Hello, everybody. My name is Jan Abernathy. I am chief communications officer at the Browning School in Manhattan. We were a boys school for hundreds student strong. Been around since 1888 and I'm really happy to be presenting this quick study on crisis communications in independent schools. I really believe that this is an area that a lot of comms professionals can know more about. May feel intimidated by. And I don't want anybody to feel intimidated by crisis because particularly since this is going to be something that will be happening for all of us, I predict more and more the advent of social media, a somewhat divided country, and just the ability for more information to get out more quickly, because it means that there's no doubt that crisis communications is going to be a skill that everybody is going to need to have and that you actually can master it is it can be nerve wracking. It can be a very stressful time when your school is in a crisis. But that does not mean that you cannot handle it without some specific skills and tips and tricks, which I am going to be sharing with you over the course of the next half hour. So as I said, I am Jan Abernathy. I have been in school communications for about ten years. Before that, I was in media both as a freelance journalist and also as a journalist working for Dow Jones, the publishers of the Wall Street Journal. So I do have some background in news, which has helped me, obviously, in this arena. And I also have a background in being a board chair and being a trustee trustee on a couple of independent school boards right now. And I was a board chair through some very serious issues at the school that my own children attended quite a while ago. So I do have a sort of a view of crisis from several different areas, whether it's from the area of leadership where I am sort of driving a response as a trustee or whether it's from serving the trustees and serving the other administrators, students, faculty, etc., in the school in the role that I do now. So I want you to be able to take away from this kind of a holistic view of how to look at crisis, how to not be intimidated by it, how to think about how to utilize a firm when you have to do so. And also some takeaways so that you can be even better prepared for the next one. So let's get into it. I like this quote because I think it is so true and so emblematic of the kinds of things that we need to do in communications today. If you're proactive, you focus on preparing. If you're reactive, you end up focusing on preparing. So true in crisis communications right before the crisis is rarely a neutral right. It can either actually bring you up or it can pull you down depending on how you deal with it, depending on what you say and what you don't say. Your level of transparency, your level of urgency, your level of responsiveness. When something happens, all of these things, only some of which are within your purview as a communications director, but many of them you do have the opportunity to advise on. And so I want you to be in a position that when you are advising your team on these things, you are thinking towards the perspective of not just let's get out of this, let's go, let's try to manage as such, we manage our way out of the situations quickly as possible, but also thinking about the kinds of opportunities that it presents for you to show that you are a communicator, a communicator that is on top of things, and that you're interested actually in not just preserving the reputation of your institution, but actually showing how well your institution can manage and communicate through crisis, because that's the kind of thing that your families, your faculty, your students are really going to remember. So let's talk a little bit about the anatomy of a crisis, the typical kinds of crises that you might be able to anticipate as you go through your career. As I said, I believe that this is the kind of thing that is actually going to happen more frequently for all of us. So some very typical crisis situations, child sexual abuse, very unfortunate, very much a situation that has happened for many of our schools. I would, in fact, say that if your school has never dealt with it, you will be dealing with it at some point. It can be current. It can be historical. Sometimes it's a combination of both. Sometimes the historical or the current leads to finding out about things that happen or happening currently or happening in the past. Right. So it is often an extremely, extremely fraught, emotional, sort of horrific time for school. But even having said that, you can manage through it. You may want to have the advice and counsel of a outside firm, which is certainly something I would recommend. Obviously, your attorneys are going to be involved. Quite frequently an investigation firm is involved. Those are this is a kind of a one of the almost worst case scenarios that I have ever dealt with as a communications professional. Behind that, I would say the accident, suicide, death, anything along those lines devastating to a community. Many of us went through this during COVID. We certainly lost families during COVID, got lost parents, I should say, during COVID. We have also been in a situation where we have lost Paris through other means, right? We've lost parents through violence. We've lost parents through through illness as many of our schools have. This is a not an external crisis. This is typically not something that is going to make the news unless it is a well-known person or whatever. But it is absolutely a crisis for your community. You can have the sudden departure of a senior leader, right? Either for good things are bad things. I've been at a school where the leader was going to leave to assume the leadership of another school in a very short period of time announced in the winter he would be gone in the spring, in the early summer. The very short window we were going to need to have an interim head, how to manage through that situation so that faculty is assured, so that families are assured is important. The EIB issues, this could almost be and I have done completely separate presentations just on how to deal with that. And I think many of us saw post George Floyd, we saw situations where the EIB issues in our own schools flared up amazingly and very quickly, just kind of turned into a firestorm. So