Journal website: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/   Manuscript received: 2/3/2023 
Facebook: /EPAAA  Revisions received: 28/7/2023 
Twitter: @epaa_aape  Accepted: 28/8/2023 

 

education policy analysis 
archives 
A peer-reviewed, independent,  
open access, multilingual journal  

 
 
 
 
  

 Arizona State University 

 

                 Volume 31 Number 115         October 17, 2023  ISSN 1068-2341 

 
 

Rural District Leaders and Place in the Shadow of the Pandemic: 
Refining the Conceptualization of Leadership of Place as Caring1 

Jeff Walls 
Washington State University 

& 
Sarah J. Zuckerman 

University of Nebraska – Lincoln 
United States 

 
Citation: Walls, J., & Zuckerman, S. J. (2023). Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the 
pandemic: Refining the conceptualization of leadership of place as caring. Education Policy Analysis 
Archives, 31(115). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.31.8059 

 
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the tensions between rural community needs 
and politicized state-level school closure mandates. District leaders faced competing demands 
of meeting the basic needs of vulnerable families, supporting  the mental health of students 
and teachers, protecting the health of all community members, and creating new opportunities 
for learning. This study examines how rural district leaders responded to these challenges 
through the lens of caring. This lens highlights how district leaders responded to their 
contexts, as well as their perceptions of student, family, and staff needs in ethically grounded 
and politically savvy ways. We draw on semi-structured interviews with 12 rural district leaders 
in eight districts. District leaders in this study described caring as something that is 
intentionally enacted and identified several aspects that contributed to a caring district: a 
welcoming culture, taking an interest in individuals, prioritizing wellbeing, developing 
relationships, extending empathy and grace for people, and helping individuals see themselves 

                                                 
1 This study was supported by an American Education Research Association Educational Research Service Grant. 

http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/
https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.31.8059


Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 2 

 
as part of a larger community. Leaders made efforts to set the tone for and model  care, build 
relationships with students, teachers, parents, and community members , and enact servant 
leadership to support others. We conclude by examining the ways that applying an ethic of 
care illustrates how leaders identify needs and the strategies t hey use to respond to those needs 
in a responsive, place-attuned way. 
Keywords: rural education; leadership of place; care ethics; district leadership; COVID-19 
schooling 
 
Líderes de distritos rurales y lugar a la sombra de la pandemia: Refinando la 
conceptualización del liderazgo de lugar como cuidado  
Resumen: La pandemia de COVID-19 aumentó las tensiones entre las necesidades de las 
comunidades rurales y cierres politizados ordenados por el estado. Los líderes del distrito 
enfrentaron demandas contrapuestas para satisfacer las necesidades básicas de las familias 
vulnerables, apoyar la salud mental de estudiantes y maestros, proteger la salud de todos los 
miembros de la comunidad y crear nuevas oportunidades de aprendizaje. Este estudio examina 
cómo los líderes de los distritos rurales respondieron a estos desafíos a través de la lente del 
cuidado. Esta lente destaca cómo los líderes distritales respondieron a sus contextos, así como a 
sus percepciones de las necesidades de los estudiantes, las familias y el personal de manera 
éticamente fundamentada y políticamente inteligente. Nos basamos en entrevistas 
semiestructuradas con 12 líderes de distritos rurales en ocho distritos. Los líderes distritales en este 
estudio describieron el cuidado como algo que se implementa intencionalmente e identificaron 
varios aspectos que contribuyeron a un distrito cuidado una cultura acogedora, interesarse por las 
personas, priorizar el bienestar, desarrollar relaciones, extender la empatía y la gracia a las personas 
y ayudar a las personas verse a sí mismos como parte de una comunidad más grande. Los líderes se 
esforzaron por marcar la pauta y modelar de cuidado, construir relaciones con estudiantes, 
maestros, padres y miembros de la comunidad, y promulgar un liderazgo de servicio para apoyar a 
los demás. Concluimos examinando las formas en que la aplicación de una ética del cuidado ilustra 
cómo los líderes identifican las necesidades y las estrategias que utilizan para responder a esas 
necesidades de una maner cuidada que también sea sensible al lugar. 
Palabras-clave: educación rural; liderazgo de lugar; ética del cuidado; liderazgo distrital; 
escolarización durante el COVID-19 
 
Líderes distritais rurais e locais à sombra da pandemia: Refinando a conceptualização 
da liderança do local como cuidado  
Resumo: A pandemia de COVID-19 aumentou as tensões entre as necessidades das 
comunidades rurais e os mandatos politizados de encerramento de escolas a nível estatal. Os 
líderes distritais enfrentaram exigências concorrentes para satisfazer as necessidades básicas das 
famílias vulneráveis, apoiar a saúde mental de estudantes e professores, proteger a saúde de todos 
os membros da comunidade e criar novas oportunidades de aprendizagem. Este estudo examina 
como os líderes dos distritos rurais responderam a estes desafios através da perspectiva do 
cuidado. Esta lente destaca como os líderes distritais responderam aos seus contextos, bem como 
as suas percepções das necessidades dos alunos, famílias e funcionários de formas eticamente 
fundamentadas e politicamente inteligentes. Baseamo-nos em entrevistas semiestruturadas com 12 
líderes distritais rurais em oito distritos. Os líderes distritais neste estudo descreveram o cuidado 
como algo intencionalmente implementado e identificaram vários aspectos que contribuíram para 
um distrito solidário: uma cultura acolhedora, interesse pelos indivíduos, priorização do bem-estar, 
desenvolvimento de relacionamentos, extensão da empatia e graça às pessoas e ajuda aos 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  3 

 
indivíduos. vêem-se como parte de uma comunidade maior. Os líderes envidaram esforços para 
definir o tom e modelar o cuidado, construir relacionamentos com alunos, professores, pais e 
membros da comunidade e implementar uma liderança servidora para apoiar os outros. 
Concluímos examinando as formas como a aplicação de uma ética de cuidado ilustra como os 
líderes identificam as necessidades e as estratégias que utilizam para responder a essas 
necessidades de uma forma responsiva e também sensível ao local.  
Palavras-chave: educação rural; liderança do lugar; ética do cuidado; liderança distrital; escola 
durante o COVID-19 
 

Rural District Leaders and Place in the Shadow of the Pandemic: Refining the 
Conceptualization of Leadership of Place as Caring 

 
The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the tensions between rural community needs and 

highly politicized state-level school closure mandates. District leaders faced competing demands of 
meeting the basic needs of vulnerable families, supporting mental health of students and teachers, 
protecting the health of all community members, and creating new learning opportunities. 
Educational leaders repeatedly recalibrated logistical and instructional plans amidst the shifting 
pandemic conditions (Hayes et al., 2021; Lochmiller, 2021; Lowenhaupt & Hopkins, 2020). Like 
many state-level policy decisions that fail to consider rural districts (Schafft & Jackson, 2010), 
blanket closure policies were inequitable in communities where infection rates remained lower and 
where infrastructure limited access to internet and services such as food distribution. 

This study examines how rural district leaders responded to these challenges through the 
lens of caring. In particular, we ask: 

1) How did district leaders describe their approach to creating a caring environment 
in the context of COVID-19? And,  

2) How was district leaders’ approach to care shaped by their rural community 
context and the needs of their district?  

 

Caring is a two-way relationship that responds to expressed or perceived needs (Noddings, 2012) 
and serves as a vital component of academic and social support for student success and community 
well-being (Louis et al., 2016). Leaders contribute to caring through individual relationships and by 
creating a culture of caring (Ryu et al., 2022). This lens highlights how district leaders responded to 
their contexts, as well as their perceptions of student, family, and staff needs in ethically grounded 
and politically savvy ways. By focusing on district’s leaders’ conception of caring, we seek to move 
beyond previous flat conceptualizations of rural superintendents (McHenry-Sorber & Budge, 2018) 
by examining how district leaders center the multitude of educational and health needs of children 
and community.  

