Ah, now this is a real summer break. Finally there is time to recharge, revisit the year that was, and craft big (and fun!) communication plans for the year to come.

What a treat it is to return to normalcy after back-to-back summers filled with crisis management.

This summer also offers a good time to refresh your office’s resilience plan — the sort of thing that might have gotten overshadowed the past two years by bigger priorities.

While it is fine to hope and expect that the coming school year will go smoothly, it’s also wise to anticipate and prepare for the alternative.

Over the past 12 months, for instance, schools saw a great deal of turnover within their communications offices, and a ransomware attack rendered school websites inoperable for many days. What’s past is prologue, so why not start with those two areas in developing or refining your Plan B?

How would your office respond to being short-handed for several months? What planned projects could you put on hold? Could you call in colleagues, if only for a few hours here and there? (Hint: Getting help is always just an email away.)

As for your school’s website, what can you gather now that would carry you through an extended online outage? What tools and assets would be helpful? (January’s issue of Refill has a list of action steps to launch your plan.)

And think about other areas where communications rely on a single system or person. What are your backups? Do you even have backups in place? And does your entire team know how and when to shift to the backups?

A little bit of foresight now can pay huge dividends when you’re confronted with something unanticipated.

Don’t-miss clicks

• If you thought the Great Resignation was done with education, think again: A new survey of higher education employees finds that more than half are likely to leave their jobs in the next year, with pay and workplace flexibility primarily driving the discontent.
• In a related story, a survey of college officials finds that most schools have more open positions this year than last. A staggering 84 percent of respondents said that hiring for administrative and staff jobs has been more difficult in the past year.
• Jan Abernathy of New York’s Browning School has a terrific column on why communications directors should report to the head of school, rather than to another senior leader. This was the arrangement at my previous school, and I can vouch firsthand for Jan’s takeaways. In fact, with that experience, I can’t imagine taking seriously a role that didn’t report directly to the head. Don’t miss the follow-up discussion on Jan’s piece that took place on LinkedIn.
• Are private schools subject to the legal requirements of Title IX? The federal regulation’s prohibitions on sex discrimination has long been understood to apply only to schools that get federal funding. But a federal judge in Maryland has ruled that Title IX applies to private schools, too, because of their tax-exempt status. Concordia Preparatory School, which is being sued by five former students on Title IX claims, says it will appeal the ruling.

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