4  |  SCHOOL PLANT MANAGER MAGAZINE  |  SUMMER 2026
Note from the MSPMA President: The Reactive Trap
MSPMA School Plant Manager  
is published by  
COLIBRI Northwest  
for MSPMA.
COLIBRI Northwest 
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Des Moines, WA 98198–1003
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Katie Higgins  
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O
ne of the biggest challenges 
facing school facility departments 
today is not a lack of effort. It’s 
not a lack of dedication and, in 
many cases, it’s not even a lack of 
staffing. It’s the fact that too many of us 
are trapped in a constant state of reaction.
Every day brings another emergency 
work order, another last-minute request, 
another unexpected issue, another 
schedule change, or another phone call 
that suddenly becomes the top priority. 
Over time, many facility departments 
slowly shift from operating proactively to 
simply surviving reactively.
The problem is that reactive work 
never ends. In fact, reacting becomes 
contagious. When organizations 
operate in emergency mode long 
enough, everything starts to feel urgent. 
Preventive maintenance gets delayed. 
Planning gets rushed. Staff become 
frustrated. Morale drops. Teams lose 
confidence because no matter how hard 
they work, they still feel behind.
This is where urgency inflation 
becomes a real problem. If every request 
is treated as urgent, then true emergencies 
become harder to identify. The work 
order system loses credibility, staff stop 
trusting the priority levels, and leaders 
spend more time sorting through noise 
than directing work. If everything is 
urgent, nothing is.
By Casey Housman, President, Missouri School Plant Managers Association
One of the most dangerous parts 
of reactive culture is that it can feel 
productive. Phones are ringing, radios are 
active, technicians are moving constantly, 
and managers are solving problems all 
day long. Everyone feels busy. But being 
busy and being effective are not always 
the same thing. Activity alone does not 
guarantee progress.
Most facility leaders have experienced 
this cycle:
	» You begin the day with a plan.
	» Within an hour, the plan changes.
	» By the end of the day, very little 
of the original priority work was 
completed.
That cycle, repeated over weeks, 
months, and years, creates exhaustion, 
not just physically, but organizationally. 
Most maintenance and custodial staff are 
interrupted so often they rarely complete 
work in the order it was intended. Jobs 
take longer, follow-up gets delayed, and 
even good employees can begin to feel 
like they are always behind.
The reality is that many emergencies 
are unavoidable. Equipment fails. 
Weather happens. Systems break. 
Schools are living environments with 
constant activity and constant demands. 
Reactive work will always be part of 
this profession. The danger comes when 
reaction becomes the culture instead of 
the exception.
Strong facility departments are not 
the ones with the fewest problems. They 
are the ones disciplined enough to avoid 
allowing every problem to dictate the 
entire operation. That discipline starts 
with leadership. Strong facility leadership 
cannot happen entirely from behind a 
desk, inside meetings, or through emails. 
You cannot lead facilities you rarely see.
Leaders must create systems that 
protect their teams from unnecessary 
chaos. That means having clear priorities, 
structured work order processes, realistic 
scheduling, and the willingness to say, 
“Not right now,” when appropriate. 
It also means protecting preventive 
maintenance time instead of sacrificing it 
every time pressure increases.
Sometimes leadership means 
explaining why certain work cannot 
happen immediately. Sometimes it means 
protecting preventive maintenance time 
even when pressure exists elsewhere. 
Sometimes it means slowing things 
down long enough to prioritize correctly 
instead of allowing emotion to dictate 
operations.
Fixing reactive culture does not happen 
overnight, and most departments cannot 
solve every obstacle at once. But progress 
usually starts with a few intentional 
changes:
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