Tuesday, February 27, 2007. Panel: "Leadership in Crisis -- Can You Ever Prepare?"

MR. LYMAN: All right, let's go ahead and get started, if you can find a seat, please. It's my great pleasure to introduce three of our colleagues who will talk to the theme of leadership in crisis. The things that they're going to talk about pale in comparison to the crisis that I faced last week, when my second-grade teacher ran into my office and said, "I have a crisis. The laminating machine is broken."

It was. It's very doubtful that in Louisville, Kentucky, I'm going to face a hurricane. But I can tell you that we all are going to face a crisis of one kind or another. So I hope we come away from this panel discussion with ways in which we, as schools, can be prepared and be responsive when and if a crisis should be at our doorstep.

I would like to again thank Susan Haberlandt for coming up with the theme of the conference, Leadership, and get started with this panel. This was the first group we put together, and it just kind of congealed around that. So again, thank you very much.

Bill, Charlie, and Eileen, I'll turn it over to you now.

MS. POWERS: Thank you. Good morning. All three of us are very, very happy to be here, and very, very pleased to be able to tell our stories.

The stories you have heard before at this conference have been absolutely amazing. This conference is extraordinary, so it makes me a little nervous. Every speaker has been extraordinary. But one of the big differences between our stories and the ones you have heard before is that these are stories we've lived through. They come not just from conviction, but from human circumstances, and in my case, disaster circumstances that were quite transformative in my life and in the life of my school.

I'm going to begin. I'm first on the program. My name is Eileen Powers. I'm fortunate enough to be the headmistress of an extraordinary school, Louise McGehee School. It is in the Garden District in New Orleans. We began the school year in 2005 on an extremely high note. Our enrollment was higher than it had ever been before. We were up to 492 girls. We had another 140 or so in our nursery school. We had just finished a capital campaign and were about to embark on another capital campaign. Our campus is largely old historic mansions in New Orleans, and we had purchased yet another one. We were looking forward to beginning a capital campaign to refurbish that mansion to provide room for our upper school. And so, as my board chair at that time would always say, "What kind of a year was it going to be, Eileen?"

And I would say, "It was going to be a great year, Harry."

That was on August 23rd. On August 25th, which I believe was a Friday, we said good-bye to our faculty. It's a tradition at my school, at the end of the first week of school we all meet. And I would ask you to picture, if you will, a little party at the end of the first full week of school, congratulating the faculty on a job well-done and saying to them with a "ha ha ha," "Remember to bring your hurricane evacuation list home, because it looks like we might get hit."

We're used to hurricanes in New Orleans, although we're not used to hurricanes of that magnitude. So essentially what happened was, I said good-bye to the faculty that Friday, and didn't see them for another two months. Some of them I have yet to see, because they never made it back to New Orleans. I have been in communication, but I haven't seen some of them from October of 2005. So it was a very, very traumatic beginning, to say the least, to a school year.

I will also have to tell you that the story for our school has been a happy one, and that sounds a little bizarre. I believe that we have come out of this as well as any school could come out of it. We have had a largely undamaged campus. A largely undamaged campus in New Orleans means $100,000 or so worth of damage. We were not flooded. The Garden District was not flooded. Our school was not flooded. And since 55 to 60 percent of our community came from the Garden District and uptown New Orleans, it was really important for us to understand how quickly we could return to school.

Now, we talked about beginning this with what happened. I think everybody who was watching CNN for weeks on end knew 80 percent of the city was flooded. The levees broke. The city was in a disastrous state. The city was closed down a little after that, the citizens were evacuated, and a couple of weeks after that, Hurricane Rita threatened New Orleans. The city was then closed down again. So the events are pretty much etched on everyone's mind.

But since everyone has told a story, I'm going to just tell you a little bit of my story. One of the things that happened to me -- and to everyone in our community, really -- three days later I found myself in Lafayette, Louisiana. It took me 18 hours to get there. I'm a New Yorker, all right? I don't like to drive. So evacuation to me is sheer hell, and I had never done it before. So 18 hours later, I was in Lafayette, Louisiana, with my dog and my dog food. I had forgotten my clothes -- everything -- because it was my intention not to leave.

The first communication I got from anyone in school was a text message from my board chair, and I will never forget it. It said, "Are you okay? Harry."

Now, picture this. I evacuated with all the information I needed to evacuate with, I thought. But none of it was any good. Right? Because none of the phone numbers were working. None of the cell phone numbers were working. It was just as if your life was turned upside down, the cards were thrown all over the room, and you had to figure out how to communicate, how to find your staff.

In my particular case, I had my assistant with me at this dog-friendly motel in Lafayette, and she arranged for that room for me, but also helped me to contact almost everyone in our administration. Once those folks were contacted -- I had a business manager in North Carolina, another assistant in South Carolina, my lower school head in Baton Rouge, someone else in Austin, someone else in Houston -- the reality struck that we weren't going home any time soon.

Normally in New Orleans, we evacuate for a couple of days, and it's a hassle, and we hasten to come back, because we have to face the whole thing on the road, but in this particular case we weren't going home anytime soon, weren't going back to school anytime soon.