you need to be ready on that as well. And then finally, another situation that occurs and unfortunately may be occurring more often now as we're sort of seeing demographic headwinds and fewer children being born is financial downturns. Right. Whether that's layoffs, reductions in force, you're losing beloved teachers. Maybe your school is sponsoring a buyout. You know, maybe your school is canceling programing. All of these things are are things that can deter upsetting to families, that are certainly upsetting to faculty and could constitute a crisis. The time in crisis is unanticipated. Generally there. It's rare that I have been in a situation where I have been able to say, Yeah, that's going to turn into something. And sometimes I've been in a situation where I say, Yeah, that's going to turn into something. And in fact, something happens before that situation. So I've had that kind of scenario where you think, well, this thing might turn into a lawsuit, let's say, and maybe we'll have to defend ourselves and maybe that person will go to the press and then you find out a student did something. Let's say that that puts you in the press that behavior. Right. You were not expecting that. You could never have learned about that before it happened. Right. So the three big things here to know are to know your school, know your market. What are the other schools around you doing? What are their reputations and know what's happening in the wider world. And when I say the wider world, I really am talking about how parents feel about whatever the issue is that you're needing to face in this crisis. Right. How to And in some cases, that's very clear. Look, if you're talking about suicide or child sexual abuse, if you're talking about the EIB, though, on the other hand, and depending on what the issue is, lot of different ideas, lot of different thoughts and opinions about what's going on, you need to take that into consideration, too, as you're trying to communicate. So think about the areas of focus, right? Your school, your market, your wider world, Right. So at your school, who are the influencers? Who is going to be the person who has some sway over that new kindergarten class? Right. Who are the leadership? Who are the trustees that you can trust to really spread the news of how the school is grappling with this issue? Right. How quickly will information spread in your community? So if there's something really upsetting or bad that you need to announce and already let's say your trustees know about it, maybe their families might know about it, even though they're not supposed to. How much time do you really have to get a statement together? It's probably not as much time as you may think. What about your market? Have your peer schools experienced a similar thing? Right. If your peer schools are experiencing, for instance, issues around which a lot of ours are right. How would they handle certain things? Which ways are their schools different than your school? It is always good to know, even if you're in, even if you're in a peer school that is a competitor to another peer school, it's always good to know how they handle things right. I would encourage any person who is in communications to very much maintain a network text chain, a person that you can call and say, Hey, can I tell you something? Confidentiality, confidentially. Here's a situation we have. What can we do? What would you do if you were me? Becomes a really, really important conversation for a comms person to be able to ask. And you can really only ask it of someone who's already working in schools. It's very challenging to asset. Same question of a corporate person to ask that same question of a person who is in higher ed because the reactions are going to be a little bit different. So think about who's in a school like your school and whether or not you can establish a kind of a mutually beneficial relationship along these lines. And in the wider world, you know, what are families anxious about, Right? Maybe they don't. You know, now, as an example, families are very anxious about reading. Right. Families in the past have been very anxious about math. There certainly are anxious about COVID learning loss. They may you may find your families are more anxious about health than they used to be prior to COVID. What does the culture war of this moment are your families really concerned about gender identity in your school? Are your families concerned about how you're teaching American history in your school? All of these things come into play as you're grappling with these issues. So always think about how it intersects with whatever it is that you need to talk to them about and share with them. That might be unpleasant. So then let's think about the crisis again. The anatomy of the crisis. What are you going to do? Write the plan and you're going to work your plan. If there's a if you have not yet developed a crisis communications plan would certainly encourage doing that. There are many good resources out there from nice and from other places that will really help you in developing a crisis. Communications plan. That's a good thing to have. At the very least, you should know sort of the communications chain of command and what other people would be, what other people you need to loop in right from the start. You know, ideally, at least the way that it works at my school, I report to the head of school and the head of school is going to be the person that's going to be tipping me off and saying, Hey, this is a thing that just happened. What do we do? And then we get together, bring people in as needed. Obviously, the board chair is usually in there right at the beginning and then we sort of go from there, you know, because I'm a person that has had a fair amount of experience in the business, I can sort of I can just jump into those steps if if you're not that person having it all written out and in a place where it can be easily accessible no matter when is a good idea. Right. Practice your approach. Kind of think about step yourself through. Even if it's in you're only in your own mind. What would I do if my head of school came to me today and said, Hey, I have bad news, I'm out of here in six weeks? You know, I didn't get my contract renewed or there's a suddenly a family situation and I need to leave. How will you handle that? What