All right, well, first, can you maybe share with me what the Browning School is, and then I'll get into questions. Sure. The Browning School, we are 432 now, 432 boys in the heart of midtown Manhattan. We are all right now located in one building. We're very excited to be moving into a new building for just our high school on 64th Street. That's going to happen by the end of this year, beginning of next year. Been around since 1888. We have always been proudly and remain proudly an all boys school, and we're one of two K-12 all boys options in the city of New York. Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so much. And congratulations on the new building. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, so let's go ahead and get started. So as we are talking about, you know, the post U.S. election, I know there's a lot of other things that are going to be happening. So I hope that you will share some more knowledge about that. But as the chief communications officer, how are you leading your team? Or, you know, how do you lead a team in preparing and responding to these unique challenges that we are all getting ready to experience? Well, I think the first thing you've got to do is you've got to be you've got to plan for things a little bit and then you've got to talk about them a lot. So, you know, here at Browning, we have really been working, dealing just specifically with the U.S. election and any kind of potential for anything, any sort of activity or actions around that. We have been doing that since the beginning of the calendar year. So we've basically been working on this since January, started talking to our faculty at faculty closing meetings back in June, kind of giving them an idea like this. You know, we're going to come back to you with rules for the rules of the road in terms of working with the boys. Fishbowl exercises where you can see kind of a thought. We give you a scenario and you can sort of see, you know, working three or four different people will talk about talk through that scenario for you. We will do role plays, that kind of thing to get people more so comfortable than anything with a scenario that's going to be handed to them and they need to respond to it. And these are both for for the teaching faculty. It's a scenario where it's a teacher in a classroom and a group of boys or a single boy or whatever it is. And for non teaching faculty, it can be a workplace scenario. Right. Because I think that sometimes it's something we don't talk enough about in educational institutions where are naturally obviously focused on our students. But there's also adult members of the community, right, that have to interact and interface. So we've done scenarios where it's non teaching faculty talking with one another and also non teaching faculty, let's say, perhaps being approached out in the wild, as we would say by a parent with something to say and trying to give them. And I should mention, since this is case also with advancement colleagues. Right. So a an alumni or a donor or a volunteer that you've perhaps having a conversation with in your office. It's a very productive conversation around the annual fund or something. And, you know, it's the hand on the doorknob query where it's like, you know, hey, before I go, I have a question, right, or I needed to share something with you. Right. And it's something that directly relates to the election right or directly relates to some behaviors that this person has seen being displayed around partisanship, let's say, and sort of talking through how one might respond in real time, because it's that it's that wanting to have them sort of feel what that feels like, which I think is really important. Definitely. Thank you so much. And that is so wonderful that they're getting that that practice and that you've been working on it. If you were to for if there was an organization that's like, oh, we haven't been planning this out for a year. What advice or what would you recommend that they do within the short amount of time? Yeah, I think so. So, I mean, that's not uncommon that that happens. And, you know, I do some presenting around this issue. And so, even when I was at a NYSACE conference last week, a governance conference presenting about it, and I asked people to raise their hands and say whether or not they had started to work on this. And in fact, out of a room of, let's call it 45 people, the majority of people sort of indicated that they hadn't really worked on it. Now, that could be because they believe for whatever reason, it's not going to be an issue. But, you know, those of us who are working in schools in 2016 have seen it very much an issue, right? We forgot because we had a COVID break in between there. So people were at home, right? So they didn't have the same kinds of face to face and human interaction. I would say that if you have not worked on it thus far, probably the most important thing in a K-12 school environment would really be to make sure that your faculty have some kind of idea of the rules of the road, by which I mean, what might be okay to say to a student and not okay to say to a student. How much you can allow, and this is a nuanced sort of thing to teach, but how much you can allow reasonable curiosity within the classroom about issues or whatever. How far can you take that until it might be threatening someone's dignity or starting to sound like biased language? And unfortunately, we don't always have sort of good rubrics on that because we as people tend to not really talk across divides that way. In our personal lives, we have kind of bubbled ourselves a little bit. And the younger and younger generations, I mean, I always tell the story that it's much more likely, I think, for somebody