When perception is reality, bad news about your school is terrible news, no news is bad news, and good news is the only news with a future. If your local school is not generating and publishing good news about its students, its programs, its teachers or its alums, it is losing ground in the swamp of no news viewed badly. Scan your local news sources to check this out; schools that are working their “good news” enjoy a stronger reputation and a positive perception. Schools for which there is scant good news are seldom even in the communal conversation. After the start and end of this reality check there is one truth: how a community perceives its local school is the school’s responsibility.
Cultivating a good news aura begins when school leadership understands the cycle of school and community relationships. Good news about the school begets good perceptions in the community; good perceptions in the community begets support for the school’s needs; support for the school’s needs begets more school success; and, published school successes beget good perceptions. This cycle is apparent in successful school communities and even more apparent in communities where the local school is invisible in the news. While few powerful processes in successful school organizations are “top down,” cultivating a good news aura is one that is top down. School perception lives in the work of school leaders.
There was a time when “publishing” good school news was singularly lodged in the local newspaper. A school could feed its good news to the “education” reporter and good news articles were widely distributed to community homes and businesses. The concept of “feeding” good school news has not changed, but the conduits now are multiple not singular. The local newspaper remains an important publisher of school news, but school leadership must cultivate each of their community’s news outlets – print, broadcast, and web-based. While there may be an “official” community newspaper, there are many other printed publications that make their way into mail boxes and distribution stands at groceries, gas stations, and markets. Each of these will have its own community of readers and using all available print publications assures a wider spread of good news. Television is a more difficult conduit to cultivate because TV follow the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo, but a continuous feeding of good news to a local station will result in some coverage. Radio on the other hand, especially the proliferation of small FM stations, will transmit good school news to the thousands of homes and businesses where a local station plays daily as background.
Social media has become the queen of a school’s good news network. Postings of brief nuggets of school news are friended, shared, and re-posted with such frequency that a single feeding of a good news story to social media rapidly outpaces a feed to print or broadcast media. While once scoffed at by school leaders, Facebook and Twitter work exceptionally well in getting school news to the socially connected.
Feeding and nurturing a school’s positive perception in its community pays off. While it is easy to connect this positive perception to the success of school referenda issues, that type of pay off happens only once across a span of years. The more immediate pay offs lie in how the school’s public perception attracts new families to live in the community, how its positive reputation advances the future of its graduates, and how its good aura promotes the hiring and retention of talented teachers and educators. When a school enjoys a steady stream of good news spreading throughout its community, that school is a constant source of community pride.
Bad news that turns terrible most often is a thunder bolt that a school cannot anticipate. Equally sad is the fact that every year a handful of schools suffer the tragedy of terrible news. Every school has protocols for responding to bad news turned terrible. A conscientious exercise of these protocols slowly dissolves the tarnish of terrible news. But, sadly, the half-life of terrible news is several decades long.
No news is a stagnating community perception in which many schools find themselves. No news is just that – a lengthy absence of any news about the school. Ironically, no news about a school builds a bad perception. When there is no good news to offset the absence of news, the tendency is to believe that “nothing good must be happening there.” The absence of good news is avoidable. It is correctable. It is a condition that can be reversed and quickly, if there is a concerted leadership effort to assume new practices of publishing good news.
When one wants to, one can find positive, good news stories every day in the life and times of a school. Stories about people. Stories about events. Stories about smiles or even frowns turned into smiles. Stories about children and teachers abound, but do not neglect the seldom reported stories from the cafeteria and kitchen, school bus, and custodial carts. Every person in school can be the source of good news. However, someone must want to see and find and publish the school’s good news. It starts at the top – if the proliferation of good news is a priority of the superintendent, it will happen. If it is not a priority for the superintendent, it will not.
So, check the current community perception of your local school. Can people you ask cite any recent good news they have read or heard about the school? If they can, give your school a good news high five. If they cannot, your local reality is no news is bad news.
Now, what to do about the truth of your local school. You, yes you, tell the superintendent that “No school news is bad school news. If you (the superintendent) will give me one good news story every week, I will spread the good news.” If ten people did this in your community, the no news is bad news drought would end and a prosperous good news cycle would begin. And, probably the superintendent would quickly assume a new role as the good news “teller” for the schools. Everyone wins when a school engages in a good news cycle.