steps might you go through? And I think that even that can bring a peace of mind. Think about who the spokesperson is going to be. Very important. Usually it is your head of school, right? Will you be an additional spokesperson? Will you be a person that is going to be, you know, the Browning School spokesperson said, are you going to use your own name? Think about that for a bit, because depending on the kind of the level of crisis and if it's something that's going to get out into the press, if it is something that, for instance, like, you know, a child sex abuse situation, your name book level is going to become associated with that situation, just just so that, you know, and you can't really control the headlines. So I would think about sharing my name as opposed to just saying spokesperson based on what kind of situation it was. Do you have a holding statement? Right. So one of the very first things, if you think something is going to hit the press, what is the holding statement? Right. What can you say? Because the questions you're going to have to the reporter, if the reporter emails you and a lot of times they will now sometimes they'll pick up the phone if they don't hear from you. But a lot of times people will email you and they'll say, I want to know if you've got a comment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What you need to do is email them back and say, When is your deadline? It's always a first thing and then you need to have some kind of hold holding statement prepared. Right. The Browning School believes in the missions and values of our school. This conduct runs completely counter to that and we are continuing to investigate the matter as quickly as we can. That's an example of something that is a holding statement that could be used for many things. Right? You have an incident on campus. You have something that, you know, something goes wrong with a kid in terms of their behavior, that kind of thing. That's the sort of thing you can use that holding statement for. Right. And there's many examples of how to do that also that you can find online. And then once the crisis is underway, you want to monitor what is being said. You want to monitor who's calling. You want to monitor who's asking the questions, what kinds of questions you're asking. They're asking. We had a situation at a school that I used to be involved with where we had actually Legionella. So Legionnaires disease had gotten into the pipes at school. And it was very serious because not only did we have our faculty and staff in there, it was a summertime situation. We also had campers, so we also had students and in fact employees that were not typically members of our community and having to communicate that and the press did get a hold of that. Having to communicate that was very scary. There were lots of people that were scared that they were going to develop what could have been a fairly serious respiratory illness based on something that went wrong with our facilities. So in that situation, what I did was make sure that the that the receptionists, the people that would be answering the phone had a certain like had a spreadsheet that said what the person's name was, the questions that they were asking, the response and, and sort of a timestamp scenario for that. And we did that. That probably had to last for three or four days and then everything calmed down because it's important for you to see and get that feedback about if everyone's asking, you know, did this affect kids in X, Y, Z building? And it didn't, then you know that you should have probably said in that press statement or in that in the in the email you sent to families, you should have said this only affected kids that were in this building, not in any of our other buildings. So sometimes it just points out to you the places where in your rush to get something out, you may have left information out, which is fine. And that always happens. Don't worry about that. So you've got two different kinds of audiences. You're going to have the same message but a different tone, right? You want to really employ that empathetic tone with your internal audience. Think about who you're talking to. You're talking to people that are you're involved in a relationship with. You're involved in a relationship with your external audience, folks, for sure, but not to the same extent. And you can be a little bit more businesslike with these people, right? You could be a little bit more business like with a feeder school or an access organization or you professional peers. I would still suggest that for the most part you're going to need to send the same message. You know, maybe not if it's something like the case I used before where it's legionella and it's actually something that's making your building a sick building. So that's not necessarily going to be something you're going to send out to prospective families. And you don't need to because you're going to have remediated the situation. But many of the crisis that I spoke about earlier are things where you really need to tell prospective families or access organizations or professional organizations. It can be much more cut and dried. Make sure that for your internal audience you're putting some humanity in it. You're making sure to say that you understand how upsetting this is. You're making sure to say that you are actively involved in remediating the situation because you know how challenging it is for them. So really bring that empathy way up for the people that are currently within your community. Now and as well as the alumni that love your community. So let's talk a little bit about working with a crisis firm. So there are some mistakes to avoid and some important things to remember, right? Not every bit of press coverage is a crisis. It is not. Sometimes you're just in the press, right? Sometimes. Or sometimes you're in the press. Let's say you're in the press room cutting staff writer, offering buyouts. That's a fact. You may say, well, people are going to think we're unstable or people are not going to apply their kids here or whatever. It's a fact. It doesn't The fact that it got out, it's there, it's reality, really. The band is going to move on rather quickly, even when you see some of these very negative sites around EIB and the like that have really taken schools to task over a lot of