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.