This study aimed at unveiling the roles of school principals in facilitating flexible learning (FL) to overcome the digital divide amid the covid-19 pandemic in Elementary schools on the island of Lombok, Eastern Indonesia. This grounded theory research garnered the data through in-depth interviews and focus group discussion involving 20 purposively selected principals. The findings uncovered various roles of the school principals, namely, having a sense of emergences, being responsive to emergence, preparing internal human and non-human school resources; mapping parents and students' digital divide; situational extending roles; deciding FL with multi-involvement; execute, monitor and evaluate the decided policy. All of these roles were aimed at realizing FL in the pandemic era, where its implementation in such a remote learning context is distinctive from its use in the ordinary virtual classrooms; however, schools that were initially dominated by face to face (F2F) learning system had to be more flexible that accords with the pandemic in either School Closure (SC) or New Normal (NN) form.

Index Terms- Adaptive leadership, Flexible learning, Covid-19