Confronting chaos: How secondary campus principals face novel crisis events

The Coronavirus Pandemic drastically altered not only the education systems in Texas and the US, but the reality of society across the world. Public schools continue to be in varying states of distress, and secondary principals are at the front lines of the ever-evolving crisis scenario. The strategies employed by these campus principals during such a novel crisis event, must be studied in order to understand the critical lessons learned during these events and to impact policies relating to the crisis management training of future campus principals. This study uses grounded theory methods to develop a functional theoretical model, describing the key elements to novel crisis management as seen through the lesson’s principals learned while facing this crisis. Initial codes found individual concerns or challenges, such as issues with technology, concerns and fears of the unknown, the benefits or lack of autonomy, issues between secondary and elementary based policies, and the challenges of state level guidance. These codes converged into themes such as, the need to be forward thinking in education, the impact poverty and geographical locations have during a crisis, the critical roles of power and control during a crisis, and the human element to crisis management. The final round of coding and analysis worked to bring together the universal experience of participants through the lens of the complexity theory. Each participant’s circumstances sometimes worked to alleviate the obstacles arising, while sometimes compounding those obstacles increasing stress and frustration. These results facilitate the conclusion that district leaders need to examine the way they train campus leaders, broaden their focus to incorporate more human element-based trainings, and examine the level of autonomy they afford their campus principals. State organizations need to examine their impact on districts during a crisis event when releasing conflicting and ever-changing policy guidance. The Coronavirus Pandemic emphasized the need for these changes, and while this crisis is no long in its initial novel stages, the next novel crisis event may be approaching faster than anticipated. Because of this, district and state leaders should listen and acknowledge the lessons learned by campus principals during the Coronavirus Pandemic, in order to be better prepared and ready for the next novel crisis event.