The problem addressed in this study was the challenging lived experiences, beliefs, and perceptions of K-12 public school teachers from the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state areas who were precipitously forced to move from face-to-face to online during the COVID-19 pandemic despite their lack of skills and preparedness to perform in the new environment. This qualitative phenomenological study aimed to explore those teachers' experiences, beliefs, and perceptions in the context of those teachers' lack of skills, emergency training, and preparedness. This study was driven by a conceptual framework built on constructivism, connectivism, and constructivist design theory, as those three theories share the concepts of collaboration, communication, and interaction, as depicted in Figure 1. A sample of 10 participants was recruited, selected through an online Qualtrics survey, and interviewed via Zoom between June 6 and July 12, 2023. Three research questions on teachers' experience and preparation, their beliefs in alternative better preparation, and their perception of alternative emergency planning and preparedness guided this inquiry. The collected data were imported into NVivo and analyzed using Braun and Clarke's guidelines to generate the categories and themes consisting of seven positive strategies to adopt and three negative approaches to avoid as a blueprint for developing and nurturing a constant and effective level of readiness of academic institutions for emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings inspired six recommendations for practice that include the adoption of a blended educational system, teachers' training and professional development, and the implementation of best-practice disaster recovery planning, among others, and four recommendations for future studies addressing other effects of the pandemic of other stakeholders such as parents, students, and administrators. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]