September 2017
PAGE 1
Creating truly inclusive school communications
A new school year is around the corner and with it a host of communications challenges – and opportunities. Gearing up for the start of the school year is an excellent time to reflect on your communications plans and make any needed adjustments before heading into the whirlwind of another year.
As you think about communications opportunities and hurdles, take a moment to reflect on your resources and to vet, review, and provide feedback on messaging, tactics, and strategies. Do you have a strong, diverse set of stakeholders who you trust to provide honest feedback and a range of perspectives? Are their voices truly representative of your students and community? If not, what can you do to address that?
In general, communications are strongest when they are created with input from the target audience. Some school jurisdictions develop key communicator councils or communications cabinets.
These are groups of stakeholders who can share honest feedback about how things are going in the jurisdiction, and inform communications strategies and campaigns.
Other jurisdictions host listening sessions, one-off community meetings, or seek feedback more informally from trusted sources. But far too often, the participants do not represent the broader community or the students in our schools.
Seeking and receiving parent, student, or community feedback can be incredibly valuable to shaping and refining our communications. But it’s just as important to make sure that all voices have a place at the table.
Our job is to communicate with everyone in our broader school community. Making sure our committees, community groups, or trusted advisers represent the diversity of that community will help us improve the effectiveness of our communications and outreach strategies, better serve kids, and better engage all of our families.
Not just the usual suspects
We all have them. The engaged, passionate, and committed community member or parent with time on his (or her) hands and the desire to get involved in the schools. These individuals will volunteer for everything. They will seek out opportunities for engagement, read the materials you send out, and show up prepared to contribute. They have opinions they are eager to share. While their voices and messages are important and can be valuable in improving and refining our work, they don’t always represent every view in the community, or even the most predominant views.
Some families do not have the time, confidence, or resources for this type of engagement. They may not feel as comfortable in the schools, may be intimidated by the educational system, or may not feel like their voice or input is of value. But these voices – the quiet voices that so often go unheard – are often the ones we need to hear most.
These are the individuals that we may not reach effectively with our communications, who don’t feel included or valued in our system. If we want to improve our outreach and our supports to students and families, we first need to know if what we are doing is working – and why or why not.
To create a truly inclusive stakeholder group, we need to expand well beyond the usual suspects. We can’t simply rely on those who are already well connected to our schools. We need to do the hard work of reaching out to people who are not currently actively engaged with our schools, who feel disconnected or disenfranchised, and whose perspectives are immensely important to our work.
Whether you are seeking parental feedback, student insight, or community engagement, finding people who do not routinely engage with jurisdiction leadership or share their views can be very powerful.
Are we currently reaching these people with our communications and outreach? Is what we are doing effective? How can we improve, increase engagement, and better meet their needs?
Being intentional about inclusivity
Creating a diverse and inclusive committee, cabinet, or listening session is more than ensuring that a few individuals from minority groups are sitting in the room. It means thinking holistically about the representative voices you want included and how to structure your meetings to accommodate a diversity of needs. When you look around your community and your classrooms, what do you see? Do you see similar diversity in your meetings, committees, or advisers?
Things to consider include:
- Are the major racial/ethnic groups in your community represented? Do you have refugee or migrant communities represented in your schools and are they at the table? If not, how can you effectively reach out and create a safe and inclusive space for participation?
- Is the language diversity of your area represented? Is your group set up in a manner that supports and includes non-native English speakers?
- Does your group or meeting reflect the economic diversity of your community? Have you structured your meeting in a manner that is inclusive of working families?
- Are students with special needs and their families included?
- Do you have members of the LGBTQ community or their families included?
- Are there other significant groups in your community not generally represented at your events?
In addition to making sure you have a diverse set of stakeholders at the table, it is important to also look at how you structure your meeting, event, or group.
Is your meeting set up for your own needs or the needs of your participants? Have you gathered feedback on the meeting structure from people who will be impacted?
