Navigating K-12 Crisis Communications: Stories from the Front Lines

On a Saturday night in Fairbanks, Alaska, a suspected homicide took place at a party attended by local high school students. 

By Sunday, Sarah Gillam’s team was preparing grief support and coordinating communications. 

By Monday morning, the crisis had taken a different shape. Social media rumors, largely driven by parents, had raised fears of a possible threat at multiple schools.

What started as one tragedy had become a fast-moving communications challenge.

That kind of escalation – fast, public, and impossible to predict – is exactly what our recent webinar explored. In Navigating K-12 Crisis Communications: Stories from the Front Lines, two district leaders broke down the calls they made when facts were incomplete and every decision presented new risks.

👉 Watch the on-demand webinar today to see how our panelists navigated high-stakes crisis situations.

Here are a few of the hardest judgment calls they unpack in the session.

Who gets the alert, and what happens if you get that call wrong?

Sujata Wycoff described a tense scenario where a school resource officer accidentally discharged a weapon in a high school bathroom after dismissal. The incident immediately sparked an internal debate about the audience for the notification. 

“Some of my colleagues on the team felt like it should only go to the high school,” Wycoff explained. In contrast, Wycoff argued for full transparency across the entire district to establish a single source of truth.

But Wycoff also said going wide is not always the right move. She noted that a broad alert about a minor, localized issue can spark a secondary crisis.

“You actually may end up bringing more attention to [a minor issue] by sending a school-wide communication,” Wycoff said. She also mentioned that alerting the broader community may tip off the local news media about an incident.

In the webinar, our panelists revealed how they assess and respond to crisis situations – choosing who to notify, who not to notify, and how to ensure that accurate information gets out to the community.

The pressure to say something now, and the risk of saying it too soon

In the aftermath of a crisis event, questions from community members multiply quickly.

“When you’re getting the phone calls from parents or hearing from staff… it feels like there’s pressure to get messaging out quickly, as opposed to waiting until you can get more details,” Gillam said.

Firing off an incomplete message to fill the silence is tempting. However, Gillam says that impulse is a trap. “If you send out a communication that doesn’t have all the information, it just results in frustration… and having to do more triage afterwards,” Gillam explained.


The stakes get even higher when every message could travel beyond your community. “Every email or message you send could end up in the newspaper,” Gillam said, noting a time when an email she sent was printed in a local publication.

The full webinar dives deeply into this challenge, exploring the factors that affect the timing and the content of crisis communications and how to respond when the pressure is on.

More difficult situations the panelists discuss

The full webinar explores a variety of other hard-to-navigate scenarios:

• Jumping in to respond to an incident when key district leaders are out of office
• Managing crisis response as situations quickly evolve
• Supporting district staff in the aftermath of crisis situations

👉 Learn how to respond effectively when crisis situations happen. Watch the on-demand webinar today.