This past summer, as we prepared to safely reopen our Brooklyn LAB campus for in-person learning, we invited our school community to a virtual town hall to share insights from an 80-page document outlining our new COVID-19 health and safety protocols.

Together, we created the COVID-19 School Communications Toolkit, organized around five core principles that represent the communications our school communities deserve. Within each principle, we include practical recommendations school leaders can apply now to communicate better during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. The guide also discusses how to use communications to address ongoing, deeply ingrained systemic challenges like racism and able-ism. Together, these principles and practices will help you establish new norms and a school culture centered around equity so that every student at your school can learn and thrive.

  • Collaborative The idea that “we’re better together” has helped schools prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable people during the pandemic. Schools can extend this ethos by communicating with their community, not just to their community.
  • Empathetic This year has been challenging, and recovery will take years after the pandemic ends. By consciously cultivating empathy, we can better understand and respond to the needs of our school community.
  • Transparent and Truthful In a period marked by pain and uncertainty—where truth and science have been denigrated—schools must embrace frequent, open, and fact-based communication.
  • Accessible and Inclusive Everyone in the school community deserves to receive information in a way that works for them. The substance of messages, presentation, and method of delivery must be accessible to everyone.
  • Resilient There’s no need to sugarcoat the fact that school communities are experiencing grim realities. But you can use communications to help your community heal, look to the future, and highlight what is working.

Read the full article about providing the right communities with communication safety by  Jonathan Flynn, Cecile Kidd, Aaron Daly and Eric Tucker at Getting Smart.