Systems of Care in Schools: Moving Beyond Self-Care Slogans

In a recent episode of The Table, I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Keba Rogers, psychologist, educator, and founder of Keba Speaks LLC and Third Avenue Psychological Services PLLC. Our conversation was the final installment of a four-part series on her Grace, Growth, and Greatness framework, and this episode focused on something every school leader needs to hear: self-care alone cannot sustain educators working in unsupportive systems.

Dr. Keba’s opening statement cut straight to the heart of the matter: “You cannot out-self-care a toxic environment.” This isn’t about diminishing the importance of individual wellness practices. It’s about acknowledging a fundamental truth that too many schools ignore. You can meditate, journal, and light all the candles you want, but if you’re returning to an environment that depletes you, those individual practices will never be enough.

This conversation challenged me to think differently about how we support the people who make schools work. The educators, administrators, and staff who show up every day deserve more than yoga workshops and fruit baskets during Teacher Appreciation Week. They deserve institutional systems of care that address the root causes of burnout, isolation, and overwhelm.

What Self-Care Actually Means (And What It Doesn’t)

Before we can build better systems, we need to clarify what we’re talking about. Dr. Keba offered a definition of self-care that goes far deeper than the superficial wellness culture we’ve grown accustomed to: “Self-care is really about how am I showing up in the world? Do I feel comfortable with myself? When I take time to look at the person in the mirror, do I recognize her? Am I someone that I am proud to be? Or am I hiding from myself?”

This reframing shifts self-care from activities we do to who we are. It’s about aligning our values with our behaviors, about showing up authentically in our professional lives while still meeting institutional expectations. Dr. Keba acknowledged the reality that we all work within systems that require some level of conformity. We can’t wear sweatpants to work every day, even if we’d prefer to. But authentic self-care means finding ways to be genuinely ourselves within those constraints.

The pandemic forced many educators to confront this question of alignment. During COVID, people had time to look in the mirror, sometimes literally on Zoom screens all day, and ask whether they recognized the person looking back. Some people ran from what they saw. Others used that uncomfortable clarity to realign their behaviors with their values.

Here’s what struck me most about this definition: Dr. Keba connected self-care directly to self-awareness, particularly in relation to projection. She noted that we often hide from ourselves by “projecting onto others what really we are having problems with in ourselves.” How many school conflicts stem from this very dynamic? How many times have we labeled someone else as the problem when we haven’t done the work to understand our own triggers and patterns?

The Difference Between Individual and Institutional Care

The core challenge schools face is balancing personal responsibility for wellness with institutional responsibility to create supportive environments. This isn’t an either/or proposition—both matter. But too often, schools place the burden entirely on individuals while ignoring systemic issues that make wellness impossible.

Dr. Keba used the metaphor of showing up to work on time to illustrate this balance. If your schedule requires you to be at school by 8:00 AM, your authentic self needs to figure out how to be there by 7:50 (with a small grace period until 8:10). That’s a reasonable institutional expectation. But the institution also has responsibilities it cannot outsource to individual resilience.

This is where the distinction between climate and culture becomes critical. Climate refers to the day-to-day atmosphere, the things you can measure through surveys and observations. Do people feel safe speaking up? Are contributions valued? Is there trust between colleagues? Culture, on the other hand, encompasses those embedded patterns and unspoken rules. It’s the “that’s just not what we do here” statements that signal expected conformity.

Dr. Keba shared a powerful example from her own experience. After leading what she thought was an excellent meeting, her supervisor came to her office to deliver feedback wrapped in compliments. The message? “You’re doing great, but maybe next time bring donuts.” This seemingly small suggestion carried significant cultural weight. It was code for “assimilate to our norms of nurturing leadership,” regardless of whether that aligned with Dr. Keba’s leadership style or values.

These cultural expectations often go unexamined and unquestioned. They accumulate over time, creating pressure to conform in ways that may conflict with authentic self-expression. When schools don’t explicitly discuss their culture or provide space to challenge unhelpful norms, they create environments where people feel increasingly disconnected from themselves and their work.

Moving from Self-Care to Systems of Care

So how do schools move from placing responsibility solely on individuals to creating genuine systems of care? Dr. Keba’s framework offers a roadmap through three interconnected phases: Grace, Growth, and Greatness.

Grace: Building the Foundation of Belonging

The Grace phase is about establishing psychological and emotional safety as the foundation for everything else. This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s non-negotiable if you want people to show up fully and do their best work.

Dr. Keba emphasized that “we can only be the best version of ourselves when we feel like we belong.” This means creating environments where people don’t have to choose between being authentic and being accepted. During this phase, schools should focus on climate assessments, staff retreats that actually build connection, and empathy mapping exercises that help people understand each other’s experiences.

The goal is alignment around shared values and purpose. Remember that mission statement your leadership team spent three hours debating, arguing over commas versus semicolons? Now is the time to dust it off and ask whether your daily practices actually reflect those stated values.

Grace also requires leading with curiosity rather than judgment. When someone behaves in ways that seem problematic, the first response should be questions, not conclusions. What pressures are they experiencing? What support might they need? What assumptions might we be making? This curiosity-driven approach prevents the quick judgments that erode trust and belonging.