in my generation to have known grownups, if you will, when we were children who voted differently all the time. People that had very different religions and were married to one another and talked about that, right? Because it was a little bit less commonplace than it is now. But now, we see that as fracturous, and we see that as you're going to be fighting if you have that. So we don't really have a good model. So I would say that making sure they know the rules of the road and making sure that they know then also how to behave with the adult community. So the kinds of things like you want to think about your social media, right? That's something that I talk to people a lot about and that they should kind of know better, but they don't often. So they think that their social media is private, they're espousing whatever views that they are allowed to espouse by the First Amendment, but don't think that might not then be shared in a venue that you can't control. So those are two things, because I think if we want to think about nonpartisanship, and we want to think about really what's doing the right thing for the children in our care who are going to have all sorts of different family backgrounds, and also political opinions of their own if they're old enough. How much do we want them sort of to know about us and whether we agree or disagree with those things? I mean, I think a little bit more of a blank slate approach might be good when dealing with children, and almost certainly when dealing with adult family members. So I think that those two things are important. I would look at what I'm doing politically outside of my work sphere, and that's just good practice, I think, for everybody, regardless of whether you work in schools or not. And then us as administrators telling them like, hey, here's some ideas for how we'd want you to interact in the classroom, as well as interacting with one another as co-workers. So then that takes me into my next question for you, which is, could you maybe share some guidance about how communications offices can navigate that balance between being transparent and the sensitivity as we are dealing with post-elections when it comes to parents, alumni, and staff? Absolutely. I think it's very helpful, and we have done this at Browning, to sort of tell families what they can expect from us, right? You can expect your child to be treated with dignity. You can expect a classroom to be an open place of inquiry, whatever. We've got a page on our website that we've built, very basic, that has that, and also has a TED Talk by somebody talking about differences, and has some material from EE Ford, which came out about sort of, they did a big piece about working in a time of political pluralism, that kind of thing. So I think that's the transparency piece, right? As long as you're sharing with your families that you will continue to communicate about all issues through the lens of your values, through the lens of your mission, through the lens of making sure that children know that they're safe and they're valued, and that their opinions count for something, right? None of us want to be anywhere where it's just like we're going to be shut down based on our legitimately held opinions, right? Or made to feel unsafe because of those opinions, right? So families need to know that just because there's an election going on that may be hotly contested and where the two sides cannot agree on anything, it does not necessarily follow that their child school community then has to become one that is disrupted, right? In any kind of way, just because this is going on on the outside. So it's like the transparency piece is recognizing the outside, talking to families how that comes inside. So as you were talking about that, maybe can you share some key messages that you would want to recommend to some of the participants? And then how do you tailor those to the different audiences? Because that's one of the unique things with schools is you have a lot of different unique audiences. Yeah, I think to the extent, so we're a small school, so we have the same amount of audiences, but obviously many fewer people in those constituent groups. So one of the things we're doing this year is we have a new division head in our upper school. He is running a class for all ninth graders that's about sort of controversial topics, leadership, dialogue, all this kind of stuff. He's going to be writing a blog post. He's going to be telling families about this. So we're showing that this is sort of emblematic, right, of our approach. So that's one of the approaches that we take. Can we get together in a room, agree on sort of a set of facts and then kind of debate and not even debate an issue, but sort of listen to one another, talk about an issue. I think that that's important. I think key messages, which need to be like, we are a community. That is something on all K-12 schools can agree. We are a community and we love and respect each other and we respect the dignity of everybody in this community. We need to be able to tell families that we're going to be able to see a way forward, right, which then depends on how we treat each other today, right, because we can't treat each other one way and then two days later go, okay, now that's over. Let's go back to regular to scheduled programming. We need to know, we need to sort of be mindful in terms of faculty and spaces that they may need provided for their own sort of emotional well-being and strength in this challenging time. So we want to be very aware, like, great. We want the division heads to be sort of very aware of how people are behaving or feeling because that'll come out. Like, they know one another. It's a small school. They will be able to see