I’ve been an elementary school principal for seven years now. In the last three years we’ve endured the first Los Angeles teacher strike in thirty years and the first global pandemic in the last hundred years. Here’s my best advice on reopening after the thirteen month coronavirus closure.

1. You have to be aware of trauma.
   What we’ve endured over the past two years has been akin to going through a war (now we add an actual war on top of that to boot). Everyone has a little PTSD…students, teachers, and parents.
   
   The blessing and the curse of the past two years for me personally was being shut in the house with my then eighteen-month old daughter and five year old son in an open-concept floorpan that seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m used to people trantrumming all around me. In fact, I made a movie about it. Kids don’t have the words to describe their existential angst…they just tantrum. Teachers who feel the stress and loneliness of the past few years…throw grown-up tantrums. Parent complaints are at all time high.
   
   Teachers need to be forgiving of their students and be aware that they are experiencing trauma. The only way this can happen is if principals are forgiving of their teachers and superintendents are forgiving of their principal. We can have high expectations for everyone but only if we treat everyone with patience, grace, and forgiveness. We cannot forget that the past two years have been tough for everyone.
   
2. Kids are a little different now.
   The concept of “learning loss” in my experience has been overblown. Students who were on grade level before are on grade level now and students who struggled before the pandemic are still struggling. Nevertheless, students are a little bit different now and here are a couple of ways we need to support them.
   1. Handwriting. Here’s one thing I see needs a little work. They’re great at tapping screens but definitely need some work forming letters.
   2. Socializing. Some students are more shy now than before. Some students are a little meaner than they were before now that they’ve spent a year anonymously communicating. Masks don’t cause reversible harm in this regard but they do make it temporarily trickier for adults and children to read facial expressions. Students, in particular, need our help.
   3. Appropriateness. Two years of chat rooms and who knows what they saw on Youtube have introduced some levels of inappropriateness in the way students communicate with adults and each other.
      
3. You have to stay calm.
   Principals are responsible for safety. Principals are responsible for being the academic leader. But most importantly, principals are responsible for calming everybody down…students, teachers, and parents. You can have your own freak-outs behind closed doors and commiserate with your principal friends whenever you need to but for your school you have to maintain calm to calm everybody else down. When I used to work at the district office I saw how teachers would take on the personality of their principal (whiny teachers had whiny principals, scared teachers had nervous principals). Take deep breaths, do whatever you have to. Everyone is working through their own trauma and they need their school leaders to stay calm.