Background: Organizational and systems-level conditions affect school systems during crises, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted student's academic achievement and well-being (Ingzell et al., 2021; Donelley et al., 2021; Meherali et al., 2021). Existing literature addressing organizations' responses to crises highlights the importance of internal factors including organizational culture and leadership (Deverell & Olsen, 2010; Bowers et al., 2017) and external factors including resource availability and policy trends (e.g., Hillman et al, 2009; Diehl & Golann, 2023). This article extends prior research, which emphasizes immediate responses, by identifying factors that enable schools to adjust organizational structures in response to ongoing crisis. Given that school districts saw an average reduction of 0.23 years of learning between spring 2019 and spring 2022 (Fahle et al., 2022), educators faced the daunting task of remediating and accelerating learning. HIT held the promise of addressing both post-pandemic challenges and ongoing concerns about inequities in student achievement (Robinson & Loeb, 2021, Nickow et al, 2020). HIT is useful for studying change in response to crises because it requires shifts in resource allocation, particularly in personnel and time. We leverage the case of HIT to examine the organizational factors that allow for the implementation and scaling of an effective intervention for a pervasive policy issue like post-pandemic academic recovery. Purpose: We focus on instances where organizations learn from crises, work to fortify themselves for challenges presented by future crises, and use changes to improve educational offerings. The adoption of High Impact Tutoring (HIT) in the three years following the pandemic with the support of pandemic relief funding for schools provides a useful case study because of the approach's popularity for addressing challenges to academic progress faced by schools. We ask: what internal and external factors allow for organizational learning and change in response to a crisis? Research Design: The data from this paper comes from a large scale qualitative study of 112 semi-structured interviews. We interview 90 individuals across 100 local education agencies. Separate interview protocols were developed for district leaders, teachers, tutors, policymakers, and partner organizations. We developed an a priori coding scheme grounded in the theory of action aligned with HIT (Robinson & Loeb, 2021) and existing research documenting prior attempts to implement and scale tutoring in school districts in the US (e.g., Burch et al., 2007). The final coding scheme included nine parent codes and 33 sub-codes. See Appendix 1 for a comprehensive list of parent codes and a description of our interrater reliability. Findings: We build on a prior framework of the Crisis Management Cycle (Pursiainen, 2017). The Crisis Management Cycle (CMC) delineates the stages in which an organization experiences and responds to a crisis. It has five distinct phases: (1) Mitigation: efforts taken before a crisis to avoid or reduce crisis impact; (2) Preparedness: efforts taken to produce crisis management plans and reduce the impact of unavoidable crises; (3) Response: efforts taken to contain and control the damage of a crisis; (4) Recovery: efforts taken to address needs that continue to arise post-crisis; and (5) Learning: efforts taken to reflect on data and feedback gathered during prior stages to improve future crisis response efforts. After a crisis recovery process, organizations then re-enter the pre-crisis phase to await future crises. We identified factors both before and during implementation that shape the success of organizational changes essential to the successful implementation of HIT programs, in order to understand organizational change in crisis. We defined three specific pathways that organizations take after the initial response period: a path towards organizational stagnation without learning, and two paths through learning, one towards organizational change and the other returning to organizational stagnation, as shown in Figure 1. We found that organizations can take a path of organizational stagnation if they do not take on the work of post-pandemic learning or reflection. They can also take a path towards stagnation after learning if the costs and barriers of implementing changes are too high. Alternatively, learning can create a pathway to sustained organizational change when an organization can overcome implementation challenges. These changes can make an organization more resilient to future crises and can impact educational practices affecting student development in non-crisis times. We found that factors present pre-implementation and those arising during implementation affect districts' pathways. As shown in Figure 2, in the pre-implementation learning period the following factors facilitated a organization's decision to commit to implementing HIT programs and how these programs would take shape: (1) Alignment: agreement among stakeholders of the problem and an appropriate solution; (2) Partnerships: external organizations which provide support, structure, and information to school districts seeking to implement HIT; (3) Expertise: specialized skills and knowledge relevant to implementation During implementation, these factors were consequential for the success and sustainability of these endeavors; (4) Resources: the availability of money, materials, staff and the ability to leverage those assets towards organizational aims; and (5) Organizational Readiness: the presence of mindsets and motivation necessary for pursuing organizational goals. These factors determined the constraints organizations navigated and their persistence in navigating them. Conclusion: Given the enormity of the pandemic and the challenges it presented for schooling, we contributed to the CMC framework by first establishing three separate pathways schools took after recovery. One pathway is when an organization does not engage in post-crisis learning and returns to "business as usual." These were schools which did not have the capacity or support to engage in meaningful learning. They enter a stage of stagnation before another crisis occurs. The other two pathways occur after a stage of learning. After reflecting about a school system's vulnerabilities during a crisis, leaders can choose to enact change in their organizations. These changes may be successfully implemented, leading to a path of sustained change or they may fail, leading the organization towards stagnation. We show that post crisis learning and change are not inevitable, especially for complex and strained public school systems.