that. You know, we're teaching civics as we always have. You know, there's some schools that do things like run mock elections and that kind of thing. We have not, we've never done that and so we're not doing that now. So I think some of the context also, like, really depends on how your school normally conducts itself if it was a normal election cycle, which I think most of us can agree it's not a normal election cycle right now. Definitely. And so in any of these messages or messaging opportunities, are you utilizing any of your parent groups or any parents to help with the messaging? Yeah, I think we would, you know, I think that's the kind of thing that we may need to actually wait. So proactively, no. Potentially afterwards, maybe in terms of, let's say, whatever happens, it continues to be enough of a concern in the school community that it might be helpful to have a PA meeting or something like that. Sure. Or going to PA leadership and saying, like, wow, the country's kind of in turmoil because, you know, the election still hasn't been decided and it's a month later. What are you hearing from families? Sure. I think those two things are just something that we would do as a matter of course, for good communication. But I don't. But yeah, really here, in terms of getting messaging out, it's going to all be coming from sort of senior leadership. And as to the sort of alumni piece, it will just follow on from whatever we end up telling the families. And I don't think that our alums would have a great deal of interest, you know, unless something completely wild was to happen, a great deal of interest in how we responded to the election, necessarily. Good. So, of course, there's the expectation of heightened emotions and there's, you know, misinformation that's going to be happening via social media. How are you planning or how can people plan to monitor and then manage that online presence? I know you spoke to it a little bit about, you know, folks' personal pages, but, you know, maybe if you can share some more information about managing that. Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, I think that you've got to help people. I think the risk of real kind of disinformation is high. And you could particularly, well, it's happening right now, but you could particularly imagine a situation post-election, if the election is not decided on election night, of a kind of a whipsawing where people are saying, I saw, you know, this thing being done with the votes over here in this state, or I, you know, such and such has declared the winner. And then needing to react to that or thinking you should react to that during the school day. I think that will present a challenge to people in my role. I think that we have, that's a time to remember that we're not and should not be placing ourselves in a role of anybody's primary news source. I think that is really a time that we could also say, like, if we don't jump at, like, that's a time, like, let all of the networks or whomever people are going to for their news source these days, let them lead. And we, I mean, what would the response even be? Like, maybe we wouldn't even need to have a response because the response would be kind of like, that's over one way or the other. I think you'd have to, you know, gauge that with your community. You want to also make sure, obviously, that your own school is not in the fray. Again, as a small school, not likely, but even for larger schools where it all comes down to your employees, right? Like, it all comes down to, you know, New York City, French teacher found with pro-whatever or anti-whatever stuff all over her page. And so for me, it's stopping that kind of thing at the source or making people think about that kind of thing at the source that has been really valuable. I mean, I've given this presentation on social media three times, the end of the school year last year, beginning of school year this year, and then a special presentation just for the 10 or so people that we have that are new, right? A lot of times people don't even recognize something as simple as tagging somebody, something as simple as promoting a GoFundMe or something. Like, unless you know all the tentacles and all the threads to where that goes, you could be a person finding out very quickly that you are three degrees of separation away from something that our families might really have an issue with. And what people don't understand is that is the kind of thing that's really getting people into bad situations at work, you know? And then I think for my final question, maybe can you talk about, since you lead, you know, your teams and, you know, how it is going to impact, you know, folks in their personal life, but you were mentioning about what it means when you have to come to work. Maybe if you can just share a little bit about that and your thoughts around how managers can manage that. Absolutely. I think, and I certainly in schools that I work with advise people, make sure that your professional staff understands the responsibility of the day after election day. Because regardless of what happens before or after, we're going to have an election day in November, and there's going to be a day after. And whether you believe it will be decided that day or not decided that day, people will need a reminder about the workplace. Expectations, right? And primarily, certainly a big one is you need to come to work, right? Like, it's you need to come to work. You need to be there for the children. The children need to be, you know, in a space where, like, obviously, they're going to be safe. But also, as the adult, you might have to realize you may hear some things that are, that depending on your view, right, are going to strike you the wrong