This study occurred during fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 when state policy requirements in 
the state where the study was conducted mandated social distancing in a way that made it difficult 
for schools to operate in person. For the most part, leaders in this study were resistant to blanket 
closure requirements either because spread of COVID-19 in their rural and small communities was 
low during the time of the study or pressures to reopen schools in person for a variety of reasons. In 
response, these leaders often sought to navigate a middle path by picking and choosing which state-
level policies met their needs. For example, they sought special permission from the state 
department of education to open in person or navigated social distancing and transmission 
indicators in ways that allowed some students and adults to return to school. Yet, they also 
embraced other state policy priorities, particularly state-level guidelines requiring social and 
emotional learning to be adopted in schools. In both cases, district leaders were responding to the 



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 4 

 
perceived needs of their students, staff, and broader communities. We argue that examining 
leadership from a lens of ethical care augments place-based conceptions of leadership by clarifying 
the ways that leaders identify and respond to contextual needs.   

Leadership in Rural Districts 

District context, including geography, organizational scale, and community demographics, 
shapes the work of district leaders (Glass et al., 2001; Howley et al., 2014). While there is increasing 
recognition that place is crucial in the roles and actions of school leaders (Hallinger, 2018; McHenry-
Sorber & Budge, 2018; McHenry-Sorber & Sutherland, 2020), our conceptual understanding of 
district leadership has often remained context-free.  

Studies of the rural superintendency tend towards descriptive analysis (e.g., Copeland, 2013) 
of these district leaders’ roles as managers, planners, listeners, communicators, and community 
activists.  This has led to McHenry-Sorber and Budge’s (2018) identification of the “the 
contemporary rural superintendency” as “a practice in need of a theory” (p. 1). The authors trace the 
evolution of research on rural district leadership across two waves. Worth noting is that these waves 
of interest co-evolved alongside the changing conceptions of the rural school “problem,” shifted 
from questions of effectiveness to efficiency, and more lately to equity (Biddle & Azano, 2016). As 
with the conceptual evolution of the rural school “problem,” waves of rural superintendent research 
occurred along with changing conceptualizations of place-based education (Gruenewald & Smith, 
2014; Sobel, 2004). 

According to McHenry-Sorber and Budge (2018), the first wave of rural superintendent 
research analyzed the beliefs and behaviors of superintendents from an insider/outsider dichotomy 
that focused on the way that leaders’ positioning relative to the community enabled and constrained 
their approaches to enacting change. The second wave focused on rural superintendents as leaders of 
place, and, more frequently, as critical leaders of place. Furman and Gruenewald (2004) coined the term 
“critical leadership of place” as a power-attuned and activist approach to place-based leadership. 
They argued that critical leaders of place focused on five practices: shaping the cultural politics of 
the school, negotiating borders, supporting community-based learning, securing resources, and 
professional development.  

Although this original conception was not limited to rural leadership practice, it was quickly 
adopted by scholars of rural leadership as well (Budge, 2006). Budge (2006) noted that while rural 
district leaders were often strongly invested in a place as part of their own identity, they 
simultaneously saw that place as an obstacle to students’ success and flourishing. Critical leadership 
of place was argued to move beyond a “zone of tolerance” where local values existed in a separate 
sphere from the professional aspirations of educators to an approach to leadership where 
professional expectations and local expectations are critically engaged with one another with the aim 
of improving quality of life (broadly understood) within a community (Budge, 2006, p. 7). Later 
researchers highlighted the possibilities of rural leadership of place for successfully negotiating the 
tensions between local desires and external educational mandates (Budge, 2010; Zuckerman et al., 
2018), and for practicing activist leadership that is attuned to both social inequities in a place and 
responsibility to that place as an ecosystem (Gruenwald & Smith, 2014).  

It has been noted, however, that critical leadership of place remains more of a normative 
theory of leadership practice rather than as an empirically based theory of how rural district 
leadership is practiced (McHenry-Sorber & Budge, 2018; McHenry-Sorber & Sutherland, 2020). 
When leadership actions are analyzed along the dimensions of critical leadership of place, leaders 
often run aground on community political concerns (McHenry-Sorber & Sutherland, 2020). For 
example, Rey (2014) found that superintendents who sought to position education as a means for 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  5 

 
students to escape intergenerational poverty and bring economic development to the community ran 
afoul of community values. Critical place-based education has also been challenged on theoretical 
grounds as flattening both the people and the thinking of the people in a place, and for setting 
“place” as artificially separate from the regional, national, and global context in which it exists 
(Nespor, 2008).  

McHenry-Sorber and Budge (2018) conclude their essay with two suggestions for sharpening 
our theoretical understandings of rural district leadership. First, they suggest that greater 
attentiveness to the professional socialization of superintendents will produce greater insight into the 
political maneuverings that superintendents engage in; this will nuance our understanding of 
superintendents as not resisters of non-local influence or “functionaries of the state,” but as political 
actors negotiating between the two. For example, past research has pointed to rural superintendents’ 
belief that principals would need to understand and integrate into the social fabric of the rural 
community they served to credibly navigate the pressures they faced, underscoring superintendents’ 
own role as political operators (Cruzeiro & Boone, 2009; Preston et al., 2013; Preston & Barnes, 
2017).  

Second, McHenry-Sorber and Budge (2018) suggest a need for richer epistemological 
perspectives to deepen our understanding of what it means to be a critical leader of place in ways that 
move beyond admonitions to either always reject or always embrace local or external preferences to 
a more politically dexterous understanding of superintendents’ actions. These perspectives insist that 
we attend in new ways to the relationships between schools and communities. For example, Schafft 
(2016) explicitly positions rural educational systems as a cornerstone of rural community 
development policy more broadly. Villa and co-authors (2021) in a special issue of the Journal of Rural 
Studies related to rural school-community relations point to schools as both reproducers and 
disruptors of rural identity and what it “means” to be rural. 

 

Analytical Framework 
 

Considering the above, we adopt an analytic framework that brings together community- 
aware educational policy in rural districts (Casto et al. 2016) and ethics of care and caring (Noddings, 
2012; Tronto, 2010) to elucidate the ways in which rural superintendents attended to the needs of 
their local communities, teachers, and students during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

 Community Aware Policy 

 Casto and colleague’s (2016) conception of community aware educational policy is centered 
on thick conceptions of human development, over the thin needs espoused in contemporary 
neoliberal educational policies (Casto et al., 2016). For example, Casto and co-authors point to the 
neoliberal emphasis on assessment and accountability, as well as the emphasis of individual success 
as manifestations of a “thin” conception of human need that similarly narrows our understanding of 
the purpose of schools to workforce development and technical approaches to problem solving. 
Other scholars have pointed to the ways that thin conceptions can serve to dehumanize students 
and communities, particularly those already experiencing profound inequities (Marshall & Khalifa, 
2018).  

In contrast, thick conceptions of human need emphasize local agency, identity formation, 
well-being, community, social support, and relationships and thus broaden our understanding of the 
purpose of schools’ functions. Educational leaders play a role in counteracting neoliberal forces and 
humanizing schools (Marshall & Khalifa, 2018) to support community aware educational policy at 
the local level.  



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 6 

 
To do so, educational leaders need to leaders navigate competing expectations (Honig, 

2006), including the tensions between the needs of rural communities and the demands of distant 
policymakers (Schafft & Jackson, 2010). In navigating these competing interests, district leaders 
engage in buffering, or protecting their districts from external policy demands, as well as bridging, or 
seeking external resources to meet local needs (Honig, 2006; Zuckerman et al., 2018).  These choices 
and how they are made implicates both district leaders’ caring stance (Ryu et al., 2022) and their 
political orientation to how districts might act to center thick conceptions of human development, 
relationships, and community (Zuckerman, 2020). Put differently, community-aware education 
policy implementation is a means of grappling with external policy mandates that seeks a broader 
understanding of how we should shape schools through attention to relationships and community 
development.  

