Communicating Through the Chaos

July 8, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

If I had any doubts from the job interview, the first day on the job was confirmation. The next few months underscored it. If I could summarize it one word, my job as Director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools was all about chaos.

Every day was chaotic. Little if anything could be anticipated or planned for. I often looked at the office telephone (and my Blackberry; that was the phone we used) as the enemy. You answered a call, and your day instantly changed.

I learned that I wasn’t the only one dealing with chaos. The man brought in to take over the district’s finances (which were a train wreck; the district was not only technically but actually bankrupt) was a former corporate CFO. He dealt with impossible tasks every day. His wife later told me that she worried most about public meetings – Board of Education meetings, town halls, outreach meetings – because anything could and often did happen. She would look for me making a statement on TV news, and then she knew her husband was okay.

The district had all the problems of an urban school system – money problems, crime, declining educational standards and test scores, dropping enrollments, school consolidations. An outside management firm had been brought in to try to transform the district; school closures, budget reductions (the communications budget was reduced from $1 million to $20,000, and that had been spent by the time I arrived).

*St. Louis Public Schools headquarters.*

The problems had been developing for decades; now they were being addressed, and sometimes eliminated, in weeks and days. The entire system was experiencing an ongoing series of shocks. It made for unhappy people. Lots of unhappy people. Board members fighting change. Th teachers’ union. School principals. Headquarters people. People whose jobs had been eliminated. Parents furious over school closures. Vendors who’d lost lucrative contracts.

Yes, it was chaos. And I had to figure out how to communicate into it. And in spite of it.

I had no budget. No ongoing publications. I knew next to nothing about electronic communications. Fortunately, at that time, there was almost nothing to learn. This was the pre-social media era; no Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (or X), TikTok, or anything else. We had a web site that was seriously out-of-date and a television studio (the district had its own channel) that could barely afford to function. What had been a communications staff of 12 was now me and one-half of a headcount shared with another group.

So, we improvised. First was a newsletter.

We started a weekly email newsletter from the superintendent to top HQ staff and school principals. When I first mentioned the idea, it was met with serious opposition from the outside management firm. “It will be leaked to everyone,” people said. And I said, “Exactly.” And to make sure of it, we included this statement at the top: “Private and Confidential. Do Not Distribute.”

Yes, it leaked. To parents, the public, the news media, everyone. It was one of the most unusual ways to communicate I’d ever participated in, but it worked. People were gleeful that it leaked, thinking they had foiled the management team. One rather venomous critic even caught me at a school board meeting, saying triumphantly he received every weekly issue from multiple sources. I expressed shock and indignation. When the reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch figured it out, he simply said. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” I was properly aghast at the thought.

Second, I made myself available to the news media. I was never not available. I never handed out prepared statements written by attorneys. I provided background when asked. I answered calls from 7 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. I was interviewed one night in the den of my house. One Saturday, I did an interview at the car dealership where I was getting some maintenance work done.

What helped was that reporters had never experienced that kind of cooperation, and they knew I had what was close to the worst job in the district. They cut me slack. They gave me background information of their own. They knew I would always give a straight answer, and I would talk in English, not jargon.

I also made sure to treat all media the same. It didn’t matter whether it was a small independent radio station with a very limited reach or even Newsweek. It was something I’d learned from corporate communications. You might think the New York Times is more important than anything, but that small trade or neighborhood publication just might turn out to be the most important call you make.

Third, we did outreach meetings. When it was time to present the new budget, we took the proposals out to the public. We let people see what the problems were and make their own suggestions.

When this effort was being planned, it almost strangled at the beginning. At a meeting in the superintendent’s office, with what must have been 50 people, the acting superintendent walked the assembled group of administrators through the plan. One person said, “I am not going into that high school. It is not safe.” Heads nodded in agreement.

You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. I was sitting on the floor, because it was the only place to sit. And I said, “If it’s unsafe for us to go into that high school, then why are we sending children into it every day?” Silence. The objection was dropped.

As an aside, I went into a multitude of schools in the district, many during the day but also at night for outreach meetings. Yes, some schools had security procedures; one elementary school had barbed wire on the windows on both the first and second floors. But not once did I ever feel unsafe or threatened.