If you are hosting a meeting, please consider taking these actions:
- Provide interpretation services and translated materials for those who need them, and ensure that people know these materials will be available.
- Choose a time that works for busy working families. A 4 p.m. meeting might work for the retiree or stay-at-home parent, but will automatically cut out anyone with a full-time job.
- Provide childcare if needed. Many low-income families or single parents will not be able to attend a meeting or event if it means they have to hire childcare. Providing childcare can remove that barrier and improve access.
- Establish norms and rules of engagement that support all participants in feeling safe, respected, and welcomed.
- Seek feedback on what went well and what could be improved upon for the future.
Outreach Strategies
Very often we hear from the same voices because we solicit feedback or participation in the same ways. Going beyond the school newsletter or website can help increase participation from diverse community members.
Strategies can include:
- Asking engaged parents of visible minority groups, or who represent historically under-served or under-represented communities, to recommend others from their community to sit on panels, attend forums, or join a committee.
- Ask parents and students how they get their news and how they prefer to be engaged with.
- Talk to parents one-on-one at school conferences about opportunities for increased engagement and participation. Solicit input on outreach strategies.
- Post fliers at local churches, community centers, childcare centers, ethnic grocery stores, or other community hubs.
- Use social media to get your message out more broadly.
- Hold a listening session with community members to assess the most effective ways to reach out to them.
- Make sure to stress the importance of hearing from people. People are much more likely to engage if they feel invited to do so and if they feel like their input or feedback will be valued.
- Ask people whom else you should be reaching out to. Are there other groups you should be engaging with or hearing from?
Resource Links:
Reaching Out to Diverse Populations: What Can Schools Do to Foster Family-School Connections?:
Communicating with Diverse Populations:
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Contributed by Crystal Greene, communications consultant
Tips for effective communications for issues involving legal counsel
Lawyers and communications professionals are not the same thing. They have different goals and different training.
Legal counsel seeks to protect the legal and financial interests of their client and pursue resolutions to that end. The public relations staff wants to preserve the reputation of the organization.
Their goals are not the same but the PR person / team and the legal counsel often work together to help school jurisdictions deal with high-stakes, public-relations issues.
Building an effective team
The teamwork between legal and communications staff can be powerful or problematic, depending on the personalities and how much they collaborate. At best, the public relations strategy helps keep the reputation strong until and after legal resolution is achieved. The communications strategy complements the legal strategy and vice versa.
At worst, legal and communications staff can be at odds with each other, sending mixed messages and making a difficult situation worse.
Often, when the jurisdiction faces a legal challenge, legal counsel would prefer that the jurisdiction offer no comment at all. This makes perfect sense from a legal strategy standpoint. After all, the real argument will happen in the courtroom, not the newspaper.
There will be plenty of time to tell the jurisdiction’s official version of events in front of the judge. So, from a legal standpoint there is no benefit and plenty of risk associated with making any public remarks outside of the courtroom.
Avoiding “no comment” responses
Certainly, “no comment” to the media before a trial may be advisable from a legal standpoint. But it may not help protect the image of the school jurisdictions in the public eye. In fact, it could erode the public image of the school jurisdiction long after legal proceedings are over.
The public relations professional rarely wants to make “no comment” the message. There are lots of reasons for this. Mainly, offering no comment might make the jurisdiction look as if it is hiding something or is so arrogant it does not feel the need to explain its actions to the public. It can also make the jurisdiction look out of touch with electors. An emotional connection with electors may be important in cases of tragedy or stress. The public needs to know the jurisdiction cares about students as much as they do.
When something tragic or harmful to students happens, the public is wondering how seriously the school jurisdiction is taking the situation. “No comment” could be interpreted to mean the jurisdiction is not as upset as the community, or is hiding something from the public.
Sure, there may be a legal challenge you are facing, but in the meantime, the public wants to know what you are doing to prevent a recurrence of whatever caused the situation in the first place.
There are also legal situations that have less of a student-centered focus. They might involve circumstances such as employment issues, constitutional/ human rights issues, and conflict between trustees. These legal situations may still get media attention, and thought should be given in advance to what to say.