So essentially, we began the process of figuring out. And I did this through a great number of very fine friends. One of the phone numbers I did have with me was Jeff Butler who is the since-retired head of ISAS. ISAS already had its web site in motion to register families from New Orleans for placement in the Texas independent schools. That was an incredible thing, and I will never, never give this address without thanking Jeanne Whitman and all the Texas heads who are in the audience. I know Ned Becker is here somewhere. Certainly Don North from Kinkaid School, and Jeff Butler and Sarah Kramer, who did an incredible job of helping place our students.

One thing that happened, however, was that I flew back home to New York. I always call New Orleans home, but I do call New York home, as well, and I realized very shortly that I could not stay in New York. My colleagues were back in Houston, and Don North, who's head of Kinkaid, called me and said, "I have got a place for you here. If you want to bring your people here, come down to Houston." And that's exactly what I did. He gave us office space, computer space, phone space, and I persuaded eight administrators to come and work with me in Houston.

Our first job was to work on placement of our girls. I mentioned Jeanne before. Hockaday took in 25 of our students. They had a boarding program and it swelled with the girls, and it was an incredible experience for them. We placed students all over the country, essentially, and the independent schools of this country, as you well know -- many of you were those heads -- reached out, and our girls were placed within the bosoms of independent schools. In some cases they went to public schools and Catholic schools, as well.

Once we got the girls placed, we then proceeded to think about where we were going to go from there. One of the things I found out very quickly was that our campus was largely undamaged. There was a lot of debris, but the campus was largely undamaged. We also began to find out that our area of the city was largely undamaged.

Now, the uptown area, the area that has since been called "the sliver by the river" because it was the highest ground in New Orleans -- still below sea level, but still the highest ground in New Orleans -- was essentially safe to inhabit. The city was not yet open, however. I had been having meetings with the executive committee of the board on an almost daily basis so we could figure out what we needed to figure out. Some of those issues were: How long are we going to be able to pay the faculty? What our contract said. None of us, of course, evacuated with contracts. I mean, we were lucky to get out of the city. But we figured out who had what piece of paper, so we went on and on and on trying to figure out issues of finance, issues of tuition policy, working out policies for our school with regard to how long we were going to pay the faculty. We decided we could pay them for three months.

And then we went back. And that was the big issue, making the decision to go back to New Orleans. We made that decision somewhere around October 3rd. As part of that, I had to travel to New Orleans. I felt like Indiana Jones. I did not want to make that decision without seeing the campus myself. I had many photos that people had given me. So once we made that decision as a board, we had located all of our faculty through our web site. We'll talk about that in a little while, but I have told you enough about what happened. In a little while I'll tell you about what we learned and how we proceeded from that.

I'm going to turn it over to Charlie.

MR. CLARK: Thank you, Eileen. So much of what Eileen said obviously is so pertinent to our situation. So many things were different because, like fingerprints in human beings, there's no one that matches another. But I will tell you, as a colleague and as a peer, I'm a bit nervous speaking in front of a group of heads. You can speak in a group of parents and grandparents and kids and it's no big deal. But when you speak in front of your peers, you feel like you're really being understood and possibly judged. So please forgive me for that nervousness. The other bit of nervousness going on in my life right now is that I just learned from my wife, we're having our fourth grandchild at 10:00 this morning. She didn't tell me what time zone that was.

In any event, being here today has required me to take a step back, something I hadn't planned to do. When Bruce called us and said, "Would you please speak to a crisis, crisis in leadership," I said, "The human nature kind or the Mother Nature kind?"

And he said, "The Mother Nature kind."

I said, "That's very good."

Also, before I forget it, there is a handout with a crisis review of what happened to us. We did a webinar for FCIS in Florida, so I put 50 copies on the back table there. That's the left side of the brain. But as you heard from Eileen, we need to kind of tell our stories from the right side of the brain, because that's where it was happening.

I arrived at St. Edward's School after doing a ten-year stint at Cincinnati Country Day School, thinking I was going to paradise. That's what they called it. Paradise. Right, Peter? And when I got there, I'd been there for two months in 2003, and suddenly I get a call - I'm down at Benjamin School watching an athletic contest -- saying our soccer coach had just been struck by lightning and killed instantly while she was coaching a game. So my first brush with a tragedy of sorts had to do with Mother Nature. And that was my first effort, two months into the school year. That happened on the 21st of September.

A year later, we had the first of three hurricanes that hit us. When I talk about this, I want to talk about it in the context of what you have heard so far these last two days. I do want to compliment Brad Lyman and Bruce Galbraith on providing an inspirational and yet very internally reflective conference, and I hope we can add a little bit to that. But I would like to recognize Dr. Cole and Ginger Thompson and Mark Mathabane, and our speaker today, Dr. Patel, because they all talked about something that I think is the most common theme and that theme is the human spirit: The word, the power and worth of the human spirit. Because in each and every case, what you see when you look past all the left brain stuff is what people did. They not only survived, but they really came together in a way that they had never planned in a million years to do.

