Photo courtesy of Tiffany Lillie

Back in March, Tiffany Lillie was working hard as the Director of Community Resource Development at the Framingham Public Schools.

She had been thinking about her work running out-of-school-time programs, including child care programs, in her city. She had been in the office working. She had been at community meetings listening to parent feedback. Her 200 staff members were running programs that served 2,000 children a day.

Then, Lillie heard the first coughs of a global pandemic, which gradually turned into a roar.

“In Massachusetts, we were one of the first departments to have a positive COVID-19 case in early March, so we were unfortunately trendsetting,” Lillie says. “There weren’t other examples that we could follow as a department.”

When Governor Charlie Baker ordered schools to close, Framingham pivoted its programs online. COVID-19 infection rates soared across the state.

So what does a school administrator do in the midst of a global crisis where fear and uncertainty have seized center stage?

Well, in Framingham, Mayor Yvonne Spicer and the school department and Lillie and her colleagues kept talking, in calm, clear voices, in multiple languages – because while the world had changed, the work remained the same: educate children; engage families; provide community resources.

“We went out on March 12, and on March 17 we’re like, okay, everyone, is going to become a YouTube star,” Lillie says of her staff. “We were making 10 videos a day for pre-k through high school. We were doing virtual podcasts, highlighting physical activity, and putting other original programming online.”

The city filled technological gaps, handing out Chromebooks and checking on students’ Internet access.

“Framingham is very much like a Tale of Two Cities. We have affluent families. We have low-income families. We have a large, undocumented, immigrant community. So for us access is essential. What we do doesn’t matter if kids don’t have technology or internet at home,” Lillie says.

“Working with families was our first priority. Even though we couldn’t provide the physical in-person aspect of child care, we worked on meeting students’ social/emotional and mental health needs.”

Offline, Lillie and her team were also busy in the brick-and-mortar world.

“We made phone calls. We did surveys. Staff members knocked on doors to deliver food. We showed up at many of the food and Chromebook distribution sites, so we were very much in touch with families.”

“And the mayor had convened a food and security Task Force, so members from our team are helping to do that work and collaborating with local faith-based institutions and local community partners to look at the food piece. The push was we need to pull together the resources to meet basic human needs. We’d also ask parents, What does your child need for enrichment?”

Lillie and her team tailored events to appeal to different ages, adjusting as they went along. There were virtual paint nights and virtual family trivia nights. There were panels and group discussions for high school students as well as a teenager-run podcast to discuss the fallout from the murder of George Floyd.

For preschool children, “the literacy piece was huge.” Drawing on parent feedback, Lillie’s department provided more virtual read-alouds and check-ins with the staff members that children were used to seeing. And Lillie slowly reopened the district’s child care program.

Bonds across the city grew stronger, Lillie says, explaining, “I think that we’ve always worked well with our community providers, but during the pandemic we’re reached a higher level of truly organized efforts.”

“And now we’re talking to our community partners about things like systems change and how we might share professional development resources and staffing, because that’s a big crisis right now, that we can’t find enough staff members.”

The crucial lesson that Lillie has learned?

Listen. And do the community organizing that makes it easier for families to be heard.

“As providers and institutions, we think we know what to do. But now, as a person who works for city government in this community, my biggest takeaway is that I really need to make sure we are engaging with people and that our communication goes beyond the transactional and is truly relational. That’s how we’re going to get to a place of being able to have ongoing critical feedback.”

“There’s really no formula for working through a pandemic. We’re making it up as we go. But true innovation can come from desperation.”

What’s Lillie most proud of?

“I’m just honored to be part of a community that is doing its best. We’re working through it. We’re not scared. We’re willing to be humble and just do the work.”