Lessons from Toronto’s Public Schools in Times of COVID-19

By Candice O’Grady

Candice O’Grady shares the best practices Toronto District School Board developed to ensure their communications strike a reasonable and consistent balance between transparency and privacy.

When Ontario schools were shuttered in March 2020, to stem the spread of a new and poorly understood virus, my job changed overnight. As a Communications Officer supporting Toronto’s schools with issues and crisis management, the advent of COVID-19 required new processes, structures, and protocols. It required us to have a heightened level of flexibility, adaptability, and nimbleness as we dealt with (and continue to deal with) the volatility of the pandemic day in and day out.

Before COVID, an average week would include managing a variety of discreet local issues—a gas leak, a stranger on school property, staffing changes, a death within a school community, coyotes, bed bugs, positive press about a school program or event, a visit from a politician. While the job was always unpredictable, I could never anticipate what would arise over the course of a day, we had processes, language and communications plans in place for most contingencies. We had a suite of materials that could be adapted and tailored to fit nearly every situation. Until COVID-19.

The pandemic was different than previous public health issues that I had managed in three fundamental ways:

1. it affected everyone,
2. it was highly communicable,
3. it required us (the Toronto District School Board) to delineate the border between a community’s need for transparency and an individual’s right to medical privacy in absolute terms.

The first two factors—the breadth of impact and the speed of spread—were relatively straightforward to address. We quickly moved from writing individual communications to creating a roster of templates. Each time a new situation arose, we would draft a new template. Over the course of a few weeks, we developed a robust portfolio of template letters to address everything from an outbreak, to a false positive result, to reminders about safety protocols.

The third factor, balancing transparency needs and privacy rights, was (and is) more complex. In strategic communications, navigating competing interests, meeting divergent goals and identifying commonalities in differing value systems, comes with the territory. This is true of all communications work at the Toronto District School Board, as we seek to serve, support and amplify the voices of the largest and most diverse population of children and families in the country.

The effect of the pandemic, however, was to bring that one essential question into sharp focus—what is the correct balance between the rights of the collective and the rights of the individual. While this may sound esoteric, it is a profoundly practical matter.

What information should a school principal share with parents? What information do staff require? How do we maintain public trust and confidence in our health and safety protocols, without revealing or disclosing personal medical information about students or staff who have contracted COVID-19? Are our duties to inform the same as Toronto Public Health or does our role in public education differ in some important ways? And at a deep system level, once we have made this decision, how do we ensure it is implemented with consistency and equity in every classroom, in nearly 600 schools, in the lives of 240,000 children?

While the specific answers may not be universally applicable, the process we followed worked and could be applied to strategic communications planning across many fields and in many circumstances. Adhering to these best practices has enabled us to meet the immense communications challenges posed by the pandemic. This means we have kept staff and families informed, while ensuring schools remained as safe as possible, so that learning could continue.

Nine months into the pandemic, here are the best practices we have developed for ensuring our communications strike an equitable and consistent balance between transparency and privacy.

• Develop a clear strategic plan that is easily articulated and explained.
  With the high levels of uncertainty and anxiety around COVID-19, we knew that our communications standards needed to be clear and consistent. We developed three guidelines that would be applied to every case of COVID-19 in every school—inform staff and parents/guardians of every case, share no personal information, share specific information only with those who need it.

• Establish and implement a consistent process.
  The simplicity of our message made it possible to implement a consistent process quickly for thousands of staff and nearly a quarter-of-a-million students. Once we had determined that we would inform the school community of every case, omit personal information, and share details only with those affected, it was mostly a matter of amplifying and repeating this message across the system.

• Re-evaluate everything—the plan, the practices, the materials—at regular intervals.
  While the pace of work is relentless, it is vital to carve out time regularly to evaluate whether current communications processes and products are effective. At least once a month, we come together to share our own experiences and the feedback that we have received from internal and external stakeholders. In my case, this is primarily school superintendents, principals and vice principals, as well as parents and guardians. These tweaks and shifts to how we are doing the work, and to what we are saying, helps us to evolve and adapt as the pandemic continues to impact school communities in new and different ways.

• Accept that change is the only constant for pandemic communications.
  In leadership literature, the term VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) is often invoked when exploring the qualities of an adaptable leader. Our strategic communications work at the Toronto District School Board has been defined by this tumult. At the time of writing, it continues unabated. What we can do in the face of the VUCA world is to expect it. And in anticipating the unforeseeable, we hone our abilities to create stability, certainty, simplicity, and clarity however and whenever we can.