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Highlights from our recent webinar with Steve Murley on how leading change in K-12 today requires more than sound decisions–it requires adaptability.
Change is a constant in K-12 education. Enrollment declines, school consolidations, budget pressures, and rapidly shifting community expectations are landing on district leaders all at once. And yet, many of the traditional tools in a leader’s playbook, including data-heavy presentations and top-down communication, are not delivering the results they used to.
As the future of education is evolving, how do the ways schools engage families and communities need to evolve alongside it? That question sits at the center of everything we build, and it was the through-line of a conversation we recently hosted with Steve Murley, a nationally recognized education consultant with more than 30 years of experience in PK-12 leadership. The session drew school and district leaders from across the country to dig into one of the most pressing challenges in public education today: how to lead through change in a way that actually brings communities along.
You can watch the full webinar recording here and read on for the highlights:
From Management to Leadership
Steve opened with a distinction that set the tone for the conversation that followed. “Change management” is a familiar term, but Steve argued that the real work happening in districts right now demands something different: change leadership.
Management implies control. Leadership requires adaptability. And in the current environment, adaptability is a core competency.
Steve described today’s climate using the BANI framework (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible), an evolution of the more familiar VUCA model (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). Where VUCA describes conditions in the external environment, BANI describes what people feel when they are living through rapid change. It names the emotional reality: fragile, worried, unable to see what comes next, and overwhelmed by information that does not add up.
For school leaders, this is the water their communities are swimming in before a single announcement is made.
Why Communities Resist Change
When parents and community members push back on decisions, district leaders often assume it is about the specific policy or proposal. But Steve argued that it is almost never about that.
“That resistance is almost always connected to loss,” he explained. “Those losses happen predominantly in these four areas: identity, trust, voice, and stability.”
A school closure is more than a logistical change. If a family has lived in the Longfellow neighborhood for decades, “Longfellow” is not just the name of a building. It is how they understand where they belong. Closing the school threatens something much larger than enrollment numbers. And more data, more spreadsheets, more rational arguments cannot address that kind of loss.
“I learned, and I wish I would have known this in a little bit more detail earlier in my career, because at one point in time,” Steve said. “I thought if I just had more information, if I could just show them more data, I’d be able to overcome that animosity. It’s not about the decision.”
This does not mean the data does not matter. It means the data cannot lead. Before a community can hear facts, they need to feel heard.
This connects to something we hear from school communications directors constantly: families and community members do not feel informed, even when districts are working hard to push information out. The gap is rarely about volume. It is about whether communication is designed to be a broadcast or a conversation. For too long, K-12 communication has been one-directional. What districts need now is engagement that is layered, intentional, and mutual.
Change Happens Externally. Transition Happens Internally.
Another key distinction from the session: change is something leaders implement. Transition is what happens inside the people affected by that change.
When a district closes a school and rezones students to a different building, the external change is clear. But every teacher, parent, and community member is processing that transition individually, emotionally, and at their own pace. A decision that reads as a logical first-order change to a leadership team can feel like “stepping off the edge of the flat Earth” to a parent whose family has been connected to that school for generations.
Adaptive leaders recognize this gap and design engagement accordingly. Rather than announcing and defending, they create space to understand, acknowledge, and guide. The goal, as Steve put it, is to do things with the community, not to it. That distinction is foundational to how real trust gets built.
Communication Is a Two-Sided Coin
Steve emphasized the balance between telling and involving. Effective community engagement requires both.
Many districts err too far in one direction. Some communicate frequently but do not genuinely invite input. Others create engagement processes without ever clearly explaining the context or the stakes. Both approaches erode trust.
Steve described the ideal posture this way: every leader in a district, from board members to building principals, should think of themselves as the “chief engagement officer.” And that role requires both outbound communication and active listening, consistently and simultaneously.
Steve used the analogy of a teeter-totter–when it tilts too far toward telling without asking, communities feel excluded. When it tilts too far toward engagement without clarity, confusion fills the vacuum. The goal is balance, and maintaining that balance across a change process takes deliberate attention at every stage.
