The global COVID 19 pandemic created a challenge for organizations and schools worldwide that raised fundamental questions about the degree to which they are sustainable. Some schools struggled to adapt quickly to the needs of their stakeholders while others saw opportunity in the moment to create and innovate to generate new value for their customers and increase attractive quality. Sustainability can be defined as the responsiveness of a living system to change in its environment (Snyder and Snyder, 2021) and responsiveness as the quality of reacting quickly and positively. When faced with the pandemic, schools and organizations around the world were put to the test on how responsive they could be to changes in their complex environments and this turbulent time in history has forced educational leaders to ask how schools can create more sustainable practices. This paper presents a phenomenological study which examined what school leaders did to sustain attractive quality during the pandemic, specifically by evaluating responsiveness as a core capability. Findings were explored to better understand responsiveness and ask what lessons can be learned that will help inform a framework for developing sustainable quality in education.