David Stegall
Former Deputy Superintendent of Schools State of North Carolina
Lighting the Way Forward
David Stegall served as Deputy Superintendent for Innovation at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction during the height of the pandemic. He previously had been involved over the years in improving working relationships among local and state school oversight bodies. As a result, he understood the challenge of uniting 115 different school districts around common approaches in a crisis. Given his expertise, Stegall was tasked by Governor Roy Cooper in 2020 to troubleshoot the variety of issues facing schools during the pandemic—everything from ensuring students retained access to meals to safely restarting in person instruction. His efforts resulted in a live “playbook” that compiled promising approaches and was made available to school officials throughout the state as they struggled with how to keep students safe and engaged.
Who’s on first?
It became clear early on that the pandemic would require an all-hands approach from the state government.
“No one who worked at the department had ever been a superintendent. When we started hearing rumblings about COVID, we set up weekly calls to discuss what we were hearing and what we knew. As we got into early March of 2020, we had our first case in North Carolina, which came from a group of doctors who had gone to Boston for a convention.”
“During that period of time we had about five school districts that were on spring break, and they were calling the department to ask if they should extend their spring break to make sure it didn’t spread. The state superintendent said it was a Department of Health and Human Services issue; he took a very strong stance of ‘this is not our issue.”
Well, COVID-19 hit the state of North Carolina on March 13, and the governor asked all the key players to come to the Emergency Response Center in Raleigh. It’s a large facility, and the superintendent sent me, and the governor decided to pause school for 2 weeks.
Yellow Buses, Food, and Graduation Requirements
With graduation requirements looming and childhood nutrition in the balance, the governor asked Stegall to play a leadership role on education in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services. Working out of the Emergency Response Center, Stegall began sorting through everything from rules for delivering food for kids who rely on school lunches for daily nutrition to determining how to handle child care for frontline health workers working overtime.
“We essentially lived at the Emergency Response center. They had huge TVs showing all the data and updates popping up all across the world. We divided ourselves into 3 separate workflows – child nutrition, education, and childcare – and asked, ‘Who are the key players that can help us?’ We had 40-50+ members on each team.”
The easy thing to say is, ‘we’ll load food up on school buses,’ but school bus law doesn’t allow you to use yellow buses on anything but transportation for students. We had to change the rules before we could do any of this.
“We had a running Zoom call of all 115 school district superintendents. Their board chairs would be on the call as well because communication was vital, as you might imagine. For example, we had to get buses out to get food, which required amending the State Board policy to allow school buses to transport food.”
“The State Board would call three to four meetings a week to address policies and procedures. For example, one of the requirements for graduation is that you have to complete CPR training. It seems like a minor thing, and we have a number of students who never completed it. And then, as we started realizing they weren’t going to complete the training, we would have to give amendments to that grade point average. So we went with pass/fail. But you don’t just do these things. You have to bring in practitioners and parents and students and ask what we might be missing.”
“And we had people dying – key people who were decision makers got sick and a couple of them died.”
Solving Problems – A Guidebook for Reopening Schools
Across the country, there was no tailored guidance for how schools should operate districts or how to reopen schools during a pandemic. Stegall and his team worked with the school districts across North Carolina to identify daily problems and to troubleshoot them. They developed a shared Google Document to facilitate connections across the state in real time as issues arose, as well as possible solutions and best practices. Over time, that formed the basis for a statewide playbook on reopening schools.
We crafted a document called “Lighting our Way Forward,” and we started doing daily updates by phone call with all the superintendents so they could hear the board meeting. But they’re busy in their own communities. And we’d say, ‘Here’s what happened today. Here’s three new policies. Here’s the relief. Now tell us what issues you’re facing that we aren’t aware of.’
“We would record the calls to make sure everybody had as much information as possible. As soon as something was approved by the board, the governor, or the General Assembly, it would automatically go into our “Lighting the Way Forward” Google document and let everyone know that updates had been made to the document, so they could go into it and see what had changed.”
We captured challenges on the daily calls, debriefed about them, and then met with the board to put the issues on tomorrow’s agenda. Sometimes there were things the General Assembly had to do because the issue involved a state law, so we would have a representative from the General Assembly participate.