I think that's really where our stories begin. My story begins just a year earlier, the same time, Friday afternoon, September 27th, two days after school had opened. I'm in the middle of our football field, our athletic field, because on the first Friday after school opens on a Wednesday, we have a spirit day. It's a spirit afternoon. All the classes come together, middle and upper school -- because we have two campuses -- and in this period of time they develop their own games. These games are contests and they have a good time developing that spirit. It's a very nice event.

And about halfway, two-thirds of the way through, I was approached by one of my administrators and he said to me, "Charlie, we're all leaving from the field, going home this weekend, but we need to stay in touch, because Frances just destroyed Granada," which still has not been rebuilt, "and it's heading our way. But the good news is," he said, "they never hit us. They never hit us. We had a brush with one in 1979, and everyone thought it was going to be a big one. It was just a level 1." For some reason, in the atmosphere, they deflected in different directions up to North Carolina or somewhere else.

So I bring that to your attention because I thought, okay. But was that reason not to fret? I fretted all weekend. On Monday we looked at the weather map and we said, "We have to start a meeting at 10:00."

Hurricanes pack winds of anywhere between 75 and 160 miles an hour, and she was coming at us as a level 5. Fortunately, when she hit, she had been somewhat subdued, but the slowness is really where the damage came. She was only packing 115 miles an hour winds. Only. If you have ever been in 100-mile-an-hour winds, 115 seems like it's double. And if you go to 130, it seems like that's double. And so when Jeanne hit us three weeks later with the same ferocity and greater force, although faster in movement, we had the same situation. It hit us all over again. If lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, hurricanes do. Within eight miles, the eye came ashore, and on September 23rd, we were hit once again.

But let me back up to that day of August 27th, when by Wednesday, we said, "We've got to clear out." The term that's used is "button up." Buttoning up the campus, buttoning up your homes, putting everything together, and boy, does that take time, particularly when no one really believed it was going to happen.

So on September 1 we closed the school down. We used all our faculty, staff, everyone. By the way, plastic bags are a wonderful thing, even if they clog our drains, our sewers, and everything. We had to put everything we owned in plastic bags and put them up two feet at the very least. So once people started to leave, of course, panic was setting in. There was gridlock all the way to Jacksonville, all the way to Tampa, all the way to Miami, even, because Miami was not supposed to get hit very hard.

So during this period of time, as a leader, you just look at it and say, "It is what it is." One of the important keys to all this is that when a storm hits, in this particular case, there was some lag time. And that lag time was very important to us, because it did allow us that little extra time, for those who had not been through it before, to get it back together, to get things together before we left.

I stood on the beach on the morning of the 3rd before I left on the evening of the 3rd. Only about five people were left on the barrier island. I stayed because I believe the captain of the ship should stay and both our campuses are three miles apart on the barrier island. No other school in Florida has a high school campus on the barrier island, so obviously we were a target.

When I talk about what I saw on the beach as the waves came right up to the dune line and the grass line, the thing that amazed me most were the turtle eggs. Thousands and tens of thousands of turtle eggs had been exposed because of the surf. Turtles are very much a protected species where we are, and to see them all washed out -- nobody else was on the beach but me. But I looked at it and I thought, I have to get out of here.

Once I left town, when the first bands come in, they come in like trains. You can hear the sound, almost like tornados coming in, and they do extensive damage right from the get-go. The trees lean at almost a 90-degree angle. So when I was leaving and going to Tampa, there were like six cars on the road going my way. Most people had panicked early and left. That's a piece of this that probably needs to be rethought when people look at it.

But three weeks later, we were having the same problem when Jeanne came and hit us with 125-mile-an-hour winds just after we opened school for four days. Again, everyone packed up, but in half the time. People buttoned up their homes, off they went again to various places. And by the way, those hurricanes continued across the Florida peninsula, so you could feel their effects in Tampa. I see one of my colleagues from Florida here and I'm sure he would be the first one to tell you he knows those effects.

On October 4th, 40 days later, we opened up the school for a third time. We had had maybe eight days of school at that point. Our athletic programs had completely dissipated into what I would call another incredible story. When people did start trickling back, a great thing happened. It had nothing to do with me at all. The volleyball team, the football team, the cross-country team, the swimming teams all became service teams. Those who were able to come back got together and went out and did work in the community. Debris was anywhere from two feet to five feet high. It looked like what would be a snowstorm, although loosely packed. And we looked at wires down, no water, no electricity. These kids came back and they served the school not as athletic teams but as service teams. And I can't tell you the praise that we're getting, to this day, for what our kids were doing, those who could. Not everyone could get back. Fortunately, we did get all our teachers back.

So when I look at what we've gone through and at what happened in those 40 days, and I look at the repeated openings, and I look at where we've been, the after-effect is greater than the effect itself. The effect was to develop that community and see the human work and the human spirit come together.

