<![CDATA[Purpose: This study constructs a grounded theory of school leadership strategies designed to alleviate severe teacher stress and mitigate workforce attrition during acute systemic crises. Method: Employing an inductive qualitative grounded theory design, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 14 primary and secondary school educators operating within severe infrastructural and economic disruption contexts. Findings: The grounded framework identifies two core leadership mechanisms: (1) Radical Task Triaging ("Survival Pedagogy"), which strips up to 80% of administrative compliance requirements to prioritize basic literacy and psychosocial stabilization, and (2) Institutional Buffering, wherein principals act as administrative "airlocks" to shield educators from unaligned state mandates while granting hyper-local operational autonomy. Practical implications: The findings provide school administrators with actionable structural strategies to eliminate moral injury, adjust attendance policies flexibly, and preserve human infrastructure when national systems collapse. Originality/value: This study advances crisis management literature by shifting the prevailing paradigm away from individualized teacher resilience toward leader-led structural workload reduction and protective institutional buffering.]]>
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