Sometimes it was a policy change, sometimes it was a financial issue, sometimes it was a use of facilities that was not allowed. Sometimes the fix was someone reaching out to the federal government for relief on a requirement. Every day was new.
For example, we have rural communities with technology deserts. In the mountains, there are places where there is no broadband. The companies won’t run it, because it doesn’t make sense for them to run five miles of broadband wire to one house. So we worked with Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) North Carolina to essentially reverse engineer, through cable wires or existing homes, to send messages through a little modem. We could send parents a modem. We used low orbit satellites to go over these rural communities, gave the families hotspots and used low orbit satellites for Internet access in these communities where they couldn’t get traditional cable because there was no infrastructure. We got Internet to Swain County, where roughly 20 percent of the families had Internet before.
“We triaged daily, and this went on for weeks. As the calls to the superintendents were happening, we noticed other groups that weren’t involved. There are over 200 charter schools, and we have an office of charter schools, but sometimes they were struggling, so we started having daily calls with charter schools as well.”
“As the pandemic progressed, we didn’t need to meet every day. It became every other day, then weekly. But the meetings with the board, the 7:30 call, and the meetings with the superintendents kept going through August – probably 6 or 7 months of straight communication.”
Ensuring Transparency
The Indiana National Guard took on an out-sized role in staffing nursing homes – a role that General Lyles credits to restoring confidence in managing those facilities, which were becoming major sources of staffing shortages, infections, and COVID-19 related deaths. They started with defining the problem and the solution set the Guard could bring.
The key thing is communication transparency…knowing that no one has all the answers, and that collectively, we have a capacity to solve anything. We have to bring people to the table, and then, when we’re sitting at that table, we represent tens of thousands of people…making sure we’re advocating for their needs, not assuming.
“Sometimes we had to communicate, ‘We can’t do what you wanted. And here’s why. We can keep advocating and maybe change policy down the line, but this is why this can’t happen now.’ That was the key piece. Being willing to have tough conversations. I think they would say that there’s a level of trust. If we didn’t have the answer, we would say, ‘We don’t know.”
“During every meeting, we offered time for the state superintendents to tell us what they needed. There are times they would get heated, and they would police themselves. There were times when I would say, ‘I know you’re frustrated, but I’m not the enemy.’ For all 115 of them, it was candid. We [me and Deb Emory] had both been superintendents, and we had that sense of empathy.”
The governor’s office were extremely strong partners. We communicated constantly, and there was no power struggle. The Department of Health and Human Services obviously focused on the medical side. We weren’t medical experts, and we leaned on them. They didn’t tell us how to run schools. We supported one another.
Documenting Action
They worked with EdNC, an independent group of local journalists focused on education, to build trust and to document and transparently show progress.
EdNC did a yeoman’s job of telling specific stories from the perspectives on the front line. I was able to visit 66 counties in a year. I would go to the far end of the state and see they had a tremendous solution to an issue that 40 other districts were dealing with in other parts of the state. So we started capturing this, and I came back to the department and said that I wanted us to create a “promising practices” dashboard. If there was an issue a lot of people were dealing with, and if we found someone that said, ‘This is going well,’ we would go to see it in action and take EdNC see with us and document it with a video, and later create a white paper. We would create a summary of the problem and the solution, including literature to reinforce it as a promising practice, as well as an infographic showing the results in some form.
Preserving the Future
Before the pandemic, state school officials had previously attended a CDC training on disaster and pandemic response, the playbook she and her team had developed was lost in the transition among superintendents who didn’t keep some of the resources. Stegall and his team worked hard to document what they were learning with the hope that wouldn’t happen again.
“When the pandemic hit, the first call I received was from the previous state superintendent who’d been there 16 years. She said, ‘We have a playbook, and it’s in this file cabinet, and there’s all kinds of resources.’ I called the state superintendent and chief of staff. Can you tell where it got moved? He said, ‘Well, when I came in from the previous superintendent, I didn’t keep anything.’ That’s why we created the “Lighting Our Way Forward” document for real-time response. It is a playbook…that could be used for any type of similar natural disaster or pandemic; it gives you a framework to build on.”