Rumors and Coffee

Rumor has it that the nearly bankrupt Pleasant Dale Park District will be hiring not one, not two, but THREE new full time recreation and management employees in the first week of January.

Didn't they just eliminate the marketing director's position in November in an attempt to trim the budget? Hmmm, that was not a wise move at all. How can they possibly market the new and improved Chalet and their myriad of new programs without a marketing director? Have you seen the last two mailings that have gone out since the marketing director's dismissal? Probably not, since most residents didn't get the Chalet re-grand opening flyer (a full color two sided 16" x 23" spread that cost $$$) because it was only mailed to Countryside. But, check out the Winter leisure guide that you might have received. Maybe instead of a new recreation manager, how about hiring a proof reader? That would make a lot of sense!

Rumor also has it that the bills for the new and improved Chalet are piling up with little to no money to pay them. Is this true? Only time will tell. They have yet to see any of the grant money that was promised last June.

Come on out and meet with park board president Brad Martin for coffee on January 9th at 9 a.m. at the Chalet. Bring your suggestions and input about what you want to see at the park district. Maybe even ask him about the rumors.

Just don't bring any high expectations!

Board Member Email Addresses

At the December 16 school board meeting, one topic of discussion was the PTA school directory and information contained therein. Specifically, the board president, Leandra Sedlack, wanted to know why private email addresses for board members were printed in the directory and where these email addresses came from since they were supposedly "private." Several board members implied this information came from a particular person on the board which was not the case.

First off, there were several reasons this information was included in the school directory. To begin with, it was to maintain a look of uniformity throughout the directory. Secondly, this information was included as a means for parents to communicate with the board members whom they elected to represent them. We all know how important communication is in our school district. Just last spring the communication action committee met for several months to discuss ways to improve communication throughout the district. In addition, email is a less intrusive way to reach someone and since the home phone numbers of board members have always been included in the directory, email provided another means whereby these people could be reached without being intrusive. Finally, the directory was proofread by several people including school board member Beth Tegtmeier and superintendent, Mark Fredisdorf at the November PTA board meeting.

At least three people were concerned enough to raise objection to and refuse to publish an advertisement they did not like; however, they never made ONE mention or objection to the board members' email addresses being published (which they clearly saw) until now.

In an effort to clear the air on where these email addresses came from, we'd like to show you how easy it is to get a person's email address. It's a little thing called GOOGLE!

Look at the last few entries on this page:
http://us.yhs.search.yahoo.com/avg/search?fr=yhs-avg-chrome&type=yahoo_avg_hs2-tb-web_chrome_us&p=leandra+sedlack

Another board member has a Facebook page that is open to the public. On her information page, you can view the name of the company she owns. Then, if you google the company name, you will come up a supplier directory. A third of the way down the page is her company name and her email address.

Two other email addresses came from a mass email that was sent out last April.

From: CRAZY4CHOC
To: CRAZY4CHOC
BCC: Tegtwins2
Sent: 4/5/2009 6:53:43 P.M. Central Daylight Time
Subj: April 7th Board of Education Elections

Hello, Friends:
As a candidate in the upcoming election, I would like to provide you with some information regarding recent campaign literature that has been distributed. Please take this opportunity to read the following (a duplicate attachment is also included), and forward on to individuals who may be interested. Please don't hesitate to contact Mark Mirabile, Leandra Sedlack, or myself, should you have any questions or require additional information.
Thank you,
Patti Essig
Candidate for Pleasantdale School District 107 School Board

Another email address was found here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rick+rigley&start=10&sa=N but we chose to use a different email address so there would be no confusion between boards that he serves on.

Other board members' email addresses were acquired from serving on a committee together.

These are just a few examples of how easy it is to get information from the internet. As Superintendent Fredisorf said last year at Internet Safety Night, whatever you put on the internet is a permanent record and available for all to see.

So next time the school board would like information, maybe they should ask those directly involved before jumping to conclusions and insinuating something without ALL the facts.

Why all this talk of email addresses? It's all about control. Enough said!

