Communication and the Community

Summary paragraph: In which Menin recognizes that the School Committee needs to improve how it communicates with the community, and steps taken to improve that problem.

One of my favorite lyrics comes from a Greg Brown tune, and it goes something like this "...Dream on little dreamer, dream on; the world isn't what you think it is, it's what it is..."

After I was first elected to the School Committee, during one of the many meetings I attended before the inauguration, I had a chance to watch the SC evaluate itself. When it came to the self evaluation question about communication, as I recall, there was only one tangible, measurable goal: Did we get the newsletters out in a timely fashion?

I realize that newsletters are important; I've heard them extolled as a critical factor in the passing of the High School debt exclusion, the second time. As far as I'm concerned the jury is out on that; they were important, absolutely, but more important was choice to disengage and simplify the debt exclusion question itself- the first package had everything in it from the library to DPW trucks to the High School

Once they were teased out into two separate campaigns, they passed handily on their own merits.

Keep in mind that sitting on the SC at that time were two people who were professionals in communications. As a matter of fact, the first Committee Nick deKanter and I served on together, sometime in the mid-to-late 90's, was a Task Force convened to help the School Committee better communicate with the community.

It has been a longstanding problem.

Some of it is represents last remaining shreds of the old Empire. There was a natural bent towards withholding information, an almost pathological obsession for Superintendents and School Committees to take aim at their own feet and blast away. Secrecy, withholding all the information needed for informed votes, were pretty much par for the course.

During several of the years I served on the School Committee, we engaged administrators who were allergic to bad news.

Another aspect of the difficulty in transmitting information to the community is that aside from newsletters, community access television has been a non-starter for the better part of two years. Local radio is virtually gone; most of what we now hear on local radio stations is piped in from somewhere else.

The third, and perhaps most critical element in communicating is that we deal every day in the schools with education issues that cannot be reduced to pithy, third grade level sound-bites. The issues are complex, involve many variables, and our culture has succeeded in reducing our attention span to within the diagnostic range for Attention Deficit Disorder. Some of the people entrusted to report for local papers don't know the issues, and work with editors who need to cram every story into a five word headline, regardless of the nuance and complexity.

Few voices in the local coverage are sympathetic to understanding the issues. Few outlets exist beyond the traditional to get the "gospel" to people-- newsletters, letters home; mostly targeting constituencies who already have a stake in the schools.

We have tried doing regular outreach to residents who consider themselves outside our constituency base, lunch meetings, presentations, etc. Although it is difficult to gauge the success of this, it can be done more often and more effectively. Better yet, we should find ways to open the school facilities to make them more hospitable to these people- Saturday afternoon classic movies, or teas hosted by different classes. How about using the computer labs and volunteer students after school to offer seniors an orientation to the internet?

There have been significant improvements made to our website, with the focus on making more information accessible, and using it as a means of gathering feedback from the community as a way of informing decisions we are researching between meetings.

We have extended the maximum flexibility possible into our open meetings, allowing for public comment, public conversation, and a suspension of the rules to have members of the public comment on issues as they are being brought to the vote. At the same time, having all of the information we need now to make informed decisions, we are doing a lot more due diligence, and are a lot more deliberative-- which for many, translates to interminable boredom. Having experienced the good old days, when decision-making was a formality and an end-run around deliberation, I'll take boring.

Other suggestions we have considered and implemented over time include a rolling series of forums, presented around the Wards; holding a School Committee meeting outside of the Schools once a quarter, working with Ward Councilors and PTO's to make Administrative staff and School Committee members available to meet on a more regular basis with both groups.

We have also had small group conversations with City Council members, to help them understand how we will be projecting budgets and forecasting expenses.

We have very far to go. We have come very far; none of us feel like the message is sharp, consistent, and strong enough to break through to the community, yet.

But we'll get there.