During prolonged wartime conditions, school principals must lead their communities while mediating pressures from multiple stakeholders, allocating scarce resources, and interpreting ambiguous policy goals under ongoing uncertainty. This study examines how principals cope with the challenges they face during prolonged wartime conditions. Drawing on the street-level bureaucracy framework and Tummers and colleagues’ typology of coping among public professionals, we conceptualize coping as a relational and discretionary process through which principals continuously negotiate competing institutional and emotional demands. Using 60 semistructured, in-depth interviews with Israeli school principals in the wake of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing war, we identify four coping movements: moving toward stakeholders, moving away from stakeholders, moving against stakeholders, and dynamically shifting between stakeholders. The findings demonstrate that coping under prolonged wartime conditions is not a stable or isolated response to external pressures, but rather a fluid, multidirectional, and politically embedded process that emerges through interactions with diverse stakeholders. By focusing on coping as a discretionary and relational practice, the study demonstrates how prolonged wartime conditions reshape frontline coping as a dynamic process of discretionary decision-making under extreme conditions and contribute to broader debates on policy implementation and crisis governance.
Davidovitz et al. (Tue,) studied this question.