Top Ten Gifts the Pleasant Dale Park District Needs for Christmas

10. Eric Anderson's files.

9. A pooper scooper, a muzzle and a voice box.

8. Microphone system to decipher the board president's mumblings.

7. A proofreader for all future resident correspondence.

6. A roof repairman on speed dial for the Chalet.

5. New timepieces for board members ie. watches.

4. An influx of money.

3. Participants for their programs.

2. Robert's Rules of Order Handbook

1. Get out of debt free card.

Moving Forward!

FYI to the Village of Willow Springs:

Hello Safe Routes To School project sponsors!

THANK YOU so much for your patience over the last few months as we faced the rescission and the wait for additional funding.  I am very happy to announce that our program has received the additional allocation that we needed to release the funds for the 2008 SRTS awards, which were announced in August 2009.

I took the official letters of award, addressed to the sponsor on record, to our mail room this morning.  If your agency is sponsoring multiple awards, all of your letters are enclosed in the same envelope.  The letters will go out in today’s mail, so if you do not receive your letter within a week please contact me. 

It is imperative that you thoroughly read the letter(s) of award, as it has important information about the project, upcoming required webinar, deadline by which you must have a contract/agreement in place with IDOT that allows you to move forward with your project, deadlines for project completion, and information on the survey information you must provide before and after implementation of your project/program.

Please remember that these are letters of award, which include your next steps as a project sponsor.  They are NOT notices to proceed with work and incur costs.  You must have a contract/agreement in place with IDOT prior to incurring any costs.  Any costs incurred prior to the notice to proceed cannot be reimbursed.

Please see below for the SRTS Webinar Information for December 11 and December 15.  Please note that your attendance at either of these webinars is mandatory, as outlined in your letter of award.  You can register for either of these webinars by clicking on the appropriate link below.  Each webinar will include identical information, walking you through the process for getting your contract/agreement in place with the Department.  Please list the organization you are representing when you fill out the webinar registration form - it will allow me to better track participant attendance.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail or phone.

Thank you again for your patience, and we look forward to working with you to implement your SRTS project(s)!

Best,

Megan 

The train is moving...time to get on board!

e School News 

eschoolnews.com

Technology News for Today's K-20 Educator

Volume 12, Number 11

November/December 2009

How Social Media Can Enhance School Communications

 

By Nora Carr, APR, Fellow PRSA

Described by some public relations pundits as the “new word-of-mouth marketing,” social media are still an enigma to most of us tasked with school communications. 

Sure, Twitter use has exploded during the past year, but to what end? Americans may hang on every word twitted by a celebrity, but will soccer moms really welcome tweets from their child’s teacher or principal?

On the other hand, President Obama’s historic campaign was fueled in large measure by the strategic use of social media, which galvanized online communities and reversed decades of youth voter apathy. 

Sifting through the hype and the hope, this much is clear: the web has spawned a new communications revolution, one that shifts the power from the information producer to the information consumer. Social media networking sites, in many ways, are just the latest evolution of this digital transformation. 

Empowered citizens also now have new tools to voice their approval—or their dissatisfaction— with the status quo. In the Wild Wild West of citizen journalism, truth often gets shortchanged as misinformation is recycled endlessly in the mash-up between social networks.

Just like consumers can choose which brands they want to engage with online, parents, potential employees, senior citizens, and other community stakeholders can choose whether they care enough about public,

private, and parochial schools to start fan clubs, discussion groups, dialogues, and other interactive web-based forums. 

While I still have more questions than answers at this point, my initial and admittedly timid forays into social media communications have already driven home one key lesson: the web communications fallacy of  “if you build it, they will come” holds true in this arena as well. 

I’ve been twittering, linking in, and blogging for a few weeks now, and even people who are trying to find me online can’t. While this is likely a blessing in disguise— after all, I’m a newbie when it comes to deploying these tools— communicating to no one makes it hard to justify the time. 

While I intend to keep plugging along, I already suspect that the real value of social media for school communicators is the unvarnished market intelligence now available online. It’s fascinating, and sometimes a bit scary, to see what people care enough about to post online. 