Scholars have argued persuasively that political tensions and challenges are inherent in 
leadership of rural schools and districts (Hall & McHenry-Sorber, 2017; McHenry-Sorber & Schafft, 
2015; Sutherland et al., 2022). These contests can arise from disagreements over the purposes of 
education, how schools are financed, and from broader class cleavages within the community 
(McHenry-Sorber & Schafft, 2015). In general, rural superintendents in one study found it easier to 
interact with internal stakeholders than with external (Holmes, 2021). In a study of the multi-district 
rural superintendency, Hall and Mc-Henry-Sorber (2017) found that the superintendent spent over 
half of his time engaged with political tasks managing conflicts both within and between rural 
communities. Furthermore, political concerns often imbued even instructional and managerial 
aspects of the job with a sense of being fraught. In recent work, Sutherland and co-authors find that 
rural school leaders in the U.S. south must act as political “bridges” in order to counteract 
community discourses that perpetuate inequity and racial exclusion (Sutherland et al., 2022).  

We suggest that the inherently political position in which rural district leaders find 
themselves in a position where they must both align, to the extent possible, their conception of 
community needs with community political will, and when their own conception of needs is at odds 
with the community, calculate what may be politically possible. A politically attuned approach to 
care ethics may offer a means to enact community aware education policy in a way that attends to 
the needs uncovered by a critical place-based leadership. 

Care Ethics, Caring Leadership, and the Rural Superintendency 

The foundational insight of community aware policy is that decision-makers must have 
insight into the deep/thick needs of their community as opposed to a thin/instrumental 
understanding of those needs. The meeting of expressed and inferred needs in an authentic, 
relational, and responsive way is a core tenet of care ethics (Noddings, 2012; Tronto, 2010).  

Although there are different and competing ways of conceptualizing care, there is 
widespread agreement that caring responds to the expressed or inferred needs of the one receiving 
care; if efforts at care are not responding to needs, then they are not caring (Noddings, 2005; 
Valenzuela, 1999). In organizations, leaders most often enact caring by attending to the needs of the 
people within that organization and trying to foster conditions that meet those needs (Noddings, 
2015). Past research in rural education has identified schools as important loci for meeting the needs 
of rural communities and for community development more broadly (Harmon & Schafft, 2009; 
Zuckerman, 2020). In this study, we draw on insight from four conceptualizations of caring in 
organizational and educational leadership: research on the politics of care in organizations (Tronto, 
2010), research on authentic care (Valenzuela, 1999), and emerging research on critical care (Antrop-
González & De Jesús, 2006; Wilson, 2015) and radical care (Hobart & Kneese, 2020; Rivera-
McCutchen, 2021). Although these notions of caring are often aligned, there are distinctions 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  7 

 
between them as well; it is well beyond the scope of this study to fully integrate these differences, 
and we focus instead on the theoretical light each sheds on the caring beliefs and practices of rural 
superintendents. 

First, care ethicists focusing on care in organizational settings have argued that the 
complexity of organizations characterized by policies, routines, and procedures that meet the needs 
of multiple stakeholders can present challenges to efforts at care within these settings because care is 
so dependent on particularity and contextual responsiveness (Tronto, 2010). The result is that the 
shape of care in organizations is inevitably a political question shaped by the preferences of who 
holds power in that setting (Tronto, 2010). The upshot can be a mismatch in the experiences of 
those who need care and those who intend to offer care even when both sides are well-intentioned, 
simply because of disagreements over what caring looks like (Tronto, 2010), or a “flattening” of care 
as those responsible for leading the organization create routines and procedures that are inequitably 
responsive to the needs of those within the organization. These tensions may be present in any 
organization charged with caring for others but may be especially acute in rural settings where 
leaders are grappling with tensions between community preferences and external demands. 

Second, Valenzuela’s (1999, 2005) work on authentic care underscores the need for caring to 
be responsive to people just as they are. Valenzuela (1999) suggests that much caring in schools is 
aesthetic in that care is made contingent on certain ways of acting, believing, and being. This 
instrumental, conditional approach to care often subtracts resources from students- for example, 
Valenzuela points to expectations that bilingual students speak only English in class as subtracting 
linguistic resources. In contrast, authentic care demands reciprocal trust and vulnerability from both 
sides of a caring relationship (Valenzuela, 1999). This implicit distinction between care that embraces 
students and families as they are as opposed to care that contingent on certain ways of thinking 
about and doing school can be applied to rural leadership as well.  

Finally, scholars have advanced conceptualizations of critical care and radical care. The tenets 
of critical care hold that caring is culturally situated, for example, Antrop-González and De Jesús 
(2006) point to “the Latina/o cultural value of personalismo” which emphasizes warm and friendly 
interpersonal relationships as a component of care for Dominican families and students. Critical 
caring can also act as a resource for activism and achieving political aims in the context of constraint 
(Wilson, 2015). While critical care has typically been applied in analyses of urban schooling to 
explain the ways that minoritized communities resist oppression, we recognize the parallels to rural 
district leadership and the importance of school-community relations in smaller districts. For 
example, Wilson (2015) indicates that critical care, “move[s] beyond one-on-one relationships to 
emphasize the importance of one seeking to rectify injustice in socially and culturally relevant ways 
given children’s and communities’ needs and experiences” (p. 10).  

Radical care is similarly focused on seeking change for students and families, though it is 
rooted in a “radical politics that provides spaces of hope in precarious times… radical care engages 
histories of grassroots community action and negotiates neoliberal models for self-care” (Hobart & 
Kneese, 2020, p. 1). One tenet of radical care involves “strategically navigating the sociopolitical and 
policy climate” (Rivera-McCutchen, 2021, p. 269) by plumbing the policy environment for potential 
affordances while also strategically resisting pressures that disadvantage one’s immediate 
stakeholders. Central to the success of this balancing act is a clear moral vision for what one aims to 
achieve, even if realizing that vision is subject to profound obstacles (Rivera-McCutchen, 2021). This 
aligns with a sophisticated understanding of rural superintendents as political actors: moral agents 
whose margin for action is bounded.  

Although there is limited existing inquiry into district leaders’ caring leadership generally, and 
for rural leaders in particular, this has been an area of recent inquiry. One recent study concluded 



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 8 

 
that caring district level leadership is focused on the social, emotional, and mental health and well-
being of students and staff, and is relational, systemic, environmental, and needs-driven (Kennedy & 
Walls, 2022). Recent work has also suggested that there is an increased expectation for relationally 
focused forms of leadership among rural district leaders in contrast to leadership grounded in 
deference to expertise (Holmes et al., 2021a). Furthermore, superintendents’ communicative 
approach considerably shapes stakeholders’ sense of their goodwill, competence and trustworthiness 
(Holmes et al., 2021b).  

The contextual grounding of care and the ways that caring relationships demand activism on 
the part of the one-caring are thus a powerful lens through which to understand the actions of rural 
superintendents confronting the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we attend to 
how rural district leaders conceive of and enact a community of care while navigating competing 
demands. 

 

Research Design and Methods 
 

 This study involves a secondary analysis of qualitative interview data (Gladstone et al., 2007; 
Mansfield & Jean-Marie, 2015). The first author had carried out data collection for a study focused 
on how district leaders support caring schools (Kennedy & Walls, 2022). The study had been 
planned and funding secured prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring of 2020. With 
some reconfiguration (i.e., shifting interviews from in-person to Zoom), the study was allowed to 
proceed in the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021.  
 During an initial review of interview data, the first author was struck by both the practical 
differences in how rural districts approach the pandemic (e.g., they were likely to have begun the 
school year in person, which was in stark contrast to the approach of more urban and suburban 
districts), and by the ways that rural district leaders talked about balancing the needs of their 
community with state-level policy mandates. The first author is naïve about rural education research 
and rural educational leadership, so he reached out to the second author who has considerably more 
experience and knowledge conducting research in rural contexts.  
 Examining the data from the rural and small districts separately addresses the importance of 
context in educational leadership and provides knowledge that is of interest to rural communities 
where some 9 million American students reside (Biddle et al., 2019). This is particularly true 
considering the COVID-19 recovery rhetoric regarding the effects of school closures (Donnelly & 
Patrinos, 2021; Engzell et al., 2021) and focus of national attention on the experiences of urban 
schools as normative.  

