This past week, we launched our district Innovation Design Team (IDT), with the goal of bringing together a cross-functional team to infuse the planning process for reopening with a push for designing personalized, student-centered learning environments.  We are not satisfied simply with a reopening.  We want to ensure that the schools our students come back to are even better equipped to promote student learning and foster the social-emotional health of our learners.  The framework shared by the IDT facilitator team focuses on five key domains in the context of redesign:

Elicit Stakeholder Input & Feedback

As a community oriented educational organization, it is essential that our design process be as inclusive as possible to the voices and perspectives of our community.  This has been a clear priority of our board of education, and that desire for community input is a key element of our redesign work.  As a district, this past week we sent out a comprehensive survey to families to inquire as to their preferences and expectations with regards to different reopening scenarios.  At the same time, the superintendent launched his superintendent’s community advisory committee.  The role of the IDT is to ensure that survey data and community input drives the design decisions for August reopening and beyond.

Identify Critical Areas of Need

At times during the COVID crisis, the sheer breadth of decision-making and emergency response has felt overwhelming.  In many ways, we have already had to redesign entire systems of operations in a matter of days and weeks.  In the midst of so many areas that could merit our attention, it is essential that the IDT focus on those areas of most critical need.  This was the first order of the day last week when the team facilitated its first group meeting, taking time to sift through competing demands to identify those critical areas that will need our most focused attention and effort over the next few weeks.

Provide Recommendations

The IDT is not the system that carries out the work.  We already have a district full of departments and teams who are equipped to carry out the work of educating, feeding, and serving our students.  Rather, the role of the IDT as we have envisioned it is to engage in a series of “design sprints” – to systematically review health guidelines, legal frameworks, and best practices around the world, to provide solid recommendations to the departments and decision-making units of the district.  In other words, the IDT is design to build knowledge and capacity to carry out the highest-leverage practices that are out there.

Develop Systems (Logistical & Instructional)

If I have learned anything during my time in Santa Ana Unified, it is that in a large system, instructional innovation at the student level – the shifts towards more personalized, project-based and rigorous learning environments – is largely mitigated by the operational and logistical systems that run in the background.  From the recruitment and retention of talented staff, to the alignment of resources, to the procurement of key instructional materials and practices, to the systematic professional development of staff, to the student information system and grading software, instructional systems flow from logistical systems.  As Improvement Science so strongly suggests, these systems need to be carefully mapped and redesigned if new and better outcomes are to be realized.

Action Planning

Ultimately, the success of the IDT will be measured by the concrete actions that are taken up by the school system to improve and redesign the learning experience of our students.  With such an unprecedented opportunity and critical need for departments and teams to come together, the IDT must foster and encourage a collaborative spirit that is fiercely centered on equitable learning for all students in SAUSD.  The current crisis has and will continue to demand a lot of our staff, and we are confident that we can collectively rise to the challenge, through a community input and research driven process that results in timely recommendations and action at every level of the organization.

This past Tuesday, the Santa Ana Board of Education approved for our current Director of Elementary Education, Bianca Barquin, to replace me as the next Assistant Superintendent of K12 Teaching and Learning as soon as I depart next month.  I’m incredibly excited about the selection.  I don’t know exactly how many years Bianca has been with Santa Ana Unified, but it is easily in the double digits.  She has been a site administrator, a director of Human Resources, and an absolutely essential member of our current Teaching & Learning team.  It’s a great choice and addition for the leadership team.

And now, I’m officially in lame duck status.  I remember back in January, immediately after I accepted the position as General Director of the Lincoln School in Costa Rica, both our interim superintendents and then our new superintendent expressed some concern that if I announced my departure too early, I might get cut out of the decision-making process or that people might start to ignore me.  It wasn’t really a warning at all, but rather genuine counsel that I should time my announcement thoughtfully.  In terms of district leadership, transition timelines tend to be on the shorter end – working for 6 months after formally accepting another position is not the norm.  I ended up announcing pretty quickly, and continually joked that I was eager to be disinvited from meetings, which somewhat disappointingly never happened.

In fact, with COVID-19 and all of the emergency response and planning, the work has only intensified.   The past 2 months have quickly become some the most pressing of my professional career.  There has been little time to reflect on past efforts or think much about winding down as a district employee.  We’ve simply been too busy for any of that.  On most days I get so caught up in my work that I forget we’re in the midst of packing up our house.

In that sense, I’m deeply grateful.  There is really nothing more fulfilling professionally then to be part of a hard-working, hard-charging team that is pushing one another to do some of the best work of their lives.  I’ve certainly felt that way this semester – and the work is far from over.   My educational services leadership team meets every single day, and for as much as I wish we could cut back on our meeting time, we seem to have a full agenda of discussions and daily decision points.  On most mornings we don’t get through everything.  Our broader cabinet team meets three times each week, and our 90 minutes together each time are stuffed.  As I find myself repeating, we’ve had to redesign practically every system across the district, to how we serve meals (over a million served since the physical closure) to how we take inventory to how we provide instruction and distribute learning materials.  It’s been a roller coaster of a semester.

I’ve stopped believing that things will slow down.  Perhaps people will start to quietly disengage after after graduation and with the onset of summer.  I kind of doubt it.  Just two weeks before school would normally be ending, we are formally launching an innovation and design team to rethink what school looks like in August.  Our team has been digging in to countless thought papers and design overviews to guide our thinking.  At a time when the normal school year cycle is winding down, it feels like we are just getting started.

And so begins the final push to departure.  I’m feeling energized, curious, and eager to keep pressing forward as we continue to move through such strange times in education.