It will be important to consider how the jurisdiction and its leadership will be perceived with a ‘no comment’ answer. You might be able to say something similar to no comment, but that helps people understand why you aren’t commenting. For instance: ‘We don’t comment about personnel and employment issues because we protect the privacy of all employees. Our jurisdiction takes these situations seriously, and we always follow our policy / employment code / etc.
Collaborating for effective messaging
So, how do you bridge the gap between saying too much and not saying enough? Collaboration and communication.
If a PR team is going to be effective, they must have access to appropriate information. To gain that, the school jurisdiction must give legal counsel direction to work with PR staff. At that point, as directed by the school jurisdiction, a legal team can be upfront with the communications professional regarding potential pitfalls.
If it is imperative that the jurisdiction admits no fault in a situation, the communications staff can work with that. But if they do not know that part of the legal strategy, they would naturally state what happened, why it happened and what is being done to prevent it from happening again. That is good PR practice – apologize if you screwed up. But if the legal strategy requires a slightly different response, the PR practitioner can come up with different ways to explain the situation.
For instance, if an educator is accused of harming a student, the legal team and communications professionals may agree that they will not discuss fault with the news media. But they may also come to an agreement about the need to acknowledge community fears and outrage.
You may not be able to say, “We feel bad that this student was harmed by our staff,” but you may be able to say, “We want everyone to feel good about our schools and our staff. We are concerned if anyone in the community has bad feelings about anyone working with students. So we need to establish what happened and what can be done about it. We will do our best to make connections with the community and address any issues that are disturbing to students and parents.” Such a statement would not address guilt or innocence, but it would show that the jurisdiction does care about students and their families.
In cases where staff conduct is involved, you can share the process without the details. Instead of “no comment” you can say something along these lines: “We do care about these issues. Conduct is important. Student safety is the most important. The ultimate decisions about this case will be made in court and I cannot address the specifics of this case. But I can say that we take all accusations of misconduct seriously, and we have processes that include speaking privately with staff, students and parents. We just cannot share those conversations with the media or the public.”
There is always a way to connect with the media and the public without saying “no comment,” even when the matter will be settled in the courtroom. But coming up with positive messages that reassure the public without jeopardizing the jurisdiction’s legal position requires communication and cooperation with legal counsel.
Contributed by Jay Remy, communications consultant
Rockstar communications vs. checking the box
The role of communications in jurisdiction management is growing. More and more schools are discovering that communicating their strengths can build support from parents and community, and also stabilize and grow student enrolment.
What is the difference?
What is the difference between ‘rockstar’ PR departments and those who ‘check the box’?
Checking the box can be described as having a good website, sending out routine print materials, and providing meaningful agendas for parent-engagement activities. If you’re doing that, congratulations. For the majority of school jurisdictions, communications is handled by one fulltime communications staff member, or even fewer. ‘Checking the box’ can easily be as much as a one-person PR shop can do.
If you want more…
“When you have a really well-staffed and high-functioning communications department, they almost end up filling a chief of staff function,” explains J. Marie Riche, founder and principal consultant at Ideal Communications. It is possible to go from simply reporting directly from the administration to the public, to being an effective go-between, able to predict how the public will respond and add to the decision-making process in light of that.
“When you have great staffing and well-trained PR people they are doing regular internal check-ins to see where everyone is on the steps of the strategic plan. They’re not just reporting out what we’re doing – they’re asking where the next piece is. They are able to report back from community meetings and say, ‘this is where you played a difference in the lives of kids, and here is where we need your help next’.”
Rockstar communications means finding out what the community really thinks
“In a perfect world, part of my job when I am acting as a communications person for a school jurisdiction is acting as a synthesizer and translator between how we think about education internally and making it easier to understand for the general public. In return, I get to be the voice of the community into the leadership team,” says Riche.
This means asking questions. A survey of your community can tell you where you’re doing great, and also where you need to step up.