Thread by @TracyNovick

I was asked yesterday by a teacher who lingered after one of my superintendent search input sessions:

"You're in a lot of districts. Is everyone this exhausted?"

"Yes," I said. "And the thing is: it's ALL PARTS of school districts."

(this may have been more than the teacher was asking for!)

It's the students, who have been making that known through walkouts and presentations and press.

It's the families, for whom each part of this has been a balancing act of pieces without enough outside support.

It's bus drivers who are showing up to short-staffed bus yards to run combined routes in a Massachusetts winter with the windows cracked, with hit-or-miss student attendance.

It's school nutrition, feeding kids while short-staffed facing supply shortages, having to make changes on the fly.

(Everyone is making changes on the fly.)

.@Greg_Moffitt captured principal life now: edsurge.com/news/2022-01-2…

It's the ongoing "who is in/who is out/for how long" of every classroom teacher right now.

It's every "non-regular-classroom-teacher" getting pulled between their actual (library/individual assistance/therapy/etc) job and being pushed into classroom coverage.

--and note of course that every single last one of these is just the job part; everyone is also balancing family concerns, and their own health, and all the rest of the living in a pandemic pieces--

Take the principal piece above and multiply it across a district for every superintendent, plus add juggling whatever is coming down from the state and federal levels on top of that.

Custodians, of course, have gone from the hyper-cleaning of the early pandemic to now carefully managing filter changes and air flow, on top (of course!) of the usual, and with (of course!) staffing shortages.

Nurses: pandemic + winter in Massachusetts

Plus they're the experts in the building, right?

Secretaries are always the traffic management of buildings and offices, and think of how much more "in and out and back and forth" is going on now...

Those who staff central admin are often invisible to much of the district until they aren't there.

So take the illnesses and staffing challenges of everywhere, and apply them to already understaffed offices that then are managing ordering from backed up supply lines (and ordering a lot of things we never had to before!),

managing an influx of federal funding with additional reporting requirements, tracking who is in and out across districts every day (with all of the different kids of "being out" and how that is covered under state and federal law), and juggling an ever-changing array of needs.

Oh, right: and we're still doing all that we're usually supposed to be doing, too, right?

And of course, school committees have been swept into this universe of ongoing policy/budget/goal changing over the past two years, and under scrutiny like never before.

SO, yes: everyone is exhausted.

(And this is offered not to complain, but to confirm: it isn't only you!) #MAEdu