But there's still a problem. Even though we had $10 million worth of damage, and we've had the fortune of insurance that covered it all, even though we were going to, in our minds, assume a $2 million deficit as a result, we had an outstanding business manager, and we also had an outstanding board member who had been in the insurance business when her home was destroyed in 1992, when Andrew hit Homestead, and so when she got us together, came into our office and said, "What we have to do here is get going on the insurances right away," she meant it. And we had two pit bulls working on the insurance day and night to get us $500,000 more than what it cost us to rebuild our campuses. Five million dollars went to roof damage. Every roof, 18 roofs -- probably more because there are more than 18 buildings -- all were replaced. You may not know this, but when the pressure drops as far as it does, it creates openings that aren't there. So every roof, even though it looked fine, was destroyed. So when you drove into the campus, what you would see is a campus that looks like we could resume fairly quickly. But you go into the gym and into our theater and into the various spaces, dining room, you look up into the sky. It was wide open. So if you were flying over, you would see what kind of damage was done. That's why the blue tarps are such a thing in Florida. Everyone who ever flew over Florida after that for the next year would see nothing but blue tarps. I say that because damage isn't always what you see.

Another part of that damage was mildew and mold. If you get hit once, you can secure yourself pretty quickly. When you get hit twice, it's all over. Our 800-seat theater had just been rebuilt. The $20 million campaign had just been completed a couple years before I got there with 150,000 square feet of space. Suddenly, it looked like a haunted house. Black mold and mildew were growing out of the sides and the seats and everything in there, open to the sky.

So it didn't always appear, to people who were there, what it really looked like, but I will tell you this, you can run a school with two-thirds of your classrooms. With the arms race going on and everything we're building, you can run a school with two-thirds of your space and one gym that happened to have a rubberized floor, as opposed to a wood floor. Think about that when you're building your school on a barrier island.

So how are we victimized today? We continue to be victimized today because our insurances went up 300 percent in the last two years. Our $344,000 policy of three years now is now $1.2 million. Our utilities went from $495,000 to $925,000 in three years. On a $15 million budget, think of the bite that takes out of your program. It's a nonnegotiable cost. If you're within a thousand yards of a waterway such as an ocean or a river, that's what it costs you to be in this class by yourself.

The effects we're having right now are huge. Even though we won the battle against the insurance companies, we lost the war as we look at how it's affecting us. The only thing I'll say here is to really think in terms of the difficulties of two campuses on a barrier island. Too, another difficulty was the constituencies. You really have three major ones. This doesn't include the board because I put them all with the leadership. Our parents, students, and faculty, with no real point of contact other than the schools.

But what you really want to know is: We were successful because we closed school early. We were successful because we had a communication system with cell phone numbers. Since then, Honeywell has come in with a system that can get to you instantaneously, no matter where you are. And we also had people working who weren't a part of the leadership team but were consumed and subsumed into the leadership team.

And finally, what would we do differently? We would provide alternative means for education. We did not have that well thought through. We're a tablet school. Every teacher has a tablet. We will run our high school virtually if this happens again, without a doubt, but we need one more year in order to do that. So thanks to El Nino. I hope he hangs around for another year, keeps us from hurricanes.

The other is the strategic comforts for the community. Reaching out while you have been hit is a huge thing. It's a great thing. People want to do something not only for your own school, for themselves, but for others.

And finally creating a network. A network of schools like you have here, a network of other types of businesses who can get together and hopefully solve the problems as they happen in the future, especially with global warming. We believe this is going to be here to stay. So thank you.

MR. MATTHEWS: Thank you, Charlie. At the end of this, if you can give me names of those pit bulls, I'd appreciate it.

I'm director or head of St. Paul's School, which is about two miles outside of Concord, New Hampshire. We are a campus of about 2000 acres, and a river called the Turkey River flows through the middle of that campus. It is usually a very gentle, meandering river. I woke up on Mother's Day last May, Sunday, May 14, and looked out the back window of our window and saw that the Turkey River was no longer a meandering, lazy river. It had been raining for about four days, heavily, steadily, with increasing force. The night before, at our open house -- and we have open house every Saturday night for students -- a number of the students that came to our open house were arriving with boots actually filled with water. They tried to get there by using paths and they just literally had gone under. So I was concerned when I went to bed, and more concerned when I woke up.

The water continued to rise throughout that day. Early in the morning I realized that we needed to get a group together to talk about this. If there's one leadership point that I would make this morning, it's the power and the value of a group making decisions rather than one or two people making decisions. We got a group together that included the CFO, the dean of students, dean of faculty, head of facilities, food service, security, and the academic dean. We met at 7:00 that morning.

The problem for us is that we have two dams on the campus. One dam at the top of the campus, at the head of the campus, holds back two large lakes. Another dam, a smaller one in the middle of our campus, supports and holds water for two of our ponds, on one of which the game of ice hockey started many, many years ago.

That lower dam has a capacity of about one-fifth the amount of water that was flowing on that day. So we were in significant trouble early that day, and we realized it fairly early. We decided to have a school meeting at 9:00 where we got the whole campus together in a large building called Memorial Hall. We wanted to do it fairly quickly because we were concerned that the campus would be divided in two very shortly and we wouldn't be able to get everyone together.

We had that meeting, and in the meeting, among other things, we said two things. We wanted four of our dormitories to be evacuated immediately. Water was rising and seeping into those dormitories, and we were concerned about the safety of the students in those dormitories. And so we asked that the faculty assist in evacuating those dormitories and moving the kids to dormitories on higher ground.

