Lane Carr
Administrator, Office of Policy and Strategic Initiatives, Nebraska Department of Education
Do Right, Right Now
Crisis Communication
Experience with previous emergencies helped officials identify response needs.
“In 2019, we had a significant flood in our state, and that gave us an entree into the need for clear communication, clear structures, and clear responses through crises.”
“Very early during the COVID-19 pandemic, we had a statewide call weekly with our governor and local public health, every superintendent, public and non-public school superintendents, Department of Health and Human services. We organically pulled these groups together weekly. To our governor’s credit, he understood the importance of schools being at the table. We are still doing weekly calls.”
“We’re (also) really blessed because in our state we also have the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), which is a leader in pandemic response. They were critical for our communication in a lot of ways. I think they scared our schools – and I don’t mean that in a bad way, because it was scary – but they were able to say, ‘this is serious, and you may not feel it in Mitchell, Nebraska, but this is happening, and people are dying…and here’s what you should be doing right now.’ They provided a global perspective. I know our commissioner had Dr. Jeff Gold [Chancellor of UNMC] on speed dial and talked with him often and was able to get an insight into the politics and the realities of where we were. But our clear focus was to talk to your people in the community – they’re the experts that you know, focus on them.”
Partnering with Public Health
As the pandemic unfolded, the Department of Education worked to develop a central capacity for managing information through a website, and worked with local public health departments to adapt guidance to their needs.
“We relied heavily on the local public health departments. Previously, I would argue, very few of our schools knew their public health department leaders. One of the things I was really proud of was the development of a plan for a safe return to school – what I would say was a fairly comprehensive protocol for what school should look like in the fall of 2020.”
“We basically said, ‘we want to be in school, how do we get kids in school? What are the things that we need to do?’ We focused on the idea of a risk level – a dashboard – that noted green, yellow, orange, and red, and what it meant to move across that spectrum. We asked, ‘what does the gymnasium look like? What does a band class look like? How do we help students when they’re lining up? What does hygiene mean?’”
“We set out a high-level plan for return, and then we asked them to make it their own, while fitting within some parameters and leaning heavily on local public health departments to help determine what it really means at the local level. It was critical to set out a norm but also important to acknowledge that it was okay for them to make it their own to a certain extent.”
As an example, many school districts in Nebraska focused on at-home testing instead of testing in the schools.
“Omaha is a major metropolitan area, and our public school system is huge. Omaha’s Public Health Department is highly funded and was able to be active in schools, whereas our rural schools may have had to lean on a school nurse or a local/community health official. For example schools spent a lot of money on digital thermometers. Unfortunately, we realized these weren’t necessarily the best investments. But how could we have known?”
“We focused on determining who was actually doing the work – was it the school nurse? Was it local public health? Our work was meant to be tailored based on the size of the school, the resources in each community, and that community’s access to health care professionals.”
We had a hard time convincing our districts to take up some of the resources around school testing. In fact, our local public health departments were pushing for schools not to be the places that were doing most of the testing. They were incentivizing and pushing for parents to do that, because if the kids are going to school sick and testing at school, then they had potentially already spread COVID-19 to their peers.
Modeling Community Accountability
As case numbers rose, officials tied mask wearing to safety in schools.
“In the fall of 2020 we were starting to see numbers rise. We were starting to see schools have to close down, and so we put an emphasis on: ‘this is on you. If you want to stay in school, wear a mask.’ In fact, we have an infographic: ‘stay in school, wear a mask.’
“Our governor was not going to engage with some of the flash points. His perspective was, ‘look, I wear a mask, I think, you should wear a mask. But I’m not going to force you to wear a mask.’ That mentality permeated to others – basically, we’re not going to tell you what to do. But if you want to be safe, then do your part.”
Our first campaign was called, ‘do right, right now.’ We again used some of our funding to provide for a statewide campaign with the Children’s Hospital and Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services focused on actions that were required to maintain a safe and healthy school. That campaign included bus wraps and posters…focused on what needed to happen to keep our kids in school.
Prioritizing Nutrition
Carr and his team worked through challenges in adapting safe schooling and preserving critical resources like food service across disparate populations – from metropolitan areas like Omaha to school districts in Nebraska’s many rural counties.