Growth: Building Capacity Through Continuous Improvement

Once you’ve established a foundation of belonging, the Growth phase focuses on actionable capacity building. This is where schools often stumble because they confuse one-time initiatives with continuous improvement.

Dr. Keba stressed that “improvement is not stagnant.” It’s not about attending a workshop, checking a box, and moving on. Real growth requires training cycles, reflection groups, and ongoing learning embedded into the regular rhythm of school life. This means creating structures for:

• Regular professional learning communities where educators can share struggles and strategies
• Coaching relationships that support skill development over time
• Reflection protocols that help people examine their practice without judgment
• Time and space for collaborative problem-solving

The keyword here is “cycles.” Growth happens through repeated practice, feedback, adjustment, and more practice. Schools that treat professional development as a series of disconnected events rather than a continuous process will never build the collective capacity needed to sustain improvement.

This phase also requires acknowledging that people are at different places in their professional journeys. The support a first-year teacher needs looks different from what a 20-year veteran needs. Systems of care recognize and respond to these differences rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions.

Greatness: Aligning Systems with Purpose

The final phase, Greatness, is not about perfection. Dr. Keba was explicit about this: “Greatness is not about doing 10% more than everybody else, or 20% more than, it’s really about am I doing the job I was hired to do at the level that I’m capable of doing it at?”

This definition immediately lowers the temperature in the room. So many educators are exhausted from the pressure to do more, be more, and achieve more. But greatness, properly understood, is about alignment and capacity, not superhuman effort.

During this phase, schools focus on system alignment, leadership development, and evaluation processes that recognize individual capacity and circumstances. What greatness looks like for one person might look different for their colleague in the same role. That’s not only acceptable but necessary in a system that values human dignity over standardized metrics.

Schools working toward greatness need to ask hard questions: Do our evaluation systems reward the work that matters most? Are we asking people to do jobs they weren’t hired for without additional support or compensation? Have we created structures that allow people to do their best work, or are we asking them to succeed despite our systems?

Every Voice Matters: Equity in Systems of Care

One of Dr. Keba’s most powerful insights was about equity. She noted that “if we wanna think about equitable resources, equitable service, then we’ve gotta care about the people that we’re serving and what we’re doing, right? And then every single voice, every voice, including the babies, contributes to greatness. We can’t be great if we’re excluding anyone.”

This statement connects institutional care directly to educational equity. Schools cannot provide equitable experiences for students when the adults in the building are struggling to survive. When teachers are burned out, when staff feel undervalued, when administrators are overwhelmed, students feel those effects immediately.

Systems of care must therefore extend to everyone in the school community. This includes the often-overlooked voices: support staff, custodians, cafeteria workers, and administrative assistants. In too many schools, these essential team members are treated as invisible or interchangeable. But they are part of the system, and their well-being affects the entire community.

Students, too, need to be part of conversations about systems of care. Their insights about what makes them feel safe, supported, and capable of learning are essential data points. Schools that exclude student voice from these conversations miss critical information about how their systems are actually functioning.

Holding High Expectations While Caring Deeply

The question that often arises when discussing systems of care is whether we can maintain high standards while also being compassionate. Dr. Keba’s response was unequivocal: schools must redefine success and align systems with their actual purpose.

“Expecting greatness” doesn’t mean expecting everyone to work themselves into the ground. It means expecting people to show up and do the job they were hired to do at the level they’re capable of. Some people have more capacity and will naturally do more. Others are giving everything they have just to meet basic expectations. Both can represent greatness when we measure success against individual capacity rather than arbitrary benchmarks.

This approach requires trust, which brings us back to the foundation of belonging established in the Grace phase. You can’t hold space for this kind of nuanced understanding of greatness without first creating an environment where people feel safe being honest about their capacity and limitations.

It also requires leadership willing to have difficult conversations about role clarity and expectations. Too many educators are drowning because they’ve taken on responsibilities that were never part of their job description, often because the school lacks capacity or because someone needs to fill a gap. Systems of care address these structural problems rather than relying on individual heroics to compensate for inadequate resources or planning.

Starting Where You Are

If you’re reading this and feeling overwhelmed by the gap between your current reality and the vision Dr. Keba describes, start small. You don’t need to transform your entire school overnight. But you do need to acknowledge that self-care initiatives alone will not solve systemic problems.

Begin by asking honest questions about your school’s climate and culture:

• Do people feel safe bringing up concerns or admitting when they’re struggling?
• Are there unspoken rules or expectations that pressure people to conform rather than contribute authentically?
• When was the last time you conducted a genuine climate assessment (not just a perfunctory survey)?
• Do your evaluation and recognition systems reward what you say you value, or do they incentivize something else?

Then identify one area where you can move from individual responsibility to institutional support. Maybe it’s creating regular time for grade-level teams to process challenges together. Maybe it’s examining workload distribution to ensure no one is drowning while others have more manageable responsibilities. Maybe it’s addressing a cultural norm that everyone knows is problematic, but no one has had permission to name.

The point is to start building systems rather than just offering self-care band-aids. Because, as Dr. Keba reminded us, you cannot out self-care a toxic environment. But you can commit to building a better one.