001mr rittenhouse can you take us live thank you thank you all right i'll turn it over to dr akbar massager i don't know if you guys wanna call us to order or if you would like me to okay um yeah thank you very much i'm sorry um i'm trying to open board doc so thank you everyone it is uh good to have everyone here today it is uh february 19 2021 um it's kind of weird to say it's 20 2021. um and this is the ad hoc uh committee uh meeting or the first meeting with communication team to talk about uh the ad hoc communications uh committee uh of the board so uh give me a second to open up board docs so that i can in the order of the meeting that we were
002talking about so while we do that um i guess it'll be good if uh everyone here i know i don't know everyone if uh everyone could introduce themselves and share uh their role with uh our communications for the district and uh we can start with mark um i'm mark williams i'm the director of marketing communications joanna hi i'm joanne isaac i work in teaching and learning one of my roles is internal communication with curriculum and i've transitioned this year to be working with mark on external communication arla chapman community relations diversity equity and inclusion and my work is really to support communications in outreach efforts particularly related to families caregivers and community partners too tommy hi everybody tommy bruno um i'm the general manager of the summit radio station and um a couple claim to
003fames i i guess i created the gilbee concept about 15 years ago and when i was first hired i did pr and communications for the district and about 12 years ago uh assumed the responsibilities of the radio station to be our own so we pay our own way but we are a privileged partner of akron public schools the radio stations are located inside of ella community learning center we raised about a million dollars to help build that facility we've only been in there one year and happy to join this board and help through some of the skills i may or may not have thanks for inviting me thanks tommy thank you very much well first i'll go ahead well ryan ryan rittenhouse who is actually behind the scenes making this uh go live over the
004streaming youtube um is also uh part of this team as well ryan can you elaborate on what you do are you able to talk to us here ryan handles video services he does uh creates videos for us for the most part but he also does some social media posting and things like that to help us out thank you very much um thank you ryan mark tommy joanne and carla for being here today the first thing we wanted to do is turn it over to uh you mark and carla tommy and joanne just to share with us any updates around how the district currently markets to different populations uh identifying any uh known challenges to that we've incurred uh two different different populations and then some of our greatest opportunities that exist when it comes to
005communicating and getting people engaged in our district well i don't know i think the biggest challenge would be the refugee population in north hill and we have great support from uh loy nguyen and and translators because virtually everything we do now has to be translated so any kind of message that goes out especially direct messages that go through email to our families have to be translated if we do a hard copy mailing of something and it goes to all of our families we have translations done for the families who are who do not speak english and that is that's a challenge but it's less of a challenge because we have such good people working in that area in terms of marketing you know we we try to you know primarily go for our families and
006you know the efforts that we make are directed towards the families the the parents the guardians the grandparents and the students to a lesser degree but most of our messages are directed at families try to show them that we have a diverse culture in our schools but also diversity of programs arts music math science college and career academies which encompasses a whole new world for for student learning we have a lot of different things that are inherently diverse we don't have to work at making them so because of our kind of curriculum we offer uh any kind of photographic work we do uh we're we're mindful of of of the kind of images we show but for the most part every time we take a picture it's diverse we have children of all different um
007cultures in the images that we use so i don't know if that answers your question if that addresses it but there's um uh yeah i guess the the really tough challenge is when we go for free media which i think is still very very important for us with the rest of the community not just our families but when we're trying to reach people who are the people who support us which is incredibly important the people that that whose hard earned tax dollars support this public school system that's so essential and free media is still the best way to reach them through television news newspaper online news publications radio to a lesser degree but we we try to reach through all these different means social media and included but good old-fashioned broadcasting and print media still
008help a great deal especially with folks that may not have any idea what we're doing because they don't have kids in our school system yeah i think i i'm glad did you brought that up um because that is one of the um the challenges i think that is uh everyone probably will see is there's a public assault on public schools and what we do um which doesn't come from anyone in this room but it comes externally and unfortunately sometimes from um people who are elected and so i'm wondering you know how do we um do a better job of finding our communities where they are to be able to communicate with them um because i think that's that's part of the challenge is not only the students and families that are with us but those
009students and families that could be with us but but are not because uh they're getting all these uh messages externally about um you know false narratives that we're not doing a good job which is furthest from the case um and so we need to do uh you know a good job of marketing to them too so wondering uh what ways have we worked on that well i think you can you know you could look at advertising as a as a possible way of doing that although it's advertising is not necessarily cost effective in this market we can't really use television because most of the people that are watching what we consider local television live in cleveland and they you know they don't care we have um radio advertising is probably not that important for us
010in terms of getting reaching the people that we really want to reach because we don't have anybody you know with in radio that has a huge audience i would say um you know and we are very mindful of how you know we we monitor our budget so uh i i would say billboard advertising is still probably the best way to reach a broad group of people uh with a message but the message is you know we need to have you know probably specific campaigns to do that with a call to action it's not just you don't just put up a billboard that just says hi here's who we are that's a good broad way to reach a large large number of people um but but it but that challenge is it's different in every market
011in every city and because of our proximity to cleveland it it really we have done less and less advertising magazines that don't really maybe help us you know we don't advertise in very much anymore we've kind of changed and we've done a lot more social media advertising it's a lot less expensive people share it with other people so if we advertise on facebook for example uh a lot of that gets shared and it's sort of um it's like a snowball going down a hill and because it's so affordable we find that to be a really good way to advertise and reach reach a broad group of people we're starting to work on a using something called hubspot which is a social media management tool it's very complicated to explain but it helps not just coordinate
012our social media programs and campaigns it gives us feedback on how many people we're reaching and what they're doing with the messages and things like that so i think that once we get that up and running we will probably have better better metrics you know a better idea of who we're really reaching we're going to start in through hubspot we're going to start using facebook pages with our individual schools so that each school can use its own facebook page for its own message but the district will also be able to put its messages on the school facebook pages and that has mathematically a pretty strong value for reaching huge numbers of people especially if the message is something that's it's a district message we can't assume that people are going to look at just the
013district facebook page or our website or our twitter account but we can use 40 to 50 other accounts that are all viewed by different people and i can't do the math on that right now but i think that that will be very helpful for us yeah it definitely sounds like it uh joanna were you about to say something well i was just i was just gonna add to what mark was saying i i know that i was happy to see in the advanced aps plan that they had listed one of the things that we need is something that that manages that marketing um when you asked about challenges that's one thing that i do see as a challenge you know we have um mark marx and his department do a good job of reaching