Yet, the issues raised in this study are not uniquely rural (Coldarci, 2007): certainly, leaders in 
other contexts struggle with balancing local needs and policy mandates (Koyama, 2014), what it 
means to be a caring leader (Smylie et al., 2016), and how to practice contextual, place-based 
leadership (Riley, 2013). However, we argue that applying the lens of caring and “meeting needs” to 
rural district leadership practice holds potential for sharpening our understanding of the relational 
and political practices of rural district leaders and contributes to theorizing of rural district 
leadership. As Biddle and co-authors (2019) argue, “by seeing space relationally, rather than 
categorically… it becomes easier to make meaningful connections across existing research” (p. 11). 
The findings of this study regarding how leaders navigate state policy and local policy preferences is 
important for people in rural places because this tension is often a complex and formidable 
challenge for rural district leaders. Below, we offer greater detail on the participants in this study and 
the districts where they work, describe our data collection and analysis procedures, and our 
approach to ensuring trustworthiness of our results.  

 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  9 

 
Context and Participants 

 The data for this study came from a grant-supported project intended to deepen research 
partnerships with educational organizations. Consequently, all the districts and participants in this 
study come from a single western state. We acknowledge that the experiences of these district 
leaders may not be representative of district leaders across the United States. However, one 
countervailing advantage is that each of the district leaders in this study faced the same set of state 
policies, and thus differences in their responses were due to local conditions rather than state-level 
contextual differences.   

The original dataset included districts in a variety of contexts, from medium-sized cities to 
suburban towns; however, for the purposes of this study we have analyzed only the interviews of 
leaders in rural districts. For this secondary data analysis, we utilized both quantitative and qualitative 
approaches to defining rurality (Longhurst, 2021), including National Center for Educational 
Statistics (NCES) classifications based on population size and distance from urban areas and district 
leaders’ own descriptions. Four of the districts were primarily classified as rural by the NCES. Three 
other settings were classified as “Town: Fringe,” but, the leaders identified them as rural without 
prompting by the interviewer. For example, one spoke about efforts to standardize the curriculum 
both within and between schools and noted, “so it’s an interesting issue of size in a small, smallish 
rural community.” Another spoke about emphasizing equity and noted, “[our district] is a small rural 
community and I think we’re on that journey.” The final district was classified by the NCES as 
“Town: Distant.” However, the town in question is further from any metropolitan area than any of 
the other districts in our sample; it would take one approximately two-and-a-half hours to drive 
from the town to a city. Consequently, we included this district in our sample as well. The 
demographic details of the districts are displayed in Table 1.  
 
Table 1 

District Demographic Information 

District NCES Locale Number of 
Students 

% Students 
of Color 

% Low 
SES 

Who did we speak to? 

District 3 Town: Fringe 5,103 27.1% 49.3% • Superintendent 
District 5 Rural: Distant 1,470 12.3% 48.2% • Superintendent 

• Special Services 
Director 

District 6 Town: Distant 2,636 32.5% 29.6% • Superintendent 

• Assistant 
Superintendent 

District 8 Town: Fringe 1,830 25.6% 55.7% • Superintendent 

• Assistant 
Superintendent 

• Student Services 
Director 

District 9 Rural: Remote 153 8.5% 34.6% • Superintendent 
District 10 Rural: Distant 872 9.3% 20.9% • Superintendent 
District 12 Rural: Fringe 2,564 11.2% 47.9% • Superintendent 
District 13 Town: Fringe 1,342 15.1% 27.3% • Superintendent 



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 10 

 
Across the eight districts, 12 total interviews were conducted. In each of the eight districts 

we interviewed the superintendent, and subsequently asked which other leaders at the assistant 
superintendent or director level were responsible for supporting caring schools. In three of the eight 
districts the answer was “no one” simply because the superintendent was the only district-level 
leader. In two districts, the assistant superintendent declined to be interviewed. In the other three 
districts we interviewed at least one additional person beyond the superintendent. All eight of the 
superintendents were white men, while all five of the non-superintendent leaders were white 
women.  

Data Collection and Data Analysis 

 The interviews for this study were conducted over Zoom Videoconference software 
between October 2020 and December 2020. They ranged in duration from approximately 45 
minutes to approximately one hour and 15 minutes. Although none of the questions were 
specifically focused on the leaders’ rural context, certain questions were likely to elicit reflection and 
stories about how the rural setting of the district shaped the leaders’ thinking and action. For 
example, we asked, “how do you engage the broader community in building caring and supportive 
schools for students?” and, “what have you observed about the value dilemmas people in the district 
have faced in responding to COVID?” We also asked questions about communicating intentions 
and priorities with the community. Because we employed a semi-structured approach to interviewing 
intended to “to understand themes of the daily world from the subject’s own perspective,” 
participants’ musings on how the rural nature of their districts shaped their approach to leadership 
often led to additional prompts and follow-up questions from us, which deepened our 
understanding of participants’ thinking (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009).  
 Data analysis used a modified version of Hall and co-authors’ (2005) suggested approach to 
collaborative qualitative inquiry. In this approach, consensus on findings is established dialogically, 
as authors meet, debate, and discuss the results of their individual analyses (Hall et al., 2005). This 
approach made sense because this is an example of an insider/outsider team: the first author’s naïveté 
with respect to rural educational research was contrasted with the second author’s deep experience 
in rural educational research (Beals et al., 2020). Through conversations, the authors could explicitly 
check one another’s reasoning and assumptions. In keeping with the Hall and co-authors (2005) 
approach, we first did an individual thematic reading of the entire set of interviews, and then met to 
compare our analysis. From this, we established four inductive categories that emerged from our 
reading (competing demands, equity, institutional landscape, and interpersonal relationships) and 
two deductive categories that emerged from the literature (place-based leadership approaches and the 
multiple roles of district leaders). We then re-analyzed the interviews using an open coding approach 
with the intention of categorizing codes into one or more of the analytic categories we established 
(Saldaňa, 2009). We then met once more to lay our individual analyses side-by-side and 
debate/discuss our findings with the intention of coming to a consensus. This discussion was very 
generative, for example, the second author convinced the first author that there was not sufficient 
evidence to find that “systems of care” often effectively became synonymous with the people 
running those systems. The findings presented here reflect the consensus that emerged from this 
discussion.  

Trustworthiness  

 In alignment with the conventions of quality in qualitative research, we aim to establish 
trustworthiness via transferability, confirmability, dependability, and credibility (Shenton, 2004). To 
improve the transferability of our research, we described both the districts and the interview 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  11 

 
participants of our research, with particular attention to how we decided the sense in which districts 
were rural so that readers and other researchers can decide for themselves the level of contextual 
alignment (Biddle et al., 2019; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). 
 Similarly, we endeavored to establish dependability and confirmability by giving a detailed 
account of the inception of this study, the data collection and analysis procedures, and the context in 
which data collection took place (Shenton, 2004). We acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic 
likely created a set of concerns and pressures that are (we hope) unlikely to be repeated soon. In 
other ways, though, the conditions created by the pandemic were simply a more acute and intense 
distillation of the pressures regularly faced by rural district leaders. We took three intentional steps to 
bolster the trustworthiness of this research. First, we collected data using well-established qualitative 
interview techniques (Rubin & Rubin, 2011) and employed probes and follow-up questioning 
techniques to clarify participants’ meanings (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). Second, because both 
authors separately coded the interview data, we could scrutinize one another’s conclusions and 
engage in “analyst triangulation” (Patton, 1999, p. 1189). Finally, we engaged in member checking 
with our interview participants to ensure that our conclusions aligned with the ideas they meant to 
convey (Miles et al., 2018).  
 

Findings 
 

We present our findings in four parts. First, we address the ways that district leaders 
described the foundations of care in their districts, moving from the more surface level elements of 
care to the deeper and more interpersonal levels. Second, we describe the behaviors and strategies 
used by superintendents to facilitate a caring district climate. Third, we point to the ways that district 
leaders navigated both local and external political pressures in pursuit of their vision of care. Finally, 
we present district leaders’ descriptions of how the COVID-19 pandemic offered an opportunity to 
reassess their priorities and practices, which led to a renewed emphasis on care and well-being. 
Figure 1 displays our findings for district leaders’ descriptions of care at the district level and their 
own contributions to a culture and system of care.  