And we fought back with facts. One journalism teacher published a long article in the St. Louis Journalism Review, attacking the management firm and the changes that had been made. When I read it, I had to three times to make sure I understood it. In addition to a multitude of factual errors, the article was filled with grammatical errors and misspelled words. The article had never been edited; instead, it was published unedited.

I wrote a response. A list of the errors (it was long). A list of the grammar and spelling mistakes (also long). And then I asked, did any editor at the St. Louis Journalism Review even read it before they published it? My response was published. One notable correction I remember was that the writer had referred to me as a “district flak;” I pointed out that what he meant to say was “district flack.”

I learned letter from a friend who was on the Review’s editorial board that my letter had landed like a nuclear bomb. He told me it was the longest editorial board meeting he ever participated in, and, while the errors were bothersome, what was even more upsetting to some of the board members was that the lack of editing and oversight was publicly embarrassing. (To be fair, the St. Louis Journalism Review was run by former reporters and editors, and while they were usually reliably liberal in their biases, they did try to be factually correct. (And they usually edited their articles.)

The teacher who wrote the original article caught up with me at the next school board meeting. He was not happy. He felt humiliated. He said a response was being prepared. I told him that was fine, but to make sure someone edited it before publication. He was not impressed with my response. And then I said, “You need to understand. I am not your enemy. The management firm is not your enemy. They’re trying to save the district from a financial and structural implosion.” He didn’t believe me.

Not everything that we did worked. If we had known then about the term “derangement syndrome” we all might have understood it better. Some people simply could not acknowledge facts. The one advantage I did have, in a sea of disadvantages, was relative freedom. I could move quickly, respond quickly, and know that my back was covered. I learned to trust implicitly one of the management firm’s people; he had a mind like a steel trap and a command of facts and issues that was rather phenomenal.

But it was still chaos, served daily.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph by Wayee Tan via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other

July 1, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for seven months. I’d gone through the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and I had a first day on the job unlike any other I had had or anyone I knew had had. But I figured that, after that tumultuous first day, things would settle down.

I figured wrong.

Things would never settle down. Every day would be unlike every other day.

One ongoing source of turmoil was the Board of Education itself, the seven people elected by voters to oversee the district’s operations. Four had been elected on a reform slate. Three had not. Most of the turmoil generated by the Board came from those three.

One constantly leaked confidential board information to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, especially if it might embarrass or “expose” the reform members. One day she went further. She showed up at a middle school with reporters in tow, announcing she was firing the principal. I had to drop what I was doing and rush to the school, deal with the reporters, and explain that Board members could not fire staff members. But she got the coverage she wanted on the 6 p.m. news; she wasn’t happy that I did, too.

Another Board member had been a perennial candidate for every elected office in the city of St. Louis and had managed to get on the school board because of a lack of challengers. He called me one day and asked me to set up a press conference; he was going to demand that the acting superintendent resign. I explained I couldn’t do that.

The third was likely the most intelligent member of the board. It was amazing to watch her focus like a laser on misstatements, inconsistencies, and contradictions form the administration. She also didn’t leak to the media; she said whatever she had to say publicly.

But there was a problem. One day, I was sitting in my office when I heard a splash. I saw the board member, who thought she has disguised herself by wearing a baseball cap, rush from my boss’s office next to mine and carrying an empty water pitcher. She had thrown the water on my boss at her desk.

I called security. They responded immediately. So did the police, because the board member had barricaded herself in her small office. The administrative area was evacuated. It took several hours, but the police eventually prevailed and removed her for charging and booking for assault. Yes, I had to hold an impromptu press conference to explain what had happened. I also had to give a witness statement to police. There had been rumors she had a bomb; she didn’t.

It was the reporter for Channel 5 who explained why the Board member had done it. She’d been inspired by a scene in The Wizard of Oz, and she believed my boss had become a witch. The reporter did not make that up. It was true.

A second source of turmoil was the public anger over the district’s restructuring. Downsizing had occurred across the district, with hundreds of people losing their jobs. The third floor of district headquarters in downtown St. Louis had been full of people six months before. Now it was empty and unused, except for the broadcast studio and the Board’s conference room. A major chunk of the second floor, the area adjacent to where I worked, was also empty.

