading a dignified and meaningful middle class life. I will probably end up reading a few of the books unpacking it all, but I will do it with one eye shut.

And I also read an article this morning that analyzes learning loss data, tracing its roots and causes to the advent of smartphones before the pandemic. Schooling exists in a complicated crossroads and teachers are a convenient, powerless and largely female target.

We were all so scared. That’s probably the hardest part for me to reconnect with but maybe the most important. I remember going into a huge parking lot to do a drive through covid test with the National Guard and the medical staff in full PPE and wondering how did the world become a dystopian novel? This can’t be MY world.

But it was. It doesn’t exempt people who made major decisions from accountability - but a lot of those same people also had influence in a program to develop a vaccine in an astonishingly short amount of time. And even if everything had been handled perfectly - whatever that even means - a lot of people died, a lot of people got sick and it still would not give us those years back to being what we thought our future held for us back in the winter of 2020.

As a society, we want to examine what happened so it won’t happen again but I’m afraid it fights against human nature to fully prepare for a vaguely imagined next pandemic. After all, when money is short, deferred maintenance is the first thing to get cut out of a school’s budget. But it will help us at the very least frame and think about the next public health crisis differently. If we can do it without the finger wagging, I would appreciate it.

Top Five Ways to Deliver Bad News

Part of any job that carries responsibility to supervise others means you will have to deliver news that is at best disappointing and at worst potentially life altering. I still remember the first conversation I had along these lines as a department head, when a faculty member came to me after the academic dean put a contract in his mailbox that was, shall we say, unattractive in the number of courses and preps. What I remember was that I swallowed hard and told him that what was offered was what was available. It felt really bad, but it was the truth.