As we describe in greater depth in the sections that follow, the descriptions of care proceed 
from relatively more surface level to deeper levels that describe the tenor of relationships, and the 
actions of leaders to support caring in their district are both direct and indirect. The political 
approach that superintendents describe mirrored the direct strategies they used to build systems of 
care, mixing relational compromise with advocacy on behalf of their communities.  

The What: Foundations of a Caring District Culture 

District leaders described three tenets that comprise a caring district culture: caring as 
welcoming and belonging, caring as interest, and caring as empathy and grace. The first of these 
elements is relatively more “surface level” in that it describes the context in which caring 
relationships can take root, but the latter two elements represent a deepening of care because they 
describe the nature of the relationship itself.  

Caring as Welcoming and Belonging 

Administrators described caring as intentionally enacted and contributing to the feeling or 
“vibe” of a school via friendly and welcoming interpersonal interactions. For example, the 
superintendent at District 3 described a caring school as a place where “You just get that sense that 
the people are friendly, they’re caring, they’re concerned, they ask questions, they try to help you, the 
way they treat you.” Superintendents at Districts 10 and 12 described this sense of welcome, 
friendliness, and helpfulness in customer service terms, drawing the parallel to Walmart and Home 



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 12 

 
Depot greeters. Superintendent 5 described this as a sense of welcoming and invitation that makes 
people “comfortable right away.”  

 
Figure 1 

The “What” and “How” of Superintendent Support for Care in Rural District 

 

Similarly, Superintendent 9 stated from the front office to custodians and cooks, there is a 
sense that people are “happy to be there no matter what their job,” and that from the front office 
staff to the custodians and cooks, people treat one another in a positive, friendly, cheerful manner. 
Several superintendents identified the importance of bus drivers as setting the tone with a 
welcoming smile or a warm goodbye as the first and last school staff member students see each day.  

Superintendent 8 described caring not as a program to be implemented, but rather a way of 
being that is “daily, constant, and ongoing.” While he stated that caring “can’t be canned” and that 
“You can’t fake caring…you got to live and breathe it,” he stated that caring is something that is 
demonstrated through how you treat people. For Superintendent 12, caring was demonstrated 
“When students know that you have a servant’s heart, that you’re there to help connect with them, 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  13 

 
make a personal relationship with them, and to serve them, then you know that’s the feel when you 
walk into a building or a classroom.” 

In addition to how people treat each other, Superintendent 5 and 6 described the importance 
of visual markers, messages, and symbols, such as “artifacts that represent a value system around 
relationships and belonging and love and hope and care” and “messages in the hall or displays of 
student work that focus on caring or hope or encouragement or positivity.” During school closures 
in the spring of 2020, the superintendent of District 8 reported taking this outside the school, “We 
did poems, we did pictures of kids, we did parades, we took pictures of our food service staff, who is 
still delivering lunches. We just did that every single day. It was called the daily uplift.” He reported 
in fall 2020, that these daily uplifts were back “by popular demand.” This approach to caring was a 
daily way to draw people in and help them feel connected to the larger district of which they were a 
part.  

Superintendents described the importance of caring as creating a sense of belonging inside 
and outside of the school buildings. The superintendent of District 12 reported, “Everybody wants 
to feel like they belong. Everybody wants to feel like they’re important.” At District 5, the 
superintendent stated, “We’re trying to help our students, our families, our staff, feel like they belong 
to something bigger than themselves that they matter, that they’re valued and that they’re cared for.” 
Inside the school walls, the superintendent of District 5 reported the importance of creating a sense 
of unity by listening to different ideas and perspectives, as well as demonstrating empathy. He stated, 
“That if we operate as a team, we operate as a community, we use our relationships, we’re going to 
be able to get through, and it’s only going to make us even stronger.” In this way, coming together 
as a school community was seen to navigate the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

For Superintendent 6, this sense of community extended beyond the school, stating “Caring 
is just not limited to an individual school or district, but caring is really more than just a school, it is 
a community.” He described this as giving back to the community and families that were struggling 
during the pandemic by providing weekend food pantries and a weeks’ worth of meals for 
Thanksgiving break. This superintendent felt involving students in this work was very important and 
felt that efforts like this were a form of reciprocity with the community.  

Visual markers also contributed to a sense of belonging through matching t-shirts and 
slogans. For example, the superintendent of District 5 said, “we’re trying to help our students, our 
families, our staff, feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves that they matter, that 
they’re valued and that they’re cared for. That we can develop a bond between staff and students, 
between students and each other, between families in the schools and the district, if we focus on 
trust and love and unity. Really, the ‘Believe’ talks about believing in the mission above our own self-
interest.” The superintendent of District 5 used “team” as a “mantra that summarizes our core 
values… it’s a really approachable, easy to understand message of what we’re trying to do. 
Everyone’s been on teams. You can think of great teams they’ve been on, not so great teams they’ve 
been on.” The team motif was accompanied with apparel that included “Team [District Name]” 
printed on it. Similarly, the assistant superintendent at District 8 described the superintendent and 
other staff wearing t-shirts that read “Inclusion is our love language" as a way to support the district 
goal of creating a more inclusive school community. She continued, stating “if you do that 
preventative work again and create an environment of loving, inclusivity, everyone belongs, then 
people don’t have that unsafe feeling of, ‘I’m not safe here. I don’t belong here.’” In particular, she 
saw creating an inclusive school environment as a way to reduce bullying. These visual 
representations of belonging were a way to draw people together and help them to collectively 
engage in the work of care and support.  



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 14 

 
Superintendents explicitly stated that contributing to this feeling of welcome is the job of 

everyone in the building: 
In terms of culture and climate that I want to be a part of is every educator, teacher 
that is, every staff member, paraeducator, food service, bus driver, secretary takes on 
the mindset that whatever it takes to help you succeed, I want to be about that. 
That’s the type of inclusive and cohesive glue that creates systems where it lessens 
the number of cracks for kids to fall through. 
 

Together, the broad intention of creating a sense of welcoming and belonging is to create a system 
where students cannot “fall through the cracks.” However, the general climate of welcoming and 
belonging was also only a context or container in which caring relationships can thrive; the next two 
elements of care describe the tenor of these relationships. 

Caring as Interest 

Superintendents described taking an interest in students, teachers, and families inside and 
outside of school as a way to demonstrate caring. For example, the superintendent at District 5 
described this as  

You know enough about what‘s going on in their life, that you can ask them, ‘Oh, 
how was the game. I know you scored 12 points last night, great job.’ Or, ‘I read the 
paper that our band made it to state and congratulations,’ or ‘I heard your mom’s 
struggling with their health. I’m so sorry to hear that.’ Little things like knowing 
people and what’s going… and taking just a second to show that concern in that 
investment. 
 

Likewise, the superintendent at District 13 reported the importance of connecting with students: 
“You listen to the interactions; it’s not surface level.” He described teachers, coaches, and staff 
members talking to kids about their sports games and other activities. He connected these 
interactions to relationships between individuals, stating, “It’s all about relationships, and that’s 
teacher to teacher, staff to staff, staff to student, students to staff.” The superintendent of District 
10 similarly described caring is taking an interest in individual’s success as whole person, stating, 
“People genuinely care about you, and they care about your success. I’m not talking like 
mathematics success, necessarily. I’m talking about who you are, what makes you tick, and that 
people are genuinely there to serve you.” This approach to caring underscored the ways that leaders 
sought to take a non-instrumental approach to relationships, and instead authentically in students 
and staff as people.  

Other district leaders described care in terms of particular aspects of students that are 
known. For example, at District 12, the superintendent stated, “What I’m very passionate about is 
knowing every student by name, by strength, and by need. If you’re doing those three things, 
knowing every single one of your kids by name, by strength, and by need, that in the end is the heart 
of a caring system.” In addition to having those relationships himself, the superintendent of District 
12 reported a goal of “ensuring that every student has that meaningful relationship with an adult, 
that classroom teacher, again, paraeducator, counselor, principal.” He described these connections as 
“intentional” and noted, “We’re really intentional about seeking those kids on the margins and 
ensuring that some of these kids who are a little bit more reticent to build relationships and to get to 
the kids who maybe need us most.” 

