Even if Nancy Messonnier’s name rings no bells, surely you remember the impact she had on schools five years ago.
Messonnier is the health official whose news briefing on Feb. 25, 2020, transformed how America understood coronavirus.
Up to then, the U.S. news media had paid vague attention to a viral outbreak in Asia — a disease that, in this country, had 57 cases.
Messonnier, though, earned front-page coverage with her no-nonsense warning, the first from a leader in the U.S. government: The American people needed to prepare for coronavirus because it certainly was coming.
She also said this: “You should ask your children’s school about their plans for … school closures, if there are plans for teleschool. I contacted my local school superintendent this morning with exactly those questions.”
Parents took Messonnier’s advice and went immediately to educators. But school leaders were generally caught flat-footed, their coronavirus planning being closer to “concepts of a plan,” and had few answers to offer immediately.
With candor that overcame complacency, Messonnier showed how one statement from one federal official, even a mid-level bureaucrat, could disrupt the U.S. educational system.
Muscling DEI out of schools
History may not repeat, but it does tend to rhyme: This month, a mid-level official at the Education Department made his own bid to shake up national attitudes: this time regarding diversity, equity and inclusion.
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor pushed out a four-page letter that was more screed than sober guidance.
His Feb. 14 message interpreted a 2023 Supreme Court ruling on college and university admissions as establishing a sweeping federal policy for all American schools.
He also painted DEI as inherently unlawful: Schools that pursue “nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity” are practicing “overt and covert racial discrimination.” Such schools, Trainor warned, “face potential loss of federal funding.”
This is a serious threat for independent schools that have come to rely on government funding more than ever, through Paycheck Protection Program loans during the pandemic and tax-funded “school choice” programs today.
At the same time, social justice and equity are central to the mission of both secular and religious private schools. The National Association of Independent Schools, for instance, includes promoting diversity, equity and inclusion among its expected principles of members.
Trainor got the front-page headlines he clearly sought. Concerned parents are asking hard questions. And school trustees and administrators are racing to sort out whether this new policy affects their institutions and how to respond.
Uncle Sam’s broken promise
Given how the wind is blowing, more anonymous bureaucrats may choose on their own to make pre-emptive moves that affect independent schools.
Consider “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day,” a national event each February that aims to reduce the gender gap in the field and in STEM-related careers more broadly.
This month, a branch of the Army Corps of Engineers determined that the program violated a recent presidential order banning DEI outreach, and it withdrew its promised partnership.
Ashley Hall, an independent girls’ school in Charleston, S.C., had teamed with federal officials since 2017 to present the annual event. But the Army Corps’ withdrawal threatened this year’s program until several female engineers stepped forward to keep it going.
“One of the silver linings, I guess, is seeing the interest that our community and other partners have in supporting women in STEM education,” Head of School Anne Weston told a local TV station.
Google Alerts for government
Of course, independent schools have next to no ability to influence the discussions — much less, the findings — of government officials. Lawmakers will do what lawmakers do.
What schools can do, though, is drop their tendency to tune out the actions of government.
Community relations, a duty that often falls to the communications director, includes the responsibility of tracking legislative and executive actions that can affect or interrupt school operations.
Often, this requires simply monitoring the news for notable trends and briefing the administrators who need to know.
Nancy Messonnier and Craig Trainor were unknowns until the moment they made news, but their issues were no surprise: Growing public anxiety about coronavirus was the reason she spoke to reporters; Donald Trump regularly threatened in the 2024 election to stamp out DEI.
The challenge for schools, especially in a hectic news cycle, is recognizing and staying focused on the issues where government action would truly disrupt campus life.
We recommend that the community relations official sit down with the head of school and the administrator with the best overall view on operations (likely the chief financial officer). Together, they can identify the handful of topics most pertinent to the mission and running of the school.
Google Alerts for that list of issues will keep tabs on federal and state activity. When alerts on a given subject grow frequent, it’s time to ramp up the personal monitoring and to put the proper campus officials on notice.
With local government, Google Alerts may be insufficient, so “social listening” — monitoring the direction of chatter on social media — may be necessary. A less-techy way to the same result is simply keeping in regular contact with neighborhood and municipal leaders.
The school group should gather regularly to review and update its key issues: Quarterly or, in normal times, even semiannual meetings are frequent enough. Just don’t let this fall entirely off the calendar.
Otherwise, as we saw in 2020 and are seeing again now, schools risk being unready to address important community questions as they arise.