I just read a piece put out by Transcend Education entitled “Responding, Recovering, and Reinventing.”  In a nutshell, the article presents these three Rs as a framework for addressing the COVID-19 crisis in schools.  I certainly have felt like the past 2 months have been an intense Response to an emergency crisis.  We’ve virtually redesigned an entire district system in a matter of weeks.  The Responding element of the framework very much rings true, and it has been a very heavy lift.

As for the Recovering, I’m not 100% sure when that is supposed to happen, or what that entirely means.  I think everyone is hopeful that the summer months will bring at least a measure of recovery time.  Perhaps the most difficult element of the Recovering mode is the question of how do you adequately recover when the short term time horizon is filled with so much uncertainty?  I think everyone is waiting to exhale and welcome some distant moment of predictability.  But that moment does not seem to be forthcoming.  Instead, our pivot to reinventing and planning for the future requires that we plan for multiple scenarios and contingencies, which of course demands a high level of organizational integration and collaboration.  Large systems struggle to produce a single coherent plan for meaningful student learning and fiscal solvency under typical conditions; planning for multiple scenarios simultaneously requires a capacity that is stretching everyone.

The article describes Recovery as a time for “recouping learning” and for “restoring community.”  We are actively pursuing both of these outcomes.  We redesigned our summer programs to include a robust “summer bridge” experience for our students that would address the most essential learning standards that were missed during the physical school closure.  The summer months also buy us some much needed time in our pursuit of an internet connectivity solution that will be robust enough to meet the long term needs of our students and community.  Our team of Family and Community Engagement workers have designed virtual town halls and school level community meetings, all with the goal of “restoring community” and bringing a sense of connection and support during a difficult time for many of our families.  We don’t yet entirely know the economic fallout for Santa Ana, but we have enough data and anecdotal stories to know that it is hitting hard.  Of course the Santa Ana ethic is and has always been to keep moving forward with faith in the future while seeking the benefits of hard work and education.  But still, times are difficult for many.

On a personal level, my family and I are preparing for a transition to Costa Rica, and so our recovery will be more of a reset.  Certainly it will not allow much time for physical or mental “recovery.”  Every spare moment right now is spent in making arrangments for our move.  We’ve sold our house, made living arrangements, and I’m checking in each week with the leadership team at the Lincoln School where I’ll be serving as General Director come July 1.  We’re incredibly excited about the opportunity to join the Lincoln family, although the uncertainty of when the airport in San Jose will reopen and whether we’ll actually be able to make the move on time has certainly been an ongoing source of some anxiety.  Of course, we consider ourselves tremendously blessed and recognize that in many ways, the entire world is passing through a universal moment of anxiety and difficulty.

I am very much energized to move on to the Reinventing part of the framework, but think it is important not to forget the healing and connecting that comes via time for Recovery.  For some, the impact of the physical closure has set back plans and dreams for the future, if at least temporarily.  I’m a deeply goal and task-oriented person, and the call for Recovery has been a good reminder that everyone needs some space to rest and heal in life after confronting a crisis.

While a lot of education thought leaders have been outlining the new possibilities for education now that virtual learning has, at least temporarily, gone mainstream, practitioners in schools have been wholly engrossed in emergency response and planning.  Every time someone eagerly announces that schooling will never be the same, I admittedly have to remind myself that the first order of the day is to address the very short term needs of students and school communities.  Graduations have been cancelled.  Legal frameworks for conducting business and providing mandatory services have been suspended by executive order.  Families who may have struggled to pay for services before find themselves even more stretched to address basic needs.  We’ve had to design emergency systems for food distribution and mental health services from scratch, and figure out ways to provide educational materials and device distributions while social distancing and without the benefit of universal internet access.   

Last week started to feel like a turning point for me and our educational team.  Over the course of a few days, our school governing board approved a grading policy for the Spring and Summer 2020 semesters.  We rolled out a series of guiding documents and program overviews, including our emergency remote learning continuity plan, our graduation plan, our revised summer school plans, and a plan to address timing and return of inventory (textbooks, digital devices, instruments, etc.).  Our tech team has introduced a system for families to get repairs on devices.  Our food distribution team has provided hundreds of thousands of meals to the community.  We instituted a system for careful consideration of requests for leadership teams to access campuses to conduct essential tasks as we figure out the safest way to close school for 2019-20.  Our communications team launched a major initiative to celebrate and recognize our seniors whose culminating semester looks unlike any of the past 75 years.

Admittedly, the last quarter of school this year was a herculean effort that is most accurately described as an emergency response.  It reflects the best that we could hope for and attain given the circumstances.  We even changed the name of our educational overview from a “distance learning plan” to an “emergency remote learning continuity plan.”  Perhaps a technical difference, but one that reflects our belief that a true digital learning experience can and must be more than what we were able to provide given the immediacy of the physical closure of schools in March.

So now, while we run one of the largest organizations in Orange County, we will simultaneously turn our attention to the strategic questions of providing a meaningful and rigorous education come Fall 2020.  We’ve already begun the planning, and members of our respective district and school leadership teams are looking carefully at the different models and structures that might prove most effective.  We’ve identified examples of best practices within our own district team, as well as begun curation of instructional practices and programs outside the organization that have proven most promising.  We are mobilizing to provide universal internet access, despite significant structural challenges.  We’re scenario and contingency planning for what school should look like, given different guidelines that might come at the state and national level.  We’re planning to hit a moving target, and that will require all of us to build skills and leadership capacity that we may not have possessed before.

I’m incredibly proud of the work our Santa Ana team has done to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.  But our work is far from done.  If we are to deliver on our mission to prepare every student for college and career success, then we’ve only set a foundation for the work that will need to unfold in the coming months.  It’s a historic opportunity to move from unexpected tragedy to building something better for our students and community in the long term.