Early in my career as a school leader, I got the phone call that every head of school dreads. A wheel had come off one of our school buses. The bus had gone on its side. Every child on board had been transported to the hospital.
I remember the next hours as a blur of controlled chaos. Parents were distraught. Many were furious: and rightfully so. Teachers were shaken. Staff were looking to me for answers I didn’t yet have. And I was doing something I had never done before: leading a community through genuine fear, in real time, without a script.
Every child was going to be fine. But I didn’t know that yet. And neither did anyone else.
That day taught me more about montessori school leadership than almost any other experience I can name. It taught me that in a crisis, your community doesn’t just need someone to manage logistics: they need someone to hold steady while the ground is shaking. They need to borrow your calm.
I’ve been thinking about this recently as I read and hear from school leaders navigating what feels like an almost unrelenting season of uncertainty: political turbulence, family anxiety, community polarization, and an information environment that seems designed to keep everyone on edge. Whether the crisis is sudden and acute, like that bus accident, or slow-burning and ambient, like the anxious climate in which many of our schools are operating today, the leadership challenge is fundamentally the same.
How do you lead with steadiness when the situation is anything but steady?
You Become a Symbolic Leader, Whether You Want to or Not
Under ordinary circumstances, school leadership is demanding enough. You are running a small organization with a complex mission, managing personnel, balancing a budget, and serving families who have entrusted you with the most important people in their lives.
But in a crisis, something shifts. You stop being just an operational leader and you become a symbolic one. Every word you say: and every word you don’t say: is being weighed. People are watching how you carry yourself. They are reading your body language, your tone of voice, your apparent level of confidence. They are asking themselves: Does this person have it together? Can I trust them to protect us?
This can feel impossibly heavy. And it is heavy. But it is also one of the most profound things you will ever do as a leader.
Montessori philosophy, at its best, is about creating environments where people feel safe enough to grow, take risks, and do their best work. That is just as true for adults in a crisis as it is for children in a classroom. Your job is to be the prepared adult in the room: the one whose calm radiates outward and gives others permission to breathe.
Leading Through Tension, Not Around It
One of the most important things I have learned about crisis leadership is that it is not about "solving" a problem. It is about managing ongoing tension between competing values: what leadership scholars sometimes call polarities.
Problems have solutions. Polarities don’t. They require your ongoing judgment, your ability to hold complexity, and your willingness to keep adjusting as circumstances change. Three of the most important polarities I’ve encountered, both in my own experience and in watching other leaders navigate crisis, are these:
1. Your Staff’s Well-Being and the School’s Operational Continuity
In a crisis, your teachers become emotional first responders before they can even step into their classrooms. They are absorbing fear: from children, from parents, and often from the wider culture: while managing their own anxiety about what is happening. If you ignore this reality and simply expect business as usual, you will burn people out quickly and erode the trust you need to lead effectively.
At the same time, your school cannot simply stop functioning. Children need structure and continuity. If operations stall, if instruction becomes inconsistent, if routines collapse: students suffer, and so does the community’s sense of safety.
The way through this tension is to protect the essentials and let go of everything else. Pause non-essential initiatives. Shorten meetings. Give teachers clear, simple guidance on what learning should look like right now: what to keep, what can wait. These actions signal that you understand the load people are carrying, and that you value their genuine well-being far more than any performance of productivity.
2. Transparency and the Need to Contain Harmful Uncertainty
When I got that phone call about the bus, my first instinct was to get to the hospital. But I quickly realized I also needed to get ahead of the story: because if I didn’t communicate, the vacuum would fill with rumor, speculation, and fear.
Transparency builds trust. Families and staff deserve accurate information, shared promptly and with respect for their intelligence. Being as clear as possible about what you know, and honest about what you don’t know yet, goes a long way toward preventing the kind of misinformation that can fracture a community.
But not all information needs to reach everyone, and certainly not in the same way. Differentiate your communication thoughtfully. Give your teachers more context: and give it to them first, before it goes to families. Offer families clear, plain-language updates.
With young children especially, answer their questions simply and honestly without volunteering more detail than they need. Children’s nervous systems are not equipped to carry adult fears, and it is not your job to ask them to. We often discuss this in our montessori consulting sessions: the adult's role is to filter the world for the child, not to flood them with it.
3. Acknowledging Emotion and Protecting the Stability of Routine
Here is a hard-won insight from leaders who have navigated prolonged crisis: routine is not peripheral to recovery. It is central to it. For children especially, the predictable rhythms of the school day: morning meetings, work cycles, familiar transitions: function as a psychological anchor when the wider world feels unstable.
The Montessori environment, with its emphasis on order, rhythm, and the child’s deep need for predictability, is actually extraordinarily well-suited to this moment.
The Foundation of Culture: Investing Before the Storm
While a crisis demands immediate action, the success of your leadership often depends on the work you did months or years before the "wheels came off." I am reminded of Roger Martin, the former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, who led his institution through the 2008 financial crisis.
Martin’s success wasn't just due to his brilliance during the crash; it was because he had previously invested heavily in one-on-one relationships and a culture of transparency. When he had to ask his faculty to accept a salary freeze to save the school’s future, they agreed unanimously. Why? Because the trust was already in the bank.
In our work at The Montessori Foundation, we see this constantly. Schools that prioritize authentic community and honest communication during the "quiet" times are the ones that remain resilient when the storm hits. If you are looking to strengthen these foundations, you can explore our resources in the Montessori Catalogue.
Leading the Leader: Taking Care of the Person Who Takes Care of Everyone Else
None of this is possible if you are running on empty. And that is a real risk, because school leaders in crisis mode often do the worst thing imaginable: they stop taking care of themselves precisely when they most need to.
You cannot pour from an empty vessel. That is not a cliché: it is a physiological fact. Your nervous system is the instrument through which your steadiness reaches your community. If your nervous system is dysregulated, that radiates outward too.
So: protect your sleep. Protect the habits that help you regulate: whether that is exercise, time in nature, prayer, music, or simply the company of people who love you. Don’t try to carry your whole community’s fear alone. Lean on your leadership team, your partner, a mentor, or seek out specialized montessori consulting for an outside perspective. There is no weakness in that.
And practice the small disciplines of steadiness in your visible presence as a leader:
- Pause before you speak.
- Slow your pace of speech when things get intense.
- Give thoughtful answers to hard questions rather than reactive ones.
These habits, practiced consistently, will have a ripple effect far beyond what you might imagine.
What People Will Remember
Every child on that bus went home to their parents that day. No one was seriously hurt. And in the weeks that followed, I heard something again and again from families: not about the decisions I had made, not about the logistics I had managed, but about how I had made them feel: that someone was present, that their children mattered more than the institution’s reputation, and that we were going to get through it together.
Maya Angelou was right that people will not remember what you said or what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel. That is as true in a school community as anywhere in the world.
In Montessori education, we talk a great deal about the prepared environment: the deliberate, thoughtful creation of conditions that allow children to flourish. Crisis leadership asks you to apply that same intentionality to the human environment of your school. To be, yourself, the steadiest thing in an unsteady moment.
You will not be perfect at it. None of us are. But if you lead with honesty, with care, and with the deep conviction that your community’s trust is worth protecting: that is enough. More than enough. It is the kind of leadership that people remember for the rest of their lives.
