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What our K-12 schools will look like when they reopen

A conversation with Reveta Bowers, independent education expert
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Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control released its “decision tree” designed to aid school administrators in determining when they could, or should, reopen their K-12 schools closed since the spring by COVID-19.

Safety is the number one criterion for reopening. The CDC guidelines state that unless you can screen students and employees “upon arrival for symptoms and history of exposure” to the virus then “DO NOT OPEN”.

There are other steps and recommendations in the flow chart, and ultimately it will be up to state and local officials to make the decision.

For legendary independent schools educator Reveta Bowers the most critical question after “when will schools reopen” is “what will our schools look like when they do.”

Bowers, the former Head of School for the Center for Early Education in West Hollywood, California, is my guest this week on the latest Work in Progress podcast.

She gives the nation’s schools an “A for effort” when they were forced to shut down quickly and shift to remote learning in March. “I think every school has embraced technology to the greatest extent possible, and to the greatest extent that technology was developmentally appropriate for the students they were serving.”

But she points out, technology was not equally available to all students. “We knew that socioeconomically—as well as because of where those students were located—they weren’t all going to have equal access to the programs that schools were trying to push out in their distance learning platforms.”

Administrators, she says, will have to figure out how to get systems in place that will best serve all students, and that could be challenging.

Bowers offers some ideas on how to achieve this goal in this episode. You can listen to the entire podcast here, or you can download it wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 134: Reveta Bowers, Former Head of School for the Center for Early Education
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.