NYCDOE:
Community Schools

Spring 2022

The NYCDOE is led by a chancellor appointed by the city’s mayor. The highest levels of the organization’s leadership change in the year following mayoral elections, and with each change in leadership comes the inevitable strategic shifts and associated uncertainties.

BACKGROUND

The Office of Community Schools at the New York City Department of Education was created in 2014 to support 45 NYC Community Schools as part of an attendance-improvement and drop-out-prevention effort. These schools partner with community-based organizations to coordinate and deliver wraparound services to ensure students get what they need to succeed. When we began our engagement, the OCS had grown to support 317 Community Schools across the city, funded through a combination of city, state, and federal grants. Sarah Jonas, the now former Executive Director of the Office of Community Schools, hired us in support of her cabinet and one specific team that had sustained a particularly challenging combination of staffing shortages.

THE CHALLENGE

The city’s new administration entered on the heels of the COVID pandemic, with staff still wrestling the constant associated stresses. The senior cabinet worried that their strategic initiatives might not win support from the new administration, despite the fact that their work set the national standard for how a city can work in concert with community based organizations in support of children and families. In fact, the RAND Corporation released an impact study entitled “Illustrating the Promise of Community Schools: An Assessment of the Impact of the NYC Community Schools Initiative” in January, 2020, highlighting the work led by the cabinet. 

The Operations and Finance team, an in-house subset, was particularly stressed after the loss of key talent and leadership. Several members had been granted extensions on their work from home status, which meant that there were folks working both from city hall and their suburban homes. As with so many other teams, the relationships were strained under countless external pressures.

OUR APPROACH

Over the course of a brief, 2-month engagement, each member of the leadership team engaged in one round of 1:1 coaching, totaling 4 sessions. We want to note that, while we believe longer coaching engagements yield more impactful experiences, we were honored to have worked with this incredible group of public servants in a coaching engagement where we focused our energy on providing support through a rapidly shifting landscape.

The Operations and Finance team engaged in two group sessions that focused on communicating about harm, and then on rebuilding their relationships. These sessions were preceded by interviews with each member of the team to deepen our own understanding of the circumstances and level set on where we might land through our sessions. After our two sessions, we delivered a series of recommendations to continue work on the team’s interpersonal dynamics and strategic functioning.