What does it feel like to be both experiencing and leading the response to a crisis?
How might that experience impact educator, school leader, and provider recovery and renewal?
In 2024, Amy Castellanos, Cynthia Vega, and Matthew Reddam were SCRR Leadership Fellows. In conversation, they realized that they were leading through crises professionally that they were experiencing personally.
This phenomenon was missing from school crisis leadership literature: until now.
Amy, Cynthia and Matt conducted 10 interviews with school leaders from Arizona, Southern California, and Northern California. Interviewees, from mental health counselors to HR directors to state leads of suicide prevention and more, shared their experiences going through the crisis they themselves led.
And we came up with a way to talk about it: Lived-Polycrisis School Leadership.
What will you find in this guide?
First, we offer the framing and context to the conversations that Amy, Matt and Cynthia had with 10 school leaders across the country: the questions they asked, the people they interviewed, and their approach. We also share some operational language that can help us be inshared dialogue and further understand the breadth and depth of this experience.
Part One “Leaning In: The Gifts and Challenges that Lived-Polycrisis School Leadership Evokes,” we share the themes from the interviews, which coalesced in five challenges and five gifts, reflecting the personal impacts of leading communities and teams through crisis they themselves experienced first hand. This section may serve to validate some readers’ own experiences and evoke awareness and compassion for the experiences of others.
Part Two “Leading Out: Practices for Navigating Toward Recovery & Renewal,” offers guidance for school crisis leadership beyond immediate crisis response, through recovery, and toward renewal. This section offers practices for collegiality, supervision, and leadership that we can all use and adapt for our specific contexts. We offer leadership skills, moves, and strategies that can ensure our leaderships’ whole-self integration, which is vital for our humanized renewal.
We close with Concluding Thoughts & Lingering Questions, a final letter from Amy to you, and a glossary of terms to operationalize this discussion.
The work we do arises from both our personal and professional lives, often without clear lines of distinction. Our identities as leaders, survivors, caretakers, and human beings are in constant flux, shaped by the experiences we navigate and the context of our communities.
This is a guide to remind you that all the parts of you – the personal and professional – are one complete story.
Suggested Citation: Castellanos, A., Kurta, M., Wolf-Prusan, L., & Magtoto, N. (2025) Leaning In And Leading Out To Renew – A Guidebook from and for School Leaders Navigating the Personal & Professional Intersections of Polycrisis. Guide for the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project, NCTSN, SAMHSA, Washington, D.C.