The description of this intentional interest in individuals as the heart of a caring system 
emphasizes caring as something that is enacted. This intentionality was also seen at District 3, where 
the superintendent described the high school staff identifying students with whom they had a 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  15 

 
relationship with and those students who did not have a positive adult relationship and developing a 
plan to make sure the latter group of students had positive adult relationships at school. Although he 
described this as “natural relationships and rapport,” it was clear that superintendents made a 
concerted effort to get to know their teachers, students, and family members. Furthermore, 
superintendents sought to systematize this care by noticing where it was missing or unfulfilled and 
correcting it.  

Lastly, the superintendent at District 8 extended this interest in individuals to his staff, 
reporting he believes he demonstrates care by taking an interest in his staff, knowing their names, 
remembering their names, and sharing jokes. At District 9, the superintendent described this 
operating like a family and the importance of recognizing what people have been through during the 
last year. Likewise, at District 13, the superintendent reported the importance of “knowing 
[teachers’] stories and checking in” and stated, “that doesn’t happen overnight.”  

Caring as Empathy and Grace 

Finally, superintendents also described caring as empathy and extending grace to individuals 
within interpersonal relationships. For example, at District 10, the superintendent stated, “Having a 
lot of grace and reminding yourself to give a lot of grace is a great way to show that you really truly 
care about other people.” He likened this grace to recognizing that “the very small percentage of an 
iceberg is what you can see above the surface line of the water and that there’s this huge mass of ice 
right underneath the surface. I think that is true for kids, staff, for parents.” Superintendent 10 
reiterated the importance of showing grace during the pandemic, stating “that these are hard times 
for people, they’re dealing with a lot of things going on, we don’t know what’s underneath the 
surface of the water, but we should almost go into every situation knowing that there is something 
underneath the surface.”  

Similarly, at District 3, the superintendent reported that the “art and craft of being an 
administrator” is considering the circumstances of children in discipline. Likewise, at District 6 the 
assistant superintendent reported the importance of considering what kids are going through outside 
of school and expressed a desire for more flexibility in the system for students and staff alike. At 
District 8, the superintendent stated not only is there a need to extend grace to students and 
teachers, but for individuals to have grace with themselves during challenging times.  

The How: Superintendents’ Contributions to a Culture and System of Care 

This section addresses superintendents’ actions and strategies to build a culture of care in 
their district. We identify relationships building and accessibility, openness, and transparency as 
superintendents’ direct behaviors to promote caring, but district leaders also act indirectly through 
setting expectations and modeling behaviors, providing supports and resources, and removing 
barriers. 

Superintendents’ Relationship Building 

Intentional relationship building was a critical component of district leaders’ contribution to 
a culture of care. Four leaders in this study used a phrase similar to “meeting people where they are” 
to describe their approach to relationship-building. In some cases, this phrasing was used in 
reference to the character of the relationships, but in other cases it was describing actual tools for 
communicating and developing relationships. For example, the superintendent of District 12 
described using robo-calling to reach out to district staff and parents and adding family nights to the 
schedule. He added, “your plan, if it truly is balanced, it needs to be multifaceted, because families 
are connecting with schools in such different ways now. I think even just in the time, my 27 years in 



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 16 

 
schools, it really has shifted from a pull culture where we pull people into our schools and expect 
them to come to us to a push culture.” This consistent, multi-faceted, and often creative approach to 
outreach was essential to superintendents’ relationship building.  

Accessibility, Openness, and Engagement 

 In addition to their intentional efforts to build relationships, the superintendents we spoke to 
also reported certain dispositions and approaches to their work that helped them connect with staff 
members and community members. The three most common were accessibility, openness, and 
engagement. For example, the superintendent of District 9 reported that he tries “to touch base with 
everybody at least once a day. Walk around and say, hi, poke my head in the classroom... It’s when I 
don’t see somebody for a couple of days that I start to really worry.” This approach to being 
proactively open and engaged was important for staff members to feel well supported. 
 Other district leaders reported accessibility and engagement with the broader district 
community as well. The superintendent of District 3 suggested that one major challenge with the 
closures associated with COVID-19 is that he was not able to attend many community events. He 
said, “typically, I’d try to get to concerts, and soccer matches, and basketball games, and just to be 
around where our community members are so that I can connect with them and hear questions, 
concerns, those types of things, Lions Club and Kiwanis Club and all those things that we typically 
do.” This visibility in the community was seen as an important conduit for informal relationship 
building and the exchange of information. The superintendent of District 5 described a more formal 
approach when he talked about hosting “board dinners” where they “intentionally invite different 
stakeholder groups to eat dinner with [them] before board meetings.” This engagement fosters 
reciprocal exchanges of information that allowed superintendents to better meet the needs of the 
community.  

Setting Expectations and Modeling 

Superintendents viewed their role in supporting a culture and system of care as setting the 
tone and modeling care, as well as setting expectations. For example, at District 3, the 
superintendent reported the importance of setting expectations of acceptable behavior and 
expectations for all staff. Additionally, he reported the importance of modeling these expectations, 
by “showing that with our administrators, living that kind of thing as well as a superintendent, how I 
treat people, how we interact.” Additionally, he noted the importance providing tools along with this 
modeling, describing how the director of teaching and learning recently shared articles and podcasts 
with the leadership team to provide “ideas of things they could do with staff related to maintaining a 
positive atmosphere and lifting people up during this time.” He continued, “we try to model some 
of those examples and then give them tools that they can actually go use so that they’ve got 
something at their disposal.” Similarly, he described setting the tone by reminding principals to uplift 
their teachers, but also uplifting the principals, in his words, “because I know for them to be able to 
support others, I have to support them. This year I think it’s really been at the forefront of our 
thinking just because of the difficulty with the pandemic.” 

At District 6, the superintendent closely echoed this sentiment when he remarked, “that 
whole relationship component this and modeling that and caring for that leader, caring for the staff 
members, taking time to know them, that that’s really important that you have to model it in order 
for it to become a reality.” He described that his relational interactions set a tone for how others 
should strive to interact as well. For these superintendents and others in the study, their personal 
approach to caring and supportive interactions were an important component that flowed through 
the system to engender a climate of care.  



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  17 

 
Supports and Resources 

In addition to dispositions toward openness, accessibility, and engagement, the leaders in 
this study also sought to build a culture of care more directly via providing supports and resources 
to teachers and the broader community. The superintendent of District 6 described that a major part 
of his job was “be trying to get to schools those things that they need that make a difference with 
students’ education, whether that be materials or maybe technology.” He elaborated that during the 
pandemic, he had worked to ensure that all students had internet access either in their home, via a 
hotspot, or eventually by bringing some students back to school so that they could access reliable 
internet. The superintendent of District 5 suggested that providing supports and resources was an 
essential way to meet students’, families’, and teachers’ basic needs for safety and security “so that 
they can get to the next day where they feel like they’re part of the plan.” This emphasis on the 
direct provision of supports and resources to meet needs is directly aligned with the emphasis of an 
ethic of care on meeting expressed or inferred needs.  

Removing Barriers 

In addition to providing resources and supports, the leaders in this study also described 
removing barriers as an important aspect of their efforts to build a culture of care. For example, the 
superintendent of District 12 noted that “there are so many things that educators are being asked to 
do, so many things our schools are being asked to do and oftentimes people feel like there’s layers of 
bureaucracy, there’s layers of things that are in their way to doing that.” He strives to give his staff 
members the freedom and time to build strong relationships with students by helping to remove 
bureaucratic barriers to that work. While some leaders talked about removing bureaucratic barriers 
that get in the way of forming caring relationships, other leaders spoke about mental barriers. For 
example, the assistant superintendent of District 6 suggested that she was working to help teachers 
reduce the sense that they needed constant academic press, particularly during the pandemic. She 
suggested that “there is no reason to do that” and was striving to “take that off people’s plates.” 
Removing mental barriers that pushed teachers to live their professional identity in decontextualized 
ways was one way that she was working to build a system of care.  