Several schools had been closed, angering parents and teachers like. School bus routes had been consolidated and removed from influence by the Board and top district officers. Food service contracts had been consolidated and removed from political oversight. The nepotism rule was being enforced. Full-time activists were drawn to the turmoil.

All of it would coalesce around Board meetings. Thy were held at a middle school near downtown, because it had been built with the largest auditorium. Every Board meeting saw a filled room – 450 people who were not shy about screaming. Another 500, often more, would be outside in the parking lot.

I had attended school board meetings in my own suburban school district. Feelings might run high at times, but meetings usually stayed calm.

Not with St. Louis Public Schools

I sat next to my boss at the first meeting I attended in October. The room was packed. The crowd had to be continuously warned to calm down or be expelled. Board members yelled at each other, and at members of the crowd. People were often shouted down. It was a circus of noise. One activist charged the stage where the Board was sitting, and was wrestled to the ground by the police, handcuffed, and arrested, literally two feet from where I was sitting.

When the meeting ended, my boss smiled. “You must be a good luck charm. This was a good meeting.”

Shocked, I stared at her. “This was a good meeting?”

She nodded, smiling again. “We only had one arrest.”

The third source of turmoil was the normal workings of an urban school district. All the reporters covering the district had police radios. There would be reports of weapons on campus, gang fights, campus intruders, school bus incidents, and other problems.

Once, I was at a meeting hosted by the school district and held at the high school that specialized in information technology. Hundreds of people were attending a presentation by the State Board of Education. I received a text message – food poisoning at an elementary school near the city’s old and famous food market. The incident was odd because only one class had been affected, and the children had eaten different things in the cafeteria. But the teacher had also been affected, and that moved the situation from possible hysteria to serious issue. The food service vendor was sending people to collect samples and provide a statement to the media.

The vendor’s representatives showed up, collected samples, and promptly slipped out a side door. They would not be providing a statement. Reporters turned to me. I had to invent a response on the spot, explaining what we knew and didn’t know and expressing our surprise that the vendor had not made a statement as promised.

The vendor was not happy with my response. That made us even. I wasn’t happy with their response.

Like I said, no day was like any other day. No such thing as a “typical day” existed. I might try to plan, but I always had to be prepared to junk the plan and go by the seat of my pants. That was the only typical thing about the job.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building. All photographs via St. Louis Public Schools.by St. Louis Public Schools.

A Trailer for “Brookhaven”

June 18, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was at the grocery store, doing the weekly shopping, when my phone buzzed with a notification. TS Poetry Press, the publisher of my historical novel “Brookhaven,” had produced a trailer for the book. And what a trailer! It succinctly summarizes the story line, and it communicates the “feel” I intended for the story. There I was, in the produce aisle, looking over bags of cherries, when I viewed a video summary of my book. I was so moved I should have been by the onions to give myself an excuse.

“The Declaration of Independence” by Bradley Birzer

June 17, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was on a multi-day business trip to Washington, D.C. I had a free afternoon, so I walked from the hotel to the National Gallery on the Mall. And then, for reason or reasons unknown, I walked across the street to the National Archives. And there it was – the original Declaration of Independence.

Drafted mostly if not entirely by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is to America what the Magna Carta is to England. The statement of beliefs. The citation of grievances against an unjust ruler (also an English king, no less). The signatures.

As Bradley Birzer points out in The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, the Declaration is all these things. And it is more. Like the Revolutionary War that was already underway, the Declaration was about ideas. One of the most radical ideas it contained was the rights come not from a king or a government, but naturally from a creator.

How the Declaration came about is a thrilling story, and Birzer tells it accurately and contextually without losing any of the thrill or drama. Straws in the wind began as early as the 1740s, and the British government’s determination to make the colonies pay, or help pay, for the French and Indian War began to accelerate momentum. By the 1770s, whether it was rebellion (as many British defined it) or liberation and freedom, the war of ideas was moving into a real war. And Birzer says that war started when the first colonist was killed at Lexington outside Boston.

