This document has been formatted for printing from your browser from the Web site of the Illinois Association of School Boards.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE -- This document is © copyrighted by the Illinois Association of School Boards. IASB hereby grants to school districts and other Internet users the right to download, print and reproduce this document provided that (a) the Illinois Association of School Boards is noted as publisher and copyright holder of the document and (b) any reproductions of this document are disseminated without charge and not used for any commercial purpose.

Illinois School Board Journal
March/April 2006

Listening to hear community's voices

by Barbara Banker and Julie Armantrout

Barbara Banker is director of community relations for Woodstock CUSD 200 in McHenry County; Julie Armantrout of Glen Ellyn is senior consultant with ESA Communications. Both are members of the Illinois chapter of the National School Public Relations Association.

Not too long ago, the term "public engagement" would bring to mind the image of a young man giving an engagement ring to a surprised young woman in a restaurant or another public place.

Today, however, public engagement is recognized as a highly effective way to obtain input and support from taxpayers who often are disconnected from a school system's decision-making process. Through public engagement, school systems can establish common ground, unite disparate factions and forge positive relationships with the taxpaying public.

As a process, public engagement provides opportunities for parents, non-parents, retirees, employers, staff and other representatives of the extended school community to have their voices heard and play a role in determining the nature of their schools. It also provides an opportunity for school boards to listen to those voices.

Because the public engagement process is open to everyone, it enables a school system to obtain diverse, unedited opinions and perspectives from a cross section of its constituents. When practiced as honest, spontaneous two-way communication, it can provide valuable insights into the values, goals and priorities of the public at large.

Open and varied insights, such as those provided by the public engagement process, are especially important. Today's taxpayers are often suspicious and critical of public sector initiatives — especially if they involve money. Correctly or incorrectly, the public too often feels that it is the victim of "spin" — that facts, figures and scenarios are interpreted and/or manipulated to meet the goals of insiders.

The public engagement process has been adopted and effectively used by a wide spectrum of private and public entities, including school systems, municipalities, businesses, non-profit organizations, political parties and large corporations. Public engagement is widely accepted and used for one reason: because it works.

How it works

Because public engagement is a "big picture" process, it provides members of the internal and external school communities with an opportunity to play a role in establishing the goals and priorities of their school district.

An extensive survey by Public Agenda, a non-profit public opinion research firm based in New York, showed that the public engagement process provides an excellent way to garner increased community input and support — one of the top priorities of school boards nationwide.

But a major portion of the community response received by board members often comes from disgruntled taxpayers who attend board of education meetings and whose complaints and demands do not necessarily represent the community at large.

The public engagement process provides a thorough and objective analysis of public wishes and opinions. Also observed by Public Agenda: "Rather than entering into a dialogue of honest give and take and providing a process by which citizens can understand the pros and cons of different policies … a board often makes a decision and then tries to sell it to the public."

This is akin to having a waiter take your order and then serve you the food he feels you should have, instead of serving you what you wanted.

Mere opinion research, although valuable, doesn't do the job of public engagement. Such research solicits information about community concerns, but it does not provide community dialog, elicit new ideas, or enable community members to play a proactive role in helping to insure that their schools have the support and resources needed to provide the superior educational experiences that benefit both children and property values.

So just how does a district enable community members to play that proactive role without relinquishing the board's authority to make decisions? How does the board go about listening with the idea of truly hearing what its constituents want? At least one district in a suburban Chicago collar county has found a process that worked well for its community.

What worked in Woodstock

Woodstock CUSD 200 is a fast-growing preK-12 district that covers 110 square miles in McHenry County northwest of Chicago. It also is a good example of the effectiveness of the public engagement process.

After experiencing tremendous success in 2000 with the use of study circles to determine the community's aspirations and expectations for graduates of the school system, the board of education decided to turn to the public again for input on how to solve another issue that threatened the quality of education in the district. The challenge: How to prepare for an unprecedented surge in student enrollment caused by sprawling new housing developments, which are expected to increase the district's enrollment by a booming 65 percent.

Observing how other school districts in the collar counties had been hurt by rapid residential growth, the school board took a proactive stance and decided to address the issue in its early stages.

