This past week was a challenging one that reminded me of the importance of embracing hard feedback. Costa Rica is in the midst of the most severe wave of COVID-19 cases since the onset of the pandemic. The national government, in an attempt to control the outbreak, has outlined renewed restrictions that seek to limit contagion without shutting down key elements of the economy. Last Monday, the public school system got involved, with the Ministry of Education announcing that they would be shifting the academic calendar to allow schools to shut down for 3 weeks during the peak of the COVID wave. This declaration made it mandatory for public schools to close their doors starting today.
The decision to shift the calendar and mandate public school closures left private schools in the country in limbo. In a private meeting that same Monday afternoon, we were informed that private schools would be required to shift entirely to virtual learning during the 3 week public school closure. We were invited to move forward accordingly, with the understanding that physical school closure was not optional.
We made the formal announcement the next day that the final three weeks of school would be entirely virtual. Unlike previous decisions and communications with our school community over the course of our navigation of the COVID pandemic, this communication raised immediate concerns from many members of our school community. Without a formal announcement from the Ministry of Health and Education that virtual learning was a mandate, why would we announce a move to virtual education? Furthermore, if the government could shift in-person options in a moment, our families wanted to know what we were doing to ensure that the upcoming school year would be as free of disruptions and limits to in-person learning as possible.
When feedback comes in a flood like it did this past week, it can be difficult to process and appreciate it. If you allow yourself to get in a defensive mode, then you can become blind to the fact that the feedback can actually make you better and stronger moving forward. Of course we had a strong rationale for our decision to close, both fulfilling the need to provide several days’ notice to cancel contracts for in-person services, and to provide our staff and families with enough advance notice to plan accordingly. Additionally, by the end of the week, we did get an official announcement from the Ministry of Health and Education. Moving to virtual was the legal expectation, and we had been proactive in our communication about that. Yet the feedback that had come was still incredibly helpful. Some of our families felt that as an administration, we weren’t being responsive enough to their needs as parents. In other cases, there was concern that our communication had been too one-sided and that we weren’t curious enough about how our parents were feeling about any decision to close in-person services.
The result of the feedback was some genuine reflection and planning to act on what we heard. This included us planning an information and feedback session to talk with our community about our planning for reopening in August. I also had the chance to personally reach out to some of our families to better understand what they were thinking and feeling about how plans were unfolding. In the end, I came away with a better sense of the decisions we needed to make as a school that would best meet the needs of our students and families. It was another reminder that the moment when it is hardest to hear the feedback is often the time when you need it the most.
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