We also told all students to stay in the dormitories, not to go out of them except with faculty members to go to eat. We were very clear about not going out of the dormitories. Shortly after that meeting, the campus was divided in half, which necessitated that we provide food for two different halves of the campus. Seven buildings were taking on water. Pretty soon we lost our central power, central power plant. Soon afterwards, we lost the central pumping station, which pumped our sewage.

We continued to meet as a group, this emergency response team. We continued to meet as a group throughout that day and through the night. We kept a room open right next to my office in the schoolhouse for 24 hours. We made sure that there was a phone bank for parents. We had ten people on the phone bank, because parents were calling and sometimes not being able to get through to their children or their children's group advisors.

In the middle of Sunday night one of the two roads that provided access to the campus was closed, under four feet of water. Because we were divided in half, that effectively closed off emergency vehicle access to one-half of our students and faculty. Then word arrived that, despite our warnings, a few students were out rafting. This was the greatest thing in the world! What a challenge! What a thrill! And so they chose to sneak out, hop in some rafts, and enjoy themselves.

Monday morning, as the water continued to rise, some buildings at that point were under as much as eight feet of water. We had another group meeting of our emergency response team at 7:00 that morning. We decided at that point that we had to send students home. We were very, very concerned about their safety, particularly when we heard about what some of them had chosen to do.

We had that meeting at 9:00 in Memorial Hall. We had buses. We provided buses to get students from the side of the campus that was on the other side from Memorial Hall. They took a long circuitous route and they got them there. At that meeting in Memorial Hall we told the students that we were going to be sending them home. As you might imagine, it was a chaotic place. Tears, emotions. Unhappiness, happiness. A whole bunch of emotions. We told them this at 9:00 and by 4:00, 525 students had left the campus, with the exception of about 30 international students who were not able to leave, were not able to get out. So we kept them there in the dormitory on high ground.

Two days later, we decided to end the academic year. We decided we also wanted to try to hold graduation. Probably that was the biggest leadership decision that we had to make that year, the decision to end the academic year.

That Monday evening, after the students had left, we closed the campus. It had become sort of a sightseeing attraction for many people in the area, and we were nervous because it was still a dangerous place. So we closed the campus and we added about ten additional security people to make sure that no one got on the campus.

About a week later, we decided to hold our summer program, the advanced studies program, which is a summer program for New Hampshire high school students. It usually lasts about five and a half weeks. We decided to hold it, but we shortened it to four and a half weeks. We knew that we wouldn't be able to provide that in many of our buildings.

The total damage was $5 million. We are currently in litigation with our insurance company, and as Forrest Gump would say, "That is all I want to say about that."

Construction continued throughout the summer. We were able to open on time this September. We had a full complement of students. We didn't lose any new students, any newly admitted students. We didn't lose any old students. With one exception, every building was able to be used. Construction was a miraculous thing to watch, particularly a company -- I don't know how many of you have heard of a company by the name of Munters. They're a company that goes into campuses and institutions shortly after water or flood damage, and they assess that damage, they move quickly, and they are able to save buildings that otherwise wouldn't be able to be saved because of the mold that quickly moves in those buildings.

Only one family asked for a refund. We said no. The flood has not seemed to have had any long-term enrollment consequences for us since this year our admissions numbers are the highest they have ever been in our history.

I think I'll stop there with what happened, and come back to a few of those issues that I talk about a little bit later.

MS. POWERS: Thank you, Bill. One of the things I remember so clearly was being in Andover when this happened, at the St. Paul's campus, and having dinner with Bill's CFO, who was just strung out. She was a wreck. I was up there to give a disaster seminar with an insurance company, and this disaster had just happened to them.

At any rate, I'm going to resume with the idea that we're going to talk a little bit about what we did at the time and what we learned at the time. One of the things that I will reiterate that Bill said was the importance to me of being able to have a team around me. It was extremely important that I could get eight of my administrators to Houston. The good people of Houston put up so many of us in different homes and so forth.

As I said, Kinkaid School gave us offices, phones, computers, and on a daily basis we worked, once the girls were placed, to make some decisions about our school. Much of the communication that happened very early happened on our web site, and one of the big challenges that I faced immediately was that we had a new web site. It was beautiful, flashing pictures, and it looked great. We were due to be trained on it August 29th. So no one could get into the web site, because we hadn't been trained. The gentleman who had constructed it for us was flooded out, and we had to find him.

So my marketing director, who was also in Lafayette with me, had quite a challenge. Once we got on that web site, the importance was obviously early communication from the head about what we were going to do.

Now, of course at that point in time, September 3rd or 2nd, we didn't know what we were going to do, but it is important to express that we needed to know as much information as we could from parents, and I actually gave them the only e-mail address I knew to be working, which was my husband's e-mail address in New York. He was then absolutely barraged with questions.

I traveled to New York before I went to Houston, spent four days constantly on the computer trying to get in touch with families, trying to answer communications.

The other issue was, we constructed that web site to be something that could be a bulletin board for our faculty, for our girls, for our parents, and we reconstructed it again so that it was an interactive communication. We also had a password-protected part of the bulletin board, so all of that communication through the web site was extremely important.