For example, the biggest YouTube draw for my school district, North Carolina’s Guilford County Schools, is a two-year-old “investigative” news story questioning the accuracy of the district’s annual crime and violence report to the state. With 1.7 million views, it far outpaces the superintendent’s strategic plan launch speech, which we posted on YouTube as part of our new media experiment. 

This underscores why asking whether school districts or individual schools should bother developing a social media presence is a bit like debating whether to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped. Chances are your school or district already has an online presence on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, or Twitter—it just might not be the one you want. 

Although many social media conversations are banal, others are insightful. Either way, online chatter could serve as an early warning system for simmering issues that are ready to ignite into a major crisis. Increasingly, parents are using personal web pages, blogs, and other new media tools to share news, discuss concerns, and rally support for everything from PTAfundraisers to indoor air quality investigations. 

The ultimate “two-way” communication channel, social media requires listening as well as responding. It is, after all, a conversation. Most web marketers advise keeping blogs and web pages interactive, allowing visitors to post comments and ask questions in a public manner. 

This can be risky for school superintendents and others who daily experience the growing lack of civility that such anonymous forums encourage. A few years ago, the Pinellas County, Fla., superintendent, one of educational administration’s pioneer bloggers, shut down his site when the conversation turned increasingly ugly. 

That cautionary tale has led many school public relations professionals to keep the interactive portion of blogs “turned off,” much to the dismay of the medium’s purists. The compromise position of providing an eMail address for personalized (and non-public) responses to questions and concerns works well for many school leaders, but won’t score as many points on the transparency scale. 

As with many communication tools, getting started in social media seems easier than keeping it fresh, participating regularly, and making sure people get the answers they’re seeking in a timely manner. Jon Rognerud, a search optimization consultant in Los Angeles, offers a number of solid tips on his website, www.chaosmap.com. 

I particularly like his posts titled “Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide” and “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing.” For Rognerud, the profile or identity you create online (the first pillar) is like an “expanded business card” that declares your “value, who you are, and where you can be found.” 

According to Rognerud, the focus of this crucial first step should be on how your site can benefit the marketplace, not the reverse. For educators, this might mean sharing more information with parents about child and teen development or how they can reinforce a new reading curriculum at home and less about the superintendent, school board, or new district initiatives. 

Identity through association, the second pillar of social media marketing, is like giving parents, employees, students, and others the opportunity to wear your school or district logo, according to Rognerud. 

By mutual agreement, interested parties get to associate themselves with you, and you get to associate yourself with them as online “friends” or “colleagues,” or through social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, technorati, or BlinkList. 

The third step, user-initiated conversation, is probably the most unnerving for educators, who already find themselves short of time, energy, and patience. The thought of responding to hundreds of additional eMails or queries, especially in a public space that opens them to further criticism, can put leaders over the edge. 

Yet before dismissing this opportunity out of hand, school communicators might want give it a whirl. By serving stakeholders in a new and more responsive manner, you might win some converts. At minimum, it could give you the opportunity to set the record straight when misinformation rears its ugly head online. As with other communication channels, all groups, message boards, and forums aren’t created equal. Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN Groups are among those most popular and might be a good place to start. 

The fourth pillar of social media marketing, provider-initiated conversation, is “your chance to find out what your customers think, feel, love, and hate about your product,” writes Rognerud. “Ask them. Challenge them. Present yourself to them, but do so respectfully.” 

In-person interaction—or good old-fashioned face-to-face communication—is Rognerud’s fifth pillar. Research has consistently shown that facial expressions, body language, and other non-verbal cues account for more than 80 percent of what is communicated when two people interact.

When it comes to changing hearts and minds, even interactive online communication is insufficient. People are emotional beings. The silent majority often needs what the late, great Pat Jackson, one of the nation’s
pioneering public relations gurus, called a triggering event to get them moving. 

Triggering events might start with technology—a text between two students can create an audience of hundreds in just minutes— but change tends to happen not only face to face, but one to one. As another PR sage noted years ago, the web and other new media tools won’t replace other forms of relationship-building communications, but they will help us connect with people in new and important ways. 

Award-winning eSN columnist Nora Carr is the chief of staff for North Carolina’s Guilford County Schools.