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.