*Edmund Burke in 1774, by Sir Joshua Reynolds*

Birzer also provides the lesser-known context. The colonies were already beginning the rupture well before the Declaration was signed in July 1776 in Philadelphia during the Second Continental Congress. New Hampshire issued its own declaration, as did other colonies like Virginia. The tide was rising, and the British kept making one mistake after another in not recognizing the reality on the ground.

But not all the British. Edmund Burke, for one, championed the rights of the colonies in Parliament. Set against Burke in the war of ideas (if not Parliament) was Samuel Johnson, the author of the great dictionary, who was almost extreme in upholding the position of king and Parliament. Those debates, too, are concisely included by Birzer.

Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and is a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. degree from Indiana University. He serves on the boards of the Free Enterprise Institute and the Center for Cultural Renewal and is a fellow or scholar with the Foundation for Economic Education, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The McDonnell Center, and the Center for Economic Personalism. His books include In Defense of Andrew Jackson, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Caroll, Neal Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions, and Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West.

The Declaration of Independence is a well-researched, highly readable account of the seminal document in U.S. history. The Declaration is now 250 years old, still projecting its radical ideas about governments, people, and natural rights. It still is one of the most revolutionary documents written by man. And it remains as vital and current as it was when it emerged from Jefferson’s pen in 1776.

Related:

Beyond Tenebrae by Bradley Birzer.

Mythic Realms by Bradley Birzer.

“The Atlas of Independence” by Chris Mackowski

June 10, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

If I had a mental image of John Adams, it was of a rather dour individual who bridged the presidencies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, whom my history teachers in high school and college seemed to find much more interesting.

Then came the 2008 miniseries John Adams, with Paul Giamatti in the title role and Laura Linney as his wife Abigail. I almost skipped it, but we decided to watch it. And I began to understand that my teachers and I had all missed the boat on this major figure of the American Revolution. I sought out some biographies and histories, and I discovered my understanding of the second U.S. president was seriously misguided.

It was with that improving understanding that I began reading Atlas of Independence: John Adams and the American Revolution by Chris Mackowski. Now it all clicked. John Adams wasn’t some relatively minor character; he’d played a major role in the Second Continental Congress, the one that eventually adopted the Declaration of Independence.

Adams gave speeches. He argued. He cajoled. He chaired committees (he chaired a lot of committees). He wrote letters. And as Mackowski points out, he paid a steep price. As radical as Adams was in his politics, he was equally devoted to his wife Abigail and his family. And his work with the congress and later his appointment as part of the diplomatic mission to France kept his away from his family for long periods of time.

Atlas of Independence concisely tells the story of John Adams. It’s a highly readable, fascinating account, and it gives Adams the attention and understanding he merits. John Adams himself saw his cousin Sam Adams as the central figure of the American Revolution, but by the time of the Second Continental Congress, “John would begin to eclipse his cousin as the main engine driving the movement.”

John Adams, the main engine driving the movement to American independence. Yes, my understanding had been seriously flawed.

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has received B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania.

Atlas of Independence is well-researched, and it provides a solid summary of what Adams did to move the country toward independence and then declare it, as well as what he did to serve the cause of independence afterward.

Painting: John Adams, oil on canvas by Gilbert Stuart.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had

June 3, 2026 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30.

Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting.

Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis.

An outside management team has been authorized to take over and try to fix the massive problems the district faced – financial, academic, structural. The management team had been tasked with smashing an entrenched bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy – and all the outside people supporting it – was fighting back.

I was allowing myself to walk right into it. I’d already had the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and now I would have the strangest first day on the job I’d ever had.

*Photograph by Charles Deluvio via Unsplash*.

I parked in the district’s garage, a short walk across a plaza from the headquarters building. I followed my instructions, introduced myself to the security team at the entrance, and accompanied one of the armed guards to a small room off the lobby, where I had my picture taken and badge created. Then I took the stairs to the second floor, where my office was said to be. Someone directed me toward the side of the building overlooking North 11^th Street. The office was quite nice, just like any corporate office, and with a door. It was next to my boss’s office, but she was in an offsite meeting with all the other senior officials.

The secretary told me that I was supposed to go to Human Resources to fill out the required forms, but she said there was something else I needed to do first. Channel 5 News had asked for an interview about the teachers’ sickout.

