The COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis and today's school principals are faced with more challenging circumstances than in any other time in our known history. The purpose of this paper is to explore school principals' management practices, their leadership styles, and the challenges they encounter in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. A research instrument of open-ended questions was administered to 32 school principals from government-funded secondary schools, to establish how school principals are dealing with the current situation and the challenges that arise from it. Findings rendered a contextualisation of school management practices. School leaders specified instructional and distributed leadership that were vital in this time of crisis and disclosed the challenges and uncertainties of their school communities. Hence, this paper contributes to the scarce evidence based on school leadership practices during a pandemic.