This is why the infrastructure of communication matters so much. Districts managing multiple disconnected tools, separate platforms for the website, mass messaging, and community updates, face an uphill battle when change arrives. Fragmented tools produce fragmented messaging. When a board president says one thing, a principal says another, and the school website says something else entirely, trust erodes fast. The ability to communicate consistently across every channel from one place is a strategic advantage, especially during a community crisis or a difficult transition.
You Can Never Communicate Enough
Leaders who think they are overcommunicating are almost always still falling short of what their audiences need. Steve pointed out that Gallup research suggests that 95 percent of employees say their manager does not communicate enough with them. And this pattern holds at every level of an organization.
For school districts, the gap is even wider because leaders live inside the change continuously while their communities experience it in snapshots. Steve described this as the difference between living in a film and watching a stop-motion animation. District leaders see the process evolving day by day. Community members may only check in once every few months. What feels like constant communication to leaders can register as radio silence to families.
“We live in the continuous,” Steve said. “Our constituents live in a stop-motion movie. If we remember that, we can start to think about how big the gaps are in that stop-motion animation. Those gaps have to be filled. If we don’t fill them, they will.”
This is also why meeting families where they are matters so much. Not every family is checking the district website. Not every caregiver is opening the email newsletter. Reaching every family means showing up across channels, translated into the languages families actually speak, available at the hours they are actually looking. The communication system has to close those gaps before a crisis makes them visible.
Trust Is Everything, and It Takes Time
The session closed with a frank conversation about trust as the foundation beneath every change initiative. Without it, all the right processes and communication strategies in the world will not move a community forward.
Rebuilding broken trust requires leaders to slow down, hold more meetings, demonstrate humility, and acknowledge uncertainty rather than project false confidence. Steve referenced the work of Stephen Covey in noting that leaders can only move as fast as the people they serve trust them to lead. Where that trust has been damaged, the path forward starts by going back to the beginning. That is what adaptive leadership actually looks like.
It is also worth noting that trust is not built in moments of crisis, but across the 365 days that precede those moments. Districts that have invested consistently in showing up for families, keeping communities informed, and treating engagement as a two-way relationship are better positioned to navigate hard decisions when they come. That foundation has to be built. The less of it that exists, the harder every difficult conversation becomes.
How Edlio Helps Districts Stay Connected Through Change
Everything Steve described in this session reflects challenges that Edlio was built to help districts solve. The difficulty of reaching every family. The risk of inconsistent messaging. The gap between what leadership knows and what the community sees. The need for communication that goes beyond broadcasting and becomes genuine engagement.
Edlio’s platform equips schools and districts to manage their website, mobile app, mass communications, and more from a single dashboard. Edlio Chatbot extends that reach further, making district information accessible 24 hours a day in any language, so that families who cannot call during office hours or who speak a language other than English can still get answers when they need them. And Edlio’s built-in accessibility tools ensure that no family is excluded from the conversation because of a barrier on the school’s website.
When a difficult season arrives, the infrastructure for reaching every family is already in place. There is no scrambling to coordinate messaging across disconnected systems. With Edlio, there is one platform for every conversation.
We also think about communication in tiers. Not every family needs the same level of outreach. Some are deeply engaged and just need reliable, timely updates. Others are harder to reach and need proactive, personalized connection. And some families face specific barriers (language, technology access, time) that require intentional design to overcome. Edlio’s platform is built to serve all three tiers, so that “reaching every family” is not an aspiration but a practice.
For more than 20 years, Edlio has been partnering with schools and districts to reach every family, connect their community, and uplift every student. That mission matters most in moments of uncertainty, when clear and consistent communication is not optional but essential.
Reflection for School and District Leaders
Do you have the right communication tools and processes in place to lead effectively through change? Can you meet families and community members where they are and communicate in ways that ensure everyone is informed and involved?
