Chapter 5: Re-Thinking-Re-Building-Re-Visioning Educational Leadership In A Pandemic Crisis Environment: Investigating Principals’ and Assistant Principals’ Concerns and Use of Time

As a field, educational leadership in the United States reached a pivotal moment of reckoning as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic, further exposed and exacerbated systemic societal inequities, manifested in terms of access to educational opportunities. In particular, lack of access to opportunity, typically a result of living in poverty, impacted many students attending public schools in large urban centers in the United States (Milner, 2012b). The endemic for many children and their families was that access to educational opportunities was limited in urban environments, including urban schools (Milner, 2012a, 2015). In March of the 2019–2020 school year, every U.S. state shuttered schools in an effort to mitigate the impact of the pandemic (Chavez & Moshtaghian, 2020).