Care and Politics in the Place-Conscious Rural Superintendency 

 The district leaders in this study balanced political navigation with care by creating a warm 
and welcoming community, and by being available, but they still also worked to do what was right 
for their district. Relationships helped smooth the way for making hard decisions. The 
superintendent of District 9 likened this process to accumulating relational capital when he said, “in 
the community, again, the blessing is that I’ve been here, I’ve made enough deposits in the 
community that people haven’t necessarily agreed with where we are or some of it [but] not once 
have I been personally attacked.” This relational resource was especially helpful when delivering 
news that was disappointing to some members of the community. The superintendent of District 5 
described the importance not of his own individual relationships, but of the cultural orientation 
toward empathy. He noted, “I like to err on the side of unity. In my outreach, in my 
correspondence, ever since we were closed in March, we have expressed this saying, ‘COVID-19 is a 
polarizing topic. Multiple perspectives exist.’ [Our district’s team] culture is going to help us navigate 
it because when you think about the best teams you’ve ever been on, it involves empathy. It involves 
an openness to different ideas and a flexibility.” The same strategies that district leaders used to 
improve the district’s capacity for care were also useful political strategies for managing 
disagreements within the community and between the community and outside stakeholders.  



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 18 

 
 On the other hand, the desire to meet community needs also pushed superintendents to 
advocate for their districts. Although the superintendent of District 9 described using relationships 
as a way to buffer bad news, he also described his strong moral sense of the need to keep schools 
open during the COVID-19 pandemic: 

It was just a matter of, ‘This is what’s right and by God, we’re going to open and I’m going 
to fight for this.’ I just made the statement early on in the summer, ‘We will open when 
school starts. We are going to be open.’ Word came out the week before school that we were 
going to be able to open our elementary school, but not the middle school, and high school. 
I just basically said, ‘That’s not acceptable,’ and had conversations with the Department of 
Health and had conversations with our insurance carriers. I said, ‘We’re going to open. My 
plan is to open, my community wants it. It’s what is right for everybody, but it’s really right 
for our kids and for our community.’ 
 

In their efforts to care, district leaders neither found themselves navigating what one superintendent 
called the “political dance” of the job “balancing that line of community, parents, students, staff… is 
hard sometimes when you can decide one way or another, but both ways are correct and both ways 
aren’t.” District leaders described circumstances where they advocated on behalf of the needs of 
their community with external stakeholders, but also described situations where close relationships 
helped them to manage disagreement and disappointment. In short, for the district leaders in this 
study efforts to care did not produce an “either/or” choice between support of community and 
implementation of external policy regimes, but a “both/and” situation that required wisdom and 
savviness to navigate.  

COVID-19 as an Opportunity to Revisit Priorities 

Although the leaders in this study universally described COVID-19 as a source of stress and 
distress, they also identified lessons that they could draw from the pandemic and use in the future. 
These lessons fell into three broad categories: a renewed emphasis on wellbeing, a focus on 
flexibility and individualization, and being more aware of the student experience in school and how 
it shapes engagement These categories were often interrelated (rather than mutually exclusive) and 
were tied together by an emphasis on (re)humanizing education. 

Emphasizing Wellbeing 

One way that leaders found a silver lining in the pandemic is that it renewed their emphasis 
on the well-being of students and that of families and staff members. For example, the 
superintendent of District 6 said that the pandemic led them to redouble their efforts on the overall 
mental health support model they employed in their schools. Similarly, the superintendent of 
District 7 reported that the pandemic had led them to dramatically accelerate the pace of 
implementing social-emotional learning programs. He stated, “Trying to get some of those concepts 
into place, and really focusing on that SEL at times was difficult at certain levels, but the pandemic I 
think forced us into, how do we think about supporting students and families in their social-
emotional needs across every grade level? There’s been some things that have changed within our 
system because of it, that I think it’s moved quicker than it probably would have without the 
pandemic.” He added that he expected that this emphasis would remain strong after the pandemic 
as well. The renewed focus on wellbeing displaced some focus on academic press. 

Superintendents reported taking an interest in the social-emotional well-being of their 
teachers, along with keeping all members of the community healthy during the pandemic. For some, 
such as Superintendent 10, this was identified as “adult self-care,” to help teachers overcome the 
higher-than-normal levels of exhaustion so that they can be their best selves for students. Likewise, 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  19 

 
Superintendent 3 reported attending to helping teachers to self-care and take care of themselves, not 
just during the pandemic, but during the normal stressors of a school year. He talked about the 
importance of uplifting and supporting principals and helping them do the same for teachers. This 
included messaging to teachers ahead of the winter holidays to give themselves permission to take 
time for themselves and their family and disconnect from work.  

For the assistant superintendent at District 6, this permission was something they felt should 
be given by administrators, stating, “You have to help care for them by saying, ‘You know what, you 
need to take the weekend, and not turn on your computer.’  And say, ‘I mean that.’” They 
continued, “I care about you and I’m worried about you and you need to get some rest and need to 
have some space away from this.” But more than just expressing concern, this district administrator 
added the need to help teachers take things off their plates and focus on what mattered most. At 
District 9, the superintendent described this as releasing the steam valve through silly activities such 
as dress up days, human scrabble, bingo, and a coloring contest “that relaxes everybody a bit.” For 
him, having fun was paired with “temperature checks” once a month with faculty and serving as a 
counselor to teachers. At District 8, this was taken further as district leaders provided free mental 
health services to staff through their partnership with a local university that placed counseling 
interns on site in district schools. As the superintendent of District 8 noted, “we want to take care of 
kids and staff, and it’s a wellness program for our community, our staff, as well as our students.” 
This approach reflected the superintendents’ commitment, to the extent possible, to be a resource 
for well-being not just for students but for adults and the broader community as well.  

Focusing on Flexibility and Individualization 

The rural leaders in this study also pointed to new possibilities for flexibility and 
individualization that had been unlocked by the pandemic. The superintendent of District 13 
suggested that, “brick and mortar is good for many of our kids, but not all our kids. I think this 
platform has given us opportunities to learn how to do things differently.” Several leaders remarked 
on the issue not being whether one modality was better or worse, but that different modalities for 
learning may be more useful for certain students at certain times. For example, one superintendent 
suggested that Zoom might allow for older high school students to do more service learning or work 
experience learning by not always tethering them to an at-school check in. On the other hand, some 
leaders suggested that the pandemic revealed the potential power of in-person learning in a way that 
educators may have previously taken for granted. One superintendent remarked, “I think it [has 
shown] that value of what school is to everybody. We as educators were miserable… we did not get 
into this to get on a bus and deliver food and homework.” Thus, while leaders pointed to new 
opportunities for flexibility, they also pointed to renewed in person pedagogy as well.  

Attention to Student Experience and Engagement 

Leaders in this study suggested that the altered instructional settings during COVID-19 led 
them to think anew about aspects of the student experience, from engagement, to discipline, to 
grading practices. For example, the superintendent of District 6 suggested that the district’s 
discipline statistics were quite positive during the early return to in-person schooling and added, 
“wouldn’t it be nice for when kids are all back, if we didn’t just say, ‘Let’s let go of that stuff.’ This a 
natural time for that to happen, for us to get rid of whatever some of the ridiculous rules are.” This 
openness to reevaluating the purpose and utility of the rules extended to practices around student 
engagement as well. The superintendent of District 5 suggested small class sizes enabled teachers to, 
“know those kids better than ever. They know what makes them tick. They feel safer to get 
involved” and that some of the new engagement techniques could continue to be useful even once 
class sizes increased. These leaders often pointed to the ways that the pandemic illustrated the 



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 20 

 
contrast between compliance and engagement; the superintendent of District 8 suggested that the 
pandemic helped his district to implement standards-based grading to ensure meaningful student 
learning rather than compliance learning. Each of these leaders found that the pandemic helped 
them to uncover ways to improve students’ experiences in school that could be enduring.  

