Managing schools in prolonged wartime disruption: Crisis leadership and support-caregiving work among school principals

This article examines how school principals managed prolonged wartime disruption and how their work can be understood as educational management under conditions of sustained threat. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 54 elementary, middle, and high school principals conducted in January 2024, the study explores how principals sustained school functioning while responding to security threats, staff shortages, emotional strain, disrupted routines, and intensified family needs. Qualitative content analysis, informed by Mutch's Crisis Leadership Attribute Model as a sensitizing framework, identified empirically derived domains of wartime educational-management work, including the provision of stability, ethical judgment, family and inter-agency communication, routine recalibration, institutional continuity, meaningful learning, and support-caregiving infrastructures. The findings show that principals’ work was not limited to reassurance or instructional continuity. Rather, they actively coordinated care through distress identification, therapeutic and welfare referrals, service brokerage, and the organization of psychosocial support around the school community. The article contributes to wartime school-leadership scholarships by showing how crisis leadership becomes operationalized as care-coordinative educational management. It argues that prolonged wartime disruption makes visible the institutional work of organizing care as a central condition for sustaining schooling.