The other thing for us that was incredibly important was the ability to work with our board, at first executive session via conference call, but secondly to pull in more board members. Former board chairs were extremely important to me. One of the things I would have to reiterate with Katrina was the fact that everyone had personal circumstances. Fifty percent of our faculty was flooded out. Their homes were no longer in existence. So everyone had personal circumstances, and that included board members. When we made the decision to go back to New Orleans, there was a lot of controversy around that decision with different board members who had just settled their families elsewhere, and didn't necessarily want to uproot them, and so forth. So some of that drama played out.

We are going to speak just very briefly about what lessons we've learned from Katrina. Before I say anything about that, I'm just going say, in the back I have a packet, as well. We produced something which we call the Katrina booklet. We did this for our graduation last year, because it was just an unbelievable year for our girls, and it's filled with their writing and their artwork, because obviously, once we got them back -- and we opened school three times last year -- we wanted to do the best we could in terms of their psychological recovery. Part of that was the painting and the writing, and so forth.

But also, I will say that it was the students' extreme desire to be back, especially the high school students. We're a pre-K-through-12 school, but the high school students were absolutely adamant that they needed to come back to school. They had been placed in schools all over the country.

The other thing that I would mention about lessons learned is, first of all, now we require people to give us emergency numbers that are out-of-state as well as in state. We get far more information. We have much better access to our web site. We're doing incredible things with regard to a virtual campus. We're a laptop school, so all our faculty were required over the summer to produce four weeks of lessons that would enable them to run a virtual campus if this should happen to us again. So those are some of the lessons learned. We're going to try to do questions and answers in five minutes, so I'm going to briefly go to Charlie.

MR. CLARK: I will just bring up one thing, because everything that's been said here I not only agree with, but I'm stealing an awful lot from Eileen. So thank you. But I think the fact that we are highly technological in what we do -- you really need to see that as an end. I don't know how many of you do Atlas Rubicon, but that should be updated for this reason, if for no other reason. I know some teachers drag their feet on that.

But the biggest take-away for me had to do more with my board, and not only staying in touch with them, but once it was over -- and I know you all have conflict-of-interest policies. Do not -- I repeat, do not -- suspend that. I don't care if you're in a small area, because there are people who suddenly look at this as opportunity to make money, and they'll make it off of you. What I had to do -- and this is one of those leadership pieces - I had to put my foot down and say, "No, we're going to assess our damage and we're going to treat it as if it were a major building project," complete with interviewing construction firms, mostly out of Orlando, because most of the ones we had around us were a problem -- that was a good thing -- and bringing in a construction manager. In other words, to do it separate.

Now, I only bring that up because when people are looking at you like a deer in the headlights and you're the leader, they want quick action, and sometimes the best action is not quick action. And my board found out that they not only succeeded this way, but if we had done it otherwise, it would have cost us a lot more money and we would be in a lot worse shape right now, because as many of you are, you're carrying debt and so forth from previous building projects, so I want to put that one forward. Stick with your policies. In fact, this is where they'll work for you.

MR. MATTHEWS: Lessons that we learned. We learned that the difference between surviving a crisis and not surviving a crisis is very thin. We learned how resilient, as Mark said and modeled yesterday, the human spirit is, and how supportive and responsive people can be in a crisis. So many examples of individuals and institutions reaching out to help us, from our facilities people, to our food service people, to the 50 people that volunteered on Monday -- former faculty members, former rector, spouses, students -- to take 23,000 volumes from the basement of our library up to the first and second floor. Faculty literally and figuratively held the students' hands for 48 hours. Parents housed as many as ten students for two weeks. In the Concord community, one hotel owner gave free use of his hotel for a week to our faculty who were not able to sleep in their own houses. The sister schools that offered us their facilities, offered us the opportunity to have graduation at their campus, if need be.

The importance of good communication. We pushed e-mails to the many different constituents and pushed as many as two or three e-mails a day to each group. We used the web. Our web normally gets about 700 hits a month. In the space of three days we had 23,000 hits on that web site. We learned how lucky we were, and we learned how lucky we were because we reacted really by the seat of our pants without a particular plan. We learned the importance of moving quickly in a crisis. We learned how much students and parents and alumni love the school. After a year or two of some public relations challenges, this crisis actually did pull the school together in many, many ways.

As we prepare for the future, we have hired a company to do an audit on our emergency preparedness. This company has prepared a 500-page document for us to look at. We have hired a company to give us a plan about how we can avoid future flooding and get water moving through our campus as quickly as we can. We now have, as others have, a distance learning curriculum in place. We have also established an executive risk management team that meets monthly. The two risks that we are talking a lot about right now are a campus wide signal system to help everyone there respond to emergencies. We spend a huge amount of time talking about a possible pandemic flu.

We've invested in alternative energy backup sources. We've increased our own security force. And finally, we're investing time and energy talking about what Mark talked about yesterday: The power of love, empathy, compassion, living in community, respecting differences, serving others in the common good, the importance of all of those values which, for us, are represented in our school prayer. And I'll end by sharing our school prayer with you, because I think it reflects the kinds of values that we try very much to model. We don't succeed all the time, but we try very much to model and have our students model. We feel that these values are probably the best preparation to avert future human crises and to help when crises of nature hit.

