Handout 15
Case Study Exercise
Your board has just hired a new superintendent from out of town. His top priorities are to reduce class size and give school principals more authority over their budgets.
Meanwhile, as part of the process of interviewing superintendent candidates, the board has commissioned a series of surveys, mainly to identify the community’s top educational priorities. The board was particularly interested in knowing whether people knew about and supported its recent emphasis on adding more computers and Internet access to every school building.
The survey results indicated that parents, senior citizens and business leaders in the community had a different set of priorities. Their top 3 were to: 1) improve the safety of students and enforce discipline and behavior standards; 2) hire and retain better teachers; and 3) make sure every student has enough textbooks and other basic supplies. Moreover, parents, senior citizens and business leaders gave the local schools very poor marks in these three areas.
Well down on the community’s list of priorities were programs to expand education technology, reduce class size, or give principals more authority over hiring and budgets.
The new superintendent and the school board chairman argued that the public was misinformed and misguided—that the system should acknowledge the public opinion results but move ahead on its own agenda. They said the public was just plain wrong about the safety and textbook issues, that the school system had made great progress in the past few years.
Questions for Discussion
- What should the board do?
- What policy implications does this have for board members?
- What strategic communications approaches should the district consider?
Case Study: Suggested Answers
The board could:
- Get the facts on safety and discipline; quality teachers; textbooks and supplies in their district. This isn’t just about providing "better spin"; you need to know what the reality is.
- Identify allies and emissaries to each of your key audiences—and use them as "key communicators" to get out the word. This takes longer, but the reality is that teachers talking to teachers, parents talking to parents, business leaders talking to business leaders, and students talking to students have a lot more credibility with their peers than school leaders and board members. Don’t wait to identify these "key communicators" until there is a crisis. Involve them early and regularly. The most powerful communication is face-to-face, peer-to-peer. And you need to keep saying the same things, over and over, so that they have a chance of actually sticking.
- Provide more opportunities for community members to see for themselves what’s happening in schools—that they’re safe, that classrooms and cafeterias are orderly, that students have enough supplies.
- Use data to make their case. (But remember that the most powerful communications are first-hand testimonials, especially when they involve students. Imagine how much more powerful it would be if students in your system were openly and regularly saying that they feel safe—as opposed to including a few pages of data in a 200-page statistical profile of the district.)
- Do a survey of the public and pay attention to what it says. This might mean getting clearer about what the public knows and understands about these issues. This could require additional research, mainly in small focus groups of a dozen or so people, where researchers can go beyond the yes/no and true/false format of most surveys to better understand what people think. It might be that the public doesn’t know the "full story." But, make sure that you have a good sense of what the public believes it knows before providing additional information.
- Listen more. And, make sure that people know that you’re listening more, and that you intend to act on what you hear. The truth is, many community people will be satisfied with the board leadership if they believe the board and school leaders are giving them a chance to be heard and then are making a good-faith effort to respond. Remember, though, actions speak louder than words: Don’t promise the community something you don’t intend to deliver.
- Make better two-way communications a priority. It’s expensive and time consuming. But the reality is that boards and superintendents cannot get their work done without public understanding and support. And, you can’t expect the public to "scratch your itch" (in this case, more technology and site-based management) until you "scratch their itch" (safety and discipline, textbooks, and quality teachers). This might mean nothing more than doing a better job of having more people "tell the good news" stories. On the other hand, you need to be open to the possibility that parents and community members might have a more accurate picture of your schools than you do.
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