things, it doesn't stick. It doesn't last, particularly with social media. These charges, these accusations, they just don't last. So try not to overly stress yourself. It is bad while it's happening, but it really also is a moment in time. And that goes to my second point. If we're not panicking or not thinking things through, do not panic and do think things through as you go through the crisis right now, I would say the clock is ticking, but honestly, you have more time. You really do have more time. You have time to ask the right kinds of questions. Right. You know, if you're being told about a crisis, do not feel badly about taking your heads. Time to get the information that you need, calling him or her back should you need to say, hey, I just thought of this other thing. Can we can you step me through how this happened with how that happened? Those are all really important steps to getting the best information out there, which is what you want when you've got a crisis. You want to get the best information out there so that you can also begin to set your community on a right course where they know and they understand what you're saying to them and they can start to move forward. Don't turn everything over to senior leaders of the crisis for you have got as a communications professional, a really strong role to play in this. So play it and act with a sense of urgency. Right. You can't this is not the time to have 20 sign offs and to make sure all the division heads have looked at it. And hey, college guidance might have something to say about it. This is a tight team and this is a team that has got to get information out to the right people. And these are the important things to remember, right about working again, working with a crisis firm. Right. They know their business. They don't know your sport unless you have work to know. And I will say the caveat to that is you have worked with these people for ages. If you've worked with these people for ages, they know your skills. Many of us are not keeping these people on retainer, especially if you're a smaller school. And so they don't know your culture and they suddenly have to get to know it very fast when you're in a high pressure situation. So just remember that and you can both keep your sides of the street clean by kind of knowing what you know and they know what they know. If their advice is not right for you, don't follow it. You may have to present it to your head of school. He might be right there on the call. She might be right there on the call. If it's bad advice, it's bad advice. And you know your school. So think about that and brief them fully, not only on the crisis at hand, but any kind of surrounding context. I don't think that there's any crisis firm that's going to say, you're really telling me way too much about this situation and I want to know less. So here are just some takeaways for you to think about. There's so much more that is involved in a crisis, but for a quick bite, these are the things that I would say mission and values always right at the top. Connect everything back to that. It is your it is your safe harbor. It is what families have chosen you for. It is presumably what faculty working at your school rely on the mission of values to do even more heavy lifting than it normally does. Right. Prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare. If you are new to the business or you really have not dealt with a big crisis before, I would suggest talking to people who have reached out. Hopefully in your city, like here in New York, there's hopefully a cohort of comms people that you can really rely on and you know, mentorship, I think in this business goes a long way as well. So ask people, find those people that have done this before, transparency, they don't walk down information there will inevitably be in a crisis situation. Someone who's saying, we don't really have to tell them that, do we? I mean, how are they going to really find out? Always a bad idea. People always find out if it's something that you can share and you're legally able to share. I would advice sharing it. It is easier. It is transparent for your families who are going to like that and your faculty who are going to like that, respect that and admire that. And that is important. That is important currency for you to be taking it to the next crisis. Make sure you've researched. What do you need to know if you can't answer those five whys and W we're in an age rather, you may need to you may need to do some more work, right? You may need to do some more research on what is actually going on. Take your time and do that. You know, collect information from the back side. Right. From what has happened. Now that you've put out the email and as you put out the press release, monitor that and then use that to make the next time better. Debrief with your team, debrief with your leadership, what went right, what went wrong. That is something that we do regularly at Browning, and I think it's something that you can actually do in a lot of different scenarios, not even not only in crisis, but actually in other communication scenarios as well. So I really hope through all of this, the thing that you have seen most of all is that crisis is our manageable crisis. This are part of everyday life increasingly for communications people. And as much as you may like the other aspects of your job, and I think that we all do, this is a fact of life that is here to stay. So the more that you embrace it, embrace the challenge of it, and also embrace the opportunities inherent in dealing with something that is unpleasant for your community, but ultimately very surmountable through working in your mission and values and through being prepared, the better off you're going to be for the next time and the better off you're going to be as you go through your career and deal with this more and more. So again, I really appreciate the fact that you've taken the opportunity to look at this and take away some information from this. And if you are interested in anything that I've said or anything that I've said resonates with you, I invite you to drop me a line. I invite you to follow me on LinkedIn, and I invite you to be connected to me in the future. Thank you so much.

crisis communications

independent schools

social media

crisis management

preparedness

transparency