Our prayer is the following: "Grant, oh, Lord, that in all the joys of life, we may never forget to be kind. Help us to be unselfish in friendship, thoughtful of those less happy than ourselves, and eager to bear the burdens of others through Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen."

Thank you.

MR. CLARK: One thing I would add, interestingly enough -- and I know you have done a lot of fund raising -- our annual fund went from $750,000 to $1 million. This came from people who had worse damage than you could ever believe. So in time of crisis, not that you're out there putting your hand out, but it's amazing how people begin to open up and give.

MS. BRUNE: Thank you all. I'm Jean Brune from Roland Park School in Baltimore. You mentioned something, as you mentioned crises, and that is the pandemic that they are talking about having. You mentioned having a four-week written on-line plan for your faculty. We've talked to our faculty about that. Is this a plan that's different from the ordinary teaching that would go into place, or how they would make their teaching go on line?

MR. MATTHEWS: This is for us an on-line, four-week plan, and we feel that beyond four weeks is too much.

MS. BRUNE: Is it the actual curriculum, or a different curriculum that you would do?

MR. MATTHEWS: It would be a way of accomplishing the actual curriculum through the Internet. Obviously, that curriculum would be changed in some ways. Currently each academic division head has the ability to do that.

MR. O'NEILL: Peter O'Neill, Garrison Forest School. Charlie, you started by saying that you asked the question whether it was going to be a crisis of human nature or Mother Nature. I think most of us face the former more often, those of a human nature -- these are extraordinary stories -- than those of Mother Nature.

And a couple of thoughts I had listening to you were things that I learned facing a couple of the human nature type, one which was, within our community, fairly public involving another school, a student from our school and a student from another school, one of which never went public, and the lessons learned in both.

In the first case it was so important to have a personal relationship with the head of the other schools. This happened to be someone who was a good friend to begin with. But that was critical, to know that as we build networks of our schools, that, yes, we should do it for professional reasons, but we should also make sure we know exactly who that person is on the other end. We should make an effort to reach out, get to know people on a personal level, and have a bond of trust. That was essential to the heads of these two schools going through a very difficult process as schools, to know that you trusted the other person.

You have talked about the networking providing people. In those kinds of crises, everyone knows there's one enemy: The crisis. Everyone bonded. Everyone has a common thing. In human nature things, there can be a lot of conflict. There can be a lot of difference of opinion about how to solve it. There can be sides being taken. There's not a common enemy, a hurricane, a flood. You know that you have to get out front of that bad news very quickly and assume that it's going to get out to the media, particularly in this kind of virtual environment we live in. People will know about it immediately. Do not hide it. Confront it. Go out and really directly deal with it.

In the second case where we had a personnel issue that did not go public, my wife said to me at the end, "It takes an awful lot of work to make nothing happen." So we have to remember that, too. It's an enormous amount of work to make nothing happen occasionally, in these other kinds of crises.

MR. CLARK: Peter, well said. I think that's most important in each crisis, whether it be human nature or Mother Nature. This came from a CEO for Federated Department Stores when we had what I considered my first real big human nature problem years ago in Cincinnati. And he said, "Let's do one thing first," and he took the board members by surprise. But this is the stature of this guy. "Let's seek the truth, do what's right, and do it swiftly."

And I think there's a paradigm that developed in the 1990s, thank God, that said we need to be open and honest. Whatever is going on, no matter how much injury you might believe it's going to cause your school, in the end people will feed on that in such a way that says, "You know, I don't have to worry about that school, because I can trust it."

So much of what we go through, whether it's Mother Nature or human nature, depends on that trust of the leadership in that school, and that includes your board members.

MS. CREEDEN: I'm Debbie Creeden, the wife of Bill Creeden. I have been the wife of a head for 27 years, and I have been a teacher, middle and upper school, for 20 years. I'd like to speak as a teacher.

I was in the classroom on 9/11. I was in the classroom after Hurricane Andrew when we were in Florida. And last year we were fortunate enough to have in my class a student from New Orleans. She was a tremendous addition to our school. We were so fortunate to have her and her brother. As a teacher, there was no way I could address the academic issues without addressing the humanity issues that were happening. It was a teachable moment. It was an opportunity for me to use an alternative curriculum that Jean was speaking about, and I firmly believe those students will remember those discussions, those moments when I discussed in my ancient civilizations class the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and we talked about it then, relating it to New Orleans.

So I'm a huge proponent of taking those moments and doing the community service, the artwork. The only way our kids got through 9/11 was artwork and music. And God bless you for just saying, "School is over," and hopefully letting the kid use the poetry, the music, writing, whatever alternative means they had of internalizing it and making it their own, making something great happen out of it, because I think they'll remember that past the AP test.

MS. POWERS: I just want to underline what you have said, but also to elaborate a little bit on this Katrina booklet. You'll see one of the things we did immediately -- we were the first high school in the city to come back to New Orleans, public, private, or parochial. We opened on October 24th. We did very revolutionary things for McGehee's, which is a very traditional girls school. We admitted boys. We admitted boys because there was no way I was going to get my faculty back if I couldn't get their sons back. There was no other school open in town. We admitted boys to get back our siblings, our girls' brothers, so we could get back our girls and our community. So those were some of the modifications we made.