“In our first conversations around continuity of learning in the March, April, May 2020 timeframe, and then over the summer, food insecurity and access was a top concern for our schools. Many of our schools used some of their pandemic relief funding, which wasn’t much upon reflection now, to hold onto and ensure they had the ability to pay janitorial staff and food service professionals to keep providing those resources to parents and students in the spring and then summer, and ultimately into the fall.”
Supporting Local Needs
With the help of a local non-profit organization, Carr worked with the Commissioner of Education to understand local challenges and launch and sustain a set of “Community Collaboratives” around emerging needs to keep kids safe in school. Organized in partnership with the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation through the Bring Up Nebraska Initiative, the Community Collaboratives are grassroots, community-based support systems in Nebraska, that bring together healthcare providers, educators, social support systems, faith groups, and youth-serving organizations to identify concerns for students and rally support around them.
We have an organization in our state called the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation, and they coordinate a lot of services around preschool and early childhood education, as well as systems involving youth. They created what they called the Community Collaboratives, which are hyper-regional resources for students and families in their specific regions. Our Commissioner of Education said, ‘hey, we need to make this hyper-local as much as we can. So, let’s get these Community Collaboratives together with their communities and their resources and have conversations and regularly meet.’
“We met once a week with the Community Collaboratives, where we could hear about each set of unique challenges, including things like access to hand sanitizer or PPE. We worked to coordinate the statewide response to the unique needs of a region and those partnerships have continued. They were strengthened during the pandemic, and then we’ve maintained those bonds with the community collaboratives.”
There was a significant amount of fear and uncertainty, obviously. One of the things that we heard loud and clear from several of our Community Collaboratives and school leaders was the need for additional mental health and social emotional support for our kids.
“We used a big chunk of our first set of pandemic relief funds to provide technology and make sure that kids had access and connectivity. But then the second big piece was focused on additional mental health support and support for counselors to be able to meet with students virtually, because we heard loud and clear that folks were feeling really isolated.
“Our kids were feeling isolated. Some of our local health departments had licensed mental health practitioners on their teams, and some didn’t. We were able to push mental health resources to the regional level.”
Enhancing Equity
Carr and his team were conscious of the disparities in access to education, teachers, technology, and other resources that existed prior to the emergence of COVID-19 and were exacerbated by the pandemic.
“One key piece of social determinants of health is educational outcomes. Our business is all about kids learning, earning, and living. But we know those parts are all connected to one another.”
“To interact with the communities that were most deeply impacted, we triangulated data around schools that were identified for support through our federal accountability system. These included schools that had student groups based on race and ethnicity, disability, poverty and English language learner status that had been identified as low performing – with the social vulnerability index by county, and then COVID cases per capita. We were able to see large dots in red spaces that showed schools that previously had academic needs and where COVID was circulating in places unable to respond to the crisis. We zeroed in on those communities. When we received pandemic funds, we were able to rally some resources around them. That mapping was a fascinating process for us.”
Carr and his team were conscious of the disparities in access to education, teachers, technology, and other resources that existed prior to the emergence of COVID-19 and were exacerbated by the pandemic.
“As a school, your job is to make sure kids continue to have resources that they need. I think our learning losses were less than what we saw in other states, and that’s a testament to the resiliency of our kids and our teachers.
“I would say one of my wonders, or perhaps regrets, is to ask what would it have looked like had we (been able to) place some additional attention on adult wellbeing and teachers. I think we’re dealing with and reeling from the effects of the pandemic on our adults and our teachers. We have a huge teacher shortage as does everywhere else. One of the things we’re hearing is, ‘yeah, It’s about money, and we would take a great increase in our salary. But we’re also just tired, and we’re exhausted. We don’t have anything left to give.’”
Going forward, the Nebraska Department of Education pursued a tabletop exercise, in partnership with a national organization, Opportunity Labs, that included representatives from local public health, state department of health and human services personnel, regional education providers, and district leaders from varied sized districts. They were presented with a health-based scenario and utilized the exercise to document strains in the decision making process and identify communication patterns.