way. People that are gloating about their winner, and it wouldn't have been your winner or whatever. But at the same time, that child's not necessarily breaking any school rules, whatever. So, you got to think about, I guess, like what my mother would say, like kind of getting your mind right around how it's going to be, right? But we're going to tell you, you need to, you know, you need to be at work. The expectations are going to be at work. And the expectation is that you're going to be at work, and you're going to be able to at least at some degree compartmentalize whatever you might be feeling. And that might be joy as well, right? Because other people in your workplace, your adult co-workers, and I think a lot of times, we also have a hard time understanding that, right? Because I work at a place, and we all get along. So, everyone must think about, like me, politically. Not so much, necessarily. So, even your adult co-workers could really, could be feeling feelings of grief, right? And that's real, right? And that one of the ways as an adult, you may not even address that, but you don't have to gloat to them either, you know? So, I think really checking in with yourself, putting yourself, can you be empathetic and put yourself in another's shoes, right? And some people have a greater capacity for that. Some people have a lesser capacity for that. This is a time to figure out what your capacity is, and like, can you stress, can you stretch that a little bit more? Like, that's not a bad idea. You're an educator. I mean, I believe that everybody that works in schools and works with young people is an educator. So, this may be the time to sort of stretch on that muscle, because it's going to challenge all of us, right? But we've got to get through those days, right? We've got, just like the first days when we came back from COVID, and some of us came back, you know, right away in September. Other people didn't come back for a while or whatever, and it was scary for anybody that had to come in and ride the subway and work with kids. You've got to do it. You've got to push through, you know? So, I would just encourage schools to really make those workplace rules known, right? Illegible, right? Like, you don't want to then, because then you don't want to be penalizing people when they decide they can't come to work because they're too upset, and then you're going to penalize them, or then you're going to be like, you have to come. No, make it clear. Like, I'm always, I'm a big proponent of making things clear to people, because then there can be no, you know, there's not a misunderstanding. There's not a bias. There's not a, don't make them guess as institutionally how we're going to expect them to react. And I would have in place also to kind of a feedback loop. I think for my advancement professionals, I'd want to know, you know, are they getting calls from alums? Are they getting, you know, donors or annual fund committee or something kind of saying like, oh, I'm really surprised you didn't put out something about the election, or my boy came home and told me that the teacher was saying thus and such. So, I think about that a little bit too, about how I would collect that feedback on the back end. I mean, you just sparked something. How would you, like, what should, you know, communication spots be doing when it comes to that feedback loop, you know? Because sometimes you think, I don't want to hear the information, but it's important, right? Look, I think it's very important. I think it's just like when you have a crisis and, you know, once the crisis has passed or even while the crisis is ongoing, right, you're going to want to know, you know, how many alumni called, how many parents called in. And oftentimes, right, they're not calling the people that work with their children. They're not calling the teachers or they're not talking to teachers about it. They're going right to those of us that are advancement professionals or admissions professionals, because they know those people. Those people may have a little bit of time to talk on the phone. And I think you connect with those individuals within your school. You know, it can be as simple as, for me, it'd be a phone call, small school, but in a larger school, it could be an email that just simply says, like, hey, I really want to be able to know, to be able to gauge parents' responses to X, right, parents' responses to the email that we put out about whatever. A lot of times it's going to be like, I didn't hear from anybody at all. It's fine. But sometimes it might be, I heard from this person and they gave me an earful. And there'd be, there's not really a way for comms to know that, because advancement doesn't always say, like, let me go back and tell comms, then push it up the chain, right, to the head of school. In my school, the head of school might tell me, but I could imagine in other schools, the head of school might not. And you want to gather that information for yourself as a comms person, because you probably wrote the email. So is there something else that you could, so take that feedback. Is there something maybe you could have done with that email? Maybe you couldn't, but maybe you could have done something with that email to make it land differently. That's where you want to be. I think you always want to be trying to think of, like, how could I have made this better? How could I improve it? Recognizing that there's always going to be a certain percentage of people that just don't like what you do. That's wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's wonderful information. I'm going to stop recording.

Browning School

Midtown Manhattan

new building

election preparation

role-playing exercises

nonpartisanship