Public Opinion and Responding to Crisis - Essay Example

Rather, it takes the collective effects of all stakeholders and departments of the school management process to successfully undertake the roles of the school as a system of institutional transformation. In his work, Kowalski creates the awareness to the fact there are three major identified departments or stakeholders in the school management system and that the individual roles played by each of these departments needs to be harnessed and coordinated in such a way that they each become dependant on the other for the common goal of transforming lives through the school.

These stakeholders are the staff, parents and students. In the case of the suicide at McKinley Middle School, there could be a thorough discussion of how the roles of each of these stakeholders could best be played from the perspective of public opinion and response to crisis to salvage future occurrences or better still to have prevented the happening totally. Problem identification mechanism in schools From the case, there is a clear indication of a major deficiency in the school management system that has to do with problem identification mechanisms. . Clearly, suicide is a psychological problem that is most likely to be reflective in the life of a student or a person who has very little psychological attention.

If all stakeholders in the schools management process as identified earlier could play their collective roles well to come to terms with some of the basic problems that students face in their academic life therefore, there is every indication that other major problems that could lead to worse forms of reaction to problems such as suicides would be catered for. Crisis Response Deficiencies More to the fact that schools do not put in much effort to identifying and mitigating crisis in students and for that matter crisis in schools, there also exists a serious challenge that has to do with the fact that schools do not respond to crisis quick enough even after the crisis have started.

For instance there are a number of bureaucratic formalities that schools expect parents to go through to get crisis handled or responded to. This happens because schools fail to acknowledge and appreciate the fact that parents are part of the schools management system and that they should be in a position to have full access to the school especially in times of crisis response (Kowalski, 2010, p. 221). In the case of the suicide, there are several crisis response deficiencies that were noticed.

Without an iota of doubt, if there had been a clear-cut policy in the McKinley Middle School regarding how crisis of all manners ought to be responded to, there remains a whole lot that could have been done to salvage the situation. Because of the absence of such crisis response policy, crisis always arises before solutions are sought. The way forward To conclude, it is important to reflect