 

Discussion and Conclusion 
 

 The purpose of this study was to examine rural district leaders’ responses to the COVID-19 
pandemic through the lenses of caring and community engaged educational policy. We posited that 
the complex and rapidly changing conditions of fall 2020 and winter 2021 produced an environment 
where community desires and extra-local policies were frequently at odds (Hayes et al., 2021; 
Lochmiller, 2021), and demanded an attentive, flexible, and politically savvy response. One intention 
of this study, by making use of the unique context produced by the pandemic, was to gain further 
insight into how rural district leaders act as “critical leaders of place” (McHenry-Sorber & Budge, 
2018) and to explore how district leaders conceive of and meet the needs of community members, 
students, and staff. To do this, we engaged the concepts of community engaged educational policy 
and caring leadership (Casto et al., 2016, Rivera-McCutchen, 2021). 
 Using this compound lens, we found that the district leaders in this study centered care in 
their leadership, describing intentional, systematic efforts to care for students, staff, and their 
communities at large. These efforts focused on relational virtues such as empathy, welcoming, 
generating a sense of belonging, and well-being. Often, these efforts at care were contrasted, in the 
context of the pandemic, with educational policies that address thin conceptions of human 
development, such as accountability and academic press. An overarching focus was on drawing 
people into the fold of the school so that the school could better support their needs. This served as 
evidence of an authentic approach to care, rather than a more transactional and instrumental 
approach (Wilson, 2015).  
 In carrying out this work, district leaders generally used three aspects of caring to engage 
community aware leadership: their intentional approach to personal/relational leadership, building 
systems of care, and directing their attention to particular challenges. First, the leaders in this study 
prioritized caring by taking an interest in students, teachers, and community members, as well as 
through extending empathy and grace to all in the school community. These leaders also sought to 
prioritize well-being and a sense of belonging in the school, seeking to make school both a safe and 
welcoming space for all, even in times of heightened anxiety and crisis.  
 Secondly, the intentional enactment of care by district leaders served as a model for the 
behaviors expected of others in the building, contributing to a culture of care. They furthered a 
culture of care through efforts to meet the needs of those in their districts, removing barriers, and 
providing supports and resources.  n turn, superintendents often sought to provide direct resources 
and support to build capacity for care (Schafft, 2016). They did so by deepening the conception of 
need by turning their attention to issues outside the school walls. For example, leaders’ outreach to 
the community during the fall of 2020 was often focused on learning with specificity about the 
needs of their community, from internet access to food insecurity. The sensitivity and accuracy with 
which they could ascertain needs influenced their ability to negotiate possible solutions. In 
circumstances of limited resources, this approach allowed them to be more aware of and responsive 
to their communities. 

Within this culture of care, superintendents sought to be visible both within the school walls 
and with the community at large, seeking out a multitude of ways to connect in person and using 
technology. Through these actions, the dispositions of leaders in this study offer a means to build 
more trusting relationships (Tschannen-Moran, 2017) and more nimbly navigate community politics 



Rural district leaders and place in the shadow of the pandemic  21 

 
(McHenry-Sorber & Sutherland, 2020). The strategies that leaders employed to build caring within 
their districts – and in particular their direct relationship-building and commitment to openness – 
also served to both manage political disagreement within the community and to push external 
stakeholders and policymakers to be more flexible in meeting the needs of rural communities.  
 Third, their enactment of care and focus on well-being provided a foundation for these 
district leaders to take a critical appraisal of assessment and accountability practices that often 
promote the opposite of well-being (Casto et al., 2016). By reassessing and shifting the perspective 
of teaching and learning as “heart work,” these district leaders enacted the community aware 
educational policy described by Casto and colleagues (2016). This approach also demonstrated 
evidence of critical care in what they increased focus on during the pandemic (wellbeing), and what 
they focused less on (academic press; Rivera-McCutchen, 2021; Wilson, 2015). Resisting external 
accountability policy this way can be viewed as taking a political stance and community-activism in 
which these district leaders pushed back on policies created by those ‘from away’ (Schafft & Jackson, 
2010). In doing so, these district leaders considered teacher, student, and community members 
wants, needs, and fears in making the decisions that they felt were best for their own districts. 
Further, through their efforts to build relationships and shared identity, these district leaders clearly 
prioritized a thick conception of human development (Casto et al., 2016).  

The enriched understandings of student, staff, and community needs engendered by the 
above dispositions also generated currency as leaders build systems of care and support (Noddings, 
2015). These systems often started with examining relationships with individuals but became 
systematized as leaders examined where relationships and relational supports were strong, and where 
they were weak. We also found that leaders’ very high levels of institutional literacy were crucial to 
leaders’ ability to remove barriers and provide supports to staff, students, and community. Although 
leaders sought to act in the best interests of their community, understanding institutional 
functioning helped them to do so. 
 Across these three aspects, leaders grappled with the challenges and uncertainties of the 
pandemic in similar ways. However, we do not suggest that rurality is a monolith. Instead, this study 
focuses our attention on the ways in which school leaders must be responsive to their local 
communities, rural or urban. For example, superintendents demonstrated a fine-grained 
responsiveness to the different ways rurality affected their communities, from the protection from 
contagion provided by community isolation to addressing the need to develop their communities’ 
internet connectivity and digital tools. Examining rural district leaders’ pandemic response via an 
ethic of care provides insight into the ways that district leaders sought to meet needs in a relational, 
well-being focused way, but the approaches that they took were diverse and responsive rather than 
representing a one-size-fits-all approach to “rural district leadership” This underscores that being a 
“leader of place” is about leading in a particular place, not the category of place (Budge, 2006, 2010; 
McHenry-Sorber & Budge, 2018). However, one common thread amongst the leaders in this study 
was that the way they conceived of their place changed their margin for action: place may be 
understood as a set of political possibilities that are open and foreclosed. 
 In conclusion, this study of rural district leaders during an extraordinary time of crisis, 
advances our knowledge of how a critical leadership of place might be enacted, through an ethic of 
care and community aware educational policy. Efforts to creating caring systems and a caring district 
culture appear also to be a political resource for superintendents to understand, manage, and 
advocate for the preferences of their communities. This study also sheds light on the potential for 
community aware educational policies to promote more fulsome approaches to well-being in 
educational institutions. In practice, the leaders in this study sought to act as leaders of place by 
advocating for exceptions to one-size-fits-all policies that ran counter to the needs of their 



Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 22 

 
community as the leaders perceived them (Casto et al., 2016). On the other hand, leaders did not 
simply resist outside policy, but also used intentionally constructed systems of care to manage local 
disagreements- which underscores the importance of flexible and responsive district policies for care 
(Sutherland et al., 2022).  
 Future research would do well to elaborate on critical leadership of place as an ethic of care 
paired with community aware policy during “ordinary” times and continue to clarify the ways in 
which the role of rural district leaders is both similar and different from that of district leaders in 
other contexts. As this study was conducted in a single state policy context, a broader sample of 
district leaders could yield greater insight into how community aware policy and an ethic of care 
interact with a multitude of state policy environments. 
 

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Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol.  31 No. 115 26 

 

About the Authors 
 

Jeff Walls 
Washington State University 
Jeff.walls@wsu.edu  
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0419-6210 
Jeff Walls is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Washington State University. His 
research focuses on the intersection of ethics (particularly care ethics) and organization in 
education. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota, and his work has been 
published in Educational Policy, Educational Administration Quarterly, the Journal of Educational 
Administration, and other outlets.  
 
Sarah J. Zuckerman 
University of Nebraska–Lincoln  
Szuckerman2@unl.edu  
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3330-6431 
Sarah J. Zuckerman is an associate professor of educational administration at University of 
Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research focuses on rural schools and communities, particularly how 
leaders support collective action for improvement. She received her PhD from the University at 
Albany and her research has been published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education, the Rural 
Educator, and other outlets. 

 

education policy analysis archives 
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mailto:Szuckerman2@unl.edu
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
http://www.doaj.org/
http://www.doaj.org/
https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/epaa/about/editorialTeam
mailto:jeanne.powers@asu.edu
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