Tackling Difficulty With a Soft Heart

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Whether it’s helping transport an injured student to the hospital, piloting COVID-19 social-distancing research to speed up the return to in-person learning or stitching mental wellness into his schools’ fabric, Jonathan Cooper does not hesitate to engage on the front lines of the Mason City, Ohio, School District.

Cooper turns up everywhere in the 10,000-student school district, located between Cincinnati and Dayton. “He’s always out in the community,” says Charles Galvin, a Mason school board member. “He’s somebody who does not hide when times are tough.”

That showed last spring when Cooper hopped into the back of an ambulance after a high schooler broke his leg during the after-prom.

“His parents weren’t there, so [the superintendent] got in the ambulance,” parent representative Casey Moran says. “There was no question. He jumped right in.”

Cooper deftly navigated the post-COVID return to school. Educators who had endured three months of hybrid learning at the end of the 2019-20 school year longed for face-to-face instruction.

His efforts galvanized Mason and several other districts to partner with The Ohio State University for a COVID-19 pilot study. The research findings paved the way for Mason schools to return to full in-person learning in fall 2020.

Initially, public health authorities called for 6 feet of social distance between people, but Mason’s enrollment and limited physical space made that impossible, Cooper says. The university’s study offered hope: It found no significant difference in COVID-19 spread between 3-foot distances in classrooms and 6-foot distances in other settings.

“We said, ‘Let’s build that [testing] model,’ and so we did,” says the 5th-year superintendent. “That data changed the policy in our state and changed the course and direction of what we were doing, which allowed us to keep our schools safe and open.”

About two-thirds of the district’s families opted for their children to return in person after the study.

With students back in school, Cooper and his team created a mental health team that directly engaged community members on the topic.

Cooper says the school community’s competitive nature heaped stress on students to excel academically and drove some unhealthy behavior. For years, students had passed along what he calls “the Golden Schedule,” the unhealthy perspective that students should enroll in honors math by 4th grade and double honors by 5th to be in a competitive position years later for valedictorian and salutatorian honors.

After what Cooper called “a string of suicides every year,” something had to change. Students convened a meeting in which they told Cooper to address the harm caused by a competitive climate. “It was a pretty humbling moment,” he says.

Cooper and his colleagues sought a leading model for peer-to-peer suicide prevention. Mason schools started a class in both the middle school and high school, and about 25 therapists from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital serve students in person.

The heightened attention to mental wellness reflects the superintendent’s commitment to student voice in driving the district’s culture and vision. Matthew Montgomery, superintendent of Lake Forest Schools in Illinois and a former peer of Cooper’s, observed these changes during a recent district visit.

“Students are working to share what they want out of learning, and then create that in tandem with … the teachers or the leaders,” Montgomery says.

Brian Bradley is an education freelance writer in Washington, D.C.