“The teachers are having a sickout?” I said.

She nodded. “I think it has to do with changes to pensions. But they say it’s not a sickout, only hat a lot of teachers have called in sick.”

I went looking for someone to give me the background and find out what the district’s response was. I found the HR department down on the first floor, but no one there admitted to knowing anything. Someone in the academic department might know something, they said. I started looking around the building. That’s when I began to see some of the changes that had arrived.

The part of the second floor near my office was empty. There were fully equipped desks in cubicles, with tape dispensers, staplers, paper, and other office supplies, but no people. This had been the 12-member communication department. Now it was me and a half-headcount I hadn’t met yet. The people in Finance couldn’t help. No one in the academic department could say anything, because the top officials were in that offsite meeting.

The third and top floor was entirely empty except for a broadcast studio; the technician told me he was glad to meet me, his new boss. No one had mentioned that I was responsible for the broadcast studio. I would shortly learn that I was also responsible for the photography studio and archives, housed in one of the schools that had been closed. I found out that day when the district’s photographer showed up in my office to meet his new boss.

Back on the second floor, I stopped by the secretary’s desk to ask a question everyone had been vague about. What was my discretionary budget? She rather cheerfully told me that it it had been close to $1 million, but that had been reduced to $20,000. “But don’t worry about it,” she said. “The $20,000 has already been spent.”

The budget was zero. My job had become even more interesting.

I finally found someone who knew about the sick-leave policy and the issue, but they would not go on the record and never in front of a camera. I would soon learn that tended to be the official position of virtually everyone who worked for the school district – people universally saw the news media as one-way tickets to dismissal. The person did say the policy was that sickouts were illegal; people participating in them were subject to dismissal. I was warned that the principals would likely protect their staff and deny anyone had called in sick. I tested that with two principals. The assessment had been correct.

As my first hour on the job ended, I walked downstairs and outside to do an interview with Channel 5. Channels 2, 4, 11, and 30 followed. Then the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis American. The St. Louis Business Journal. The Riverfront Times. Several radio stations, including two independents.

That morning, I learned that I had to help TV reporters find a different location around the building so that televised reports wouldn’t look the same. That, as part of his job covering the school district, the Post-Dispatch reporter possessed and monitored a police radio. (The Post-Dispatch building was half a block away.) That School Board members, administrators, principals, and teachers all leaked like sieves to the media, parents, critics, protestors, and anyone else who’d listen.

*Photograph by Scott Graham via Unsplash*.

In between interviews, I received my first phone call. It was from the St. Louis Mayor’s office, providing my “suggested” instructions for the day. I would discover that this would happen three or four times a week. The Mayor’s office was not connected in any official way to the school district. I suppose it’s okay to note now that I received my instructions politely and then ignored them. But I appreciated the effort.

By noon, I had a little time to go to HR and fill out my forms. I completed them in a small conference room and returned them to a secretary. It would be weeks before anyone owned up to those forms getting lost. The people involved knew the forms had been lost, but they were afraid to say anything. I figured it out when I didn’t receive my first two paychecks.

More interviews followed. Lunch that day happened around 3 p.m. when I found a vending machine that I had to get Security to operate because there had been too many break-ins and thefts. Yes, right there in the headquarters building, presumably by people who worked there. What had been the district’s small cafeteria had been closed in one of the restructurings that had already happened.

Toward the end of the day, the secretary brought me a catalog to order office supplies. I mentioned that I’d seen the fully supplied cubicles nearby, and couldn’t I simply take some of what was there? She looked almost horrified. “But don’t you want new supplies?” she said. I said I would scavenge first, and if I needed anything else, I’d let her know. She looked at me like I was a graverobber.

By 5 p.m., I was exhausted. The administrators had all returned from the offsite meeting, and I was able to greet several of them, including the acting superintendent, the man who’d yelled at me in the interview. He had a small team of two or three people he’d brought with him; one of them would become an island of sanity in what was clearly the craziest workplace I’d ever walked into.

If I’d only known what was ahead, I might not have come back after what had been the stranngest, most hectic first day on the job I’d ever experienced.

Related:

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph by St. Louis Public Schools.

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