But my history teachers changed the course of government to what they called the Katrina curriculum, and you can still go on our web site and see that to this day. They said absolutely, this is the single most disastrous episode in the government of this country, and therefore, these girls, whose homes had been flooded out, should learn about why this happened. We had our own Bring Back New Orleans Commission, and the girls all role-played the mayor, whoever was on that commission. They really prepared very strongly, and we did that for two months, just in their American history and government classes. It was a fabulous opportunity for them to be positive, to take, I would say, lemons in their lives and make lemonade.

The other thing we did was to produce this book and to do the art wok. The single thing that we continue to monitor always is psychological recovery, both of our faculty, our girls, and our community, because that is not going to go away anytime soon. We cannot forget what New Orleans lens suffered, but also what individual students suffered, and the fact that they're still suffering it, because 80 percent of the city is destroyed. So yes, it's a very complex situation when you talk about recovery and what we'll go through as a city.

MR. CLARK: Michael Thompson says very clearly -- and he said this to me years ago -- it takes a minimum of three years if it's a minor crisis that you have incurred, but more like five years to recover, just to begin to go beyond healing. So five years of healing is a very important period of time to monitor in your school and to lead in your school.

MR. MATTHEWS: I don't think you can underscore enough the emotional impact of something like a hurricane or a flood. I got many, many letters from students who had been sent home, and their friends were saying, "You're really lucky to get out for summer vacation two and a half weeks early." And they didn't feel lucky. They felt very unlucky.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: You talk about monitoring the psychological recovery of students and the faculty. What did you do for yourselves?

MS. POWERS: That's a very good question. Thank you for asking that question. Really, I think part of what I struggled with was the realization that there was so much to do. You know, I'm going to say this as a woman, I know, but you just always tend to what needs to be done with your administration. And just being able to talk through this with a great administration, an extremely supportive husband, and two daughters has been really what I have done.

But I do have psychologists come in periodically, usually every three months, to work with our faculty because, for example, our nursery school faculty, 50 to 60 percent of them, were totally flooded out and many of them were uninsured. We found housing for people. We did all sorts of things. We really thought out of the box.

That's the other thing I would have to say. In a crisis -- I know you both agree with me -- you find yourself really thinking out of the box and just saying, "We've got to be extraordinarily flexible." Thank goodness I had everyone rowing in the same direction with me. Pardon the pun, but that's really what it was. Everybody agreed we needed to go back to school. We needed to support our faculty, we needed to support our girls, and we needed to fundraise. And I will reiterate that time and time again. McGehee's is a school where really the height of our annual giving -- and I raised the annual giving, probably doubled it, in the time I was there -- we were up to $300,000. You know, New Orleans is a lot poorer than a lot of other parts of the country, and $300,000 was a lot of money. We raised one and a half million dollars last year mostly from alums in unaffected areas. But people wanted to give, and they wanted to give to a cause that they knew was a good cause. And so that fundraising really helped us to survive financially. So all of those things were part of the package.

MR. CLARK: I will say ditto, with one exception. My wife was the person I went to, not my husband.

That aside, I think one of the things that does happen out of that service theory is, when you're feeling at your lowest or at a low point, if you can find a way to give or get people to understand that giving and giving back, it's a huge way to get through the initial phase of it. As time goes on, as people have various problems, it is important to keep in touch with those and not ignore them. What we did, too, though, is we moved our long-range planning up a year, actually. Instead of postponing a year, which we would normally do, we moved it up so that as we were working through our problems -- it took us 18 months, by the way, after Jeanne, on October 14 -- 18 months before we reopened our facilities again. So they just didn't get finished right away. So we thought we'd put half our time into looking towards the future in a formal way, and that helped a great deal.

MR. MATTHEWS: For me, it was quite easy. I had triple bypass surgery. Seriously, I did. But what that surgery did, and actually, what this flood has done has underscored again for me how much ordinary days should be valued, and your ordinary life, which we sometimes don't appreciate and value enough.

MS. FORD: I have one last comment. We encountered the need for this through a lock-down necessity because of a car chase that ended up on our campus. But I think when we're all planning for crises -- and certainly if it's a long-term evacuation, it's much larger than an individual school -- but if it's something for your own school, whether it has to do with a lock-down, whether it has to do with evacuation, for whatever reasons, it's really important also to have a municipal network. We found that with the police department, the fire department, the medical facilities, locally it was very important, as we were doing our planning, and our drills, to involve all of them so that when the time really does come, we have those communications networks in place, too.

MR. LYMAN: Thank you once again to our panel. Eileen, Charlie, Bill, thank you for sharing your personal stories. I really appreciate it.

Just a couple of reminders: Please fill out the evaluation forms in the back. Also, our panelists were kind enough to put some materials together for us, if we do run out, there will be a sign-up sheet and we can mail them to you when we can get some more produced. Enjoy the rest of your day, everybody.