Rooting and Tuning

Growing up, I attended a fine arts magnet school where I focused on music—singing in chorus and playing the violin. Two things were muscle memory for a violinist: tuning your instrument and recording practice tapes. 

At the start of every practice and rehearsal, I tightened and loosened the four strings of my violin to ensure that I was in harmony with each member of the orchestra. Though each song brought its own notes, crescendos, and dissonance, tuning ensured that we were all of one sound. At home each week, I set my recorder and picked up practicing where school left off, listening back to my playing to perfect every note. I imagined my orchestra, each member in their own homes looping back their recordings over and over again like I did to improve their own skills. And when we came to practice together the next day, we played the songs with more confidence and mastery, the repetition moving us closer to the design, intention, and beauty of the composition.

At the turn of the year, I began considering my own intentions for the beautiful year ahead that I want to design for myself and for StartOps. Muscle memory never really goes away and the words “rooting and tuning” kept surfacing. Moving through school operations in my work feels orchestral. The typical 180 days of school are daily practices for operations teams, adapting (tuning) and synchronizing (harmonizing) to the rhythm of school. But operations teams don’t need reminding: the isolation, unsustainable demand, and lack of role clarity and preparation that is all too common with our work leads to dissonance, if not a loud crash, most days.

So how do we root in existing best practices and tune our own work as operations teams? Where can we create space to make mistakes, reflect on them, and adapt our approach to work through the many aspects of school operations better?

ROOTING

Like violinists, teachers commonly record their lessons and review them with more experienced teachers and coaches to improve their performance. This cycle of practice, reflection, and adjustment is not new to schools, but it is virtually exclusive to instruction, not operations. Operations work through a cycle of deliverables and projects year over year, but for many teams, there are not the stages of reflection and adjustment for each staff member to refine their skillsets.

I use the word “rooting” because, like practice tapes, this cycle begins with self. As an operations team member, I began with documenting how I complete a specific project. I then rooted in what the school’s vision, mission, values, and standards are to compare whether my approach contributes to my team’s shared goals. The documentation is critical because it enabled me to observe from a distance how I, at that current time and with the tools I had available, worked through a process. The same rooting applies to my current leadership at StartOps - each project ends and begins with a reflection: how did we do it before? How did we do it this time? How will we do it better next time?

TUNING

Tuning requires an ear for your team and audience. My own tuning began late January with in-person visits and virtual pulse checks with our school partners. During these conversations, we surfaced the need for continued role clarity as a means to allow for role ownership by individual team members; made new commitments to creating resources for stronger collaboration and accountability; and discussed what is required for a successful close of the year (and start to the next school year). Our partners are our audience because they experience the work we share, and we are fortunate that they will tell us exactly what they need. And this action of tuning has created clarity for how StartOps will continue to deliver on our mission to retain and support operations team members.

The bottom line is that the beginning months of each year grant us a reset to root in the values that guide our ways of being and tune ourselves to the goals, knowledge, and assumptions of our teams. Organizational and operational work is orchestral and that can inspire how we improve our schools’ flow.

What about ops? Essential and yet, invisible.

While traveling back to DC from my grandfather’s funeral in North Carolina, I met a Brunswick County school nurse. We talked about our reasons for traveling through the Wilmington airport, which quickly turned into a conversation about COVID-19. Debbie is a veteran nurse of 25 years, and for the past 2 years, she has had a caseload of 20 schools across rural, coastal North Carolina. Hired into a 3-month temporary position in the summer of 2020, she manages positive case response across 20 schools including contact tracing and reporting. Her consistency has outpaced the Health Department in notifying families of available resources and return timelines. Debbie was headed to Atlanta to visit her son, who was treating her to a special weekend, including a spa day.

Debbie deserves much more than a spa day. Debbie is one of many non-instructional school staff whose work has quadrupled over the pandemic. School operations teams — receptionists, registrars, operations associates, data managers, you name it — have taken on contact tracing, COVID relief grant management, testing programs, PPE inventory management, and response planning. And the list doesn’t end here. As academic teams transitioned to virtual learning models, operations teams coordinated at-home material packets, prepared technology and hotspots for at-home learning, and coordinated weekly meal distribution for families.

The pandemic has been overwhelmingly difficult on all school staff, and teachers’ self-advocacy has rightfully garnered the attention it deserves since they are heavily exposed to the risks of COVID-19. But we must also call attention to operations staff. Many have taken on a full job’s worth of responsibilities on top of their normal workload. Despite how essential the work of operations teams are in school, operations staff are invisible in our conversations around burnout and retention.

For the past 18 months, I have had the opportunity to coach and support operations leaders and teams in schools across Washington, DC and Indianapolis. Some are startup schools with one or two team members managing all of school operations and data compliance; others are school networks with operations teams of six members at each campus. The structure and school models are as diverse as the students they serve, but they are all experiencing the overwhelming struggles of keeping schools open. Amidst this diversity of context, several themes have emerged:

• State and local requirements are always shifting, and support and guidance are not always consistent. Yet operations teams have had to adapt quickly and bear the brunt of families’ frustration as they rose to meet the needs of their school communities;

• School leaders recognize that their teams are burnt out and call for more wellness supports, but instructional staff has largely been the first to receive those supports;

• Operations team members feel deeply isolated in their roles and have very little access to consistent, holistic professional development;

• Operations teams continue to feel siloed, understaffed and under-resourced (and still, some states and cities do not equip every school with a full-time nurse); and

• While the influx of COVID-related public funds has supported immensely, the added grant compliance has expanded the breadth of operational responsibilities.

With this in mind, Debbie (or insert your operations team member of choice) needs not only a spa day, but she needs:

• Resources — connect operations staff with cross-school communities of peers to support one another in similar responsibilities, and equip operations staff with targeted professional development to improve their technical and leadership skills

• Flexibility — the emerging models for teacher flexibility show that it is possible to extend flexibility to all staff. Rather than flexible schedules for teachers that increase in-person responsibilities for operations staff, consider staff-wide flexibility policies that include operations members.

• Visibility — operations take center stage when something goes wrong, but do they take center stage in celebrations and planning conversations? Celebrate staff and affirm their perspectives by surveying for their feedback

• Advocacy — recognize that operations staff are at the margins of staff wellness conversations, and imagine and push for the policies and structures that center operations staff’s wellbeing and feedback

School leaders can create better work experiences for their non-instructional team members by:

• Creating flexible schedules that allow for off-site work or additional leave days

• Prioritize capturing the processes and systems that work

• Resource professional learning experiences for the entire operations team that combine technical, adaptive, and mindfulness resources and tools.

Investments of time and resources into flexible schedules, role clarity, professional development and community can be the factors that lead to greater retention of non-instructional staff and ultimately create a path for overall school sustainability.

Operations teams are the lifeblood of schools ensuring that each system is operating as it should in support of student safety, learning, and well-being. Blood is exposed through a wound and operations teams are invisible until there is an emergency. As schools, government agencies, and other entities build anew as we head into an endemic COVID virus, it is imperative that we make the invisible visible.

As operations teams are preparing for enrollment and spring testing, extend them some grace, additional time off, and a sincere THANK YOU.