"We didn't have to look too far away to see the growing pains of nearby districts," said board president Paul J. Meyer. "All of our nine schools were approaching their full capacities, and we knew we wouldn't have enough classrooms to house the additional students."

Consequently, in August 2003, the board appointed a 60-member Facilities Study Task Force to study the impact of growth on the school system and to make recommendations for the future. The task force, made up of community members, parents and staff from every school, met 19 times before presenting a comprehensive set of recommendations to the school board in August 2004.

Task force members didn't stop at making recommendations for the number of new buildings that the district would need. They also developed a set of academic standards for the types of programs and services for which separate spaces should be planned, and a set of facilities standards to create physical environments that would maximize learning.

Believing that the general public was largely unaware of the magnitude of the challenge facing the district, the task force also urged the school board to undertake a comprehensive public engagement process that would bring the recommendations to "every segment of the community" to get feedback on them before taking formal board action.

A 23-member facilitating team was formed to help plan and guide the public engagement process, which was appropriately called School- Talk200. Over a three-month period between November 2004 and January 2005, the facilitating team and task force volunteers conducted 15 open houses and made 30 presentations that were attended by some 1,800 people.

The cornerstone of each open house was a series of 14 display boards depicting specific components of the recommendations. Volunteers stationed at each display talked with participants about each aspect of the situation and encouraged them to submit written comments at the end of their visit.

This participatory process conveyed the message that the school district valued the opinions of its residents and that everyone had a voice in the decision-making process.

Feedback on the written forms gave high praise to the task force and to the school district. One person said: "I don't think anyone could say District 200 isn't being proactive about our growth problems." Another wrote: "We appreciate the opportunity to be involved in the decisions made for our children." And still another commented: "The district is trying to do this the right way — by educating the public with the facts, stopping the rumors and guessing about the future of education in Woodstock."

Using the feedback received from SchoolTalk200, the task force made a few modifications to its original recommendations and presented a final report to the board in March 2005. From those recommendations, the board crafted a comprehensive action plan that called for three new schools and additions or modifications to two others.

Before taking final action on a ballot proposal, however, the district decided to ask for the community's input again in a second public engagement process called SchoolTalk2 Action, which concluded in early December 2005. About 2,400 people participated in that process.

In January 2006, the board voted unanimously to place a referendum on the March 21 ballot, and officials are optimistic about the outcome. A recent survey indicated that 65 percent of respondents were either aware of or had participated in one of the school talk programs.

"With more than two years of community input and feedback, we feel that we have a plan that will meet the needs of the community and that the community can support," Meyer said.

This takes time

As you can see from the timeline above, public engagement takes time. It is not something to be accomplished with one community meeting. To be truly effective, public engagement must be ongoing and inclusive.

School boards are charged with the daunting task of providing all students with a high quality education. This is a great goal, but one that requires money. And, in Illinois, the great preponderance of school revenue is generated from local property taxes. Boosting property tax revenue requires taxpayer approval via a referendum — a daunting task even in the best of economic times.

In referendum planning today, it is imperative that school boards know taxpayers' priorities and how much they are willing to spend for those priorities. Referendums impact what are perhaps taxpayers' two most sensitive areas: their children and their pocketbooks.

The public engagement process is especially suited to referendum planning because it enables a district's constituents to identify those items of importance to them, and how much they are willing to pay. However, the initial questions may not be focused on how much money is necessary or the impact of the referendum on the tax levy.

The first priority is to find out what the community's aspirations are for its students and its schools. Only after those aspirations have been voiced does the district start putting dollar figures on how much those aspirations will cost. That puts the community in the lead in determining how much it will pay for what its members have said they want. But it also puts the school board in the position of being able to offer a referendum package that already has initial support throughout the community.

The bottom line is that public engagement provides all members of the school community with opportunities for an open exchange of ideas, priorities and information — an opportunity to truly be heard — plus a chance to play a role in determining the future of their schools.

And, in the end, even though public engagement can be time-consuming, it has been proven as a dynamic method to gain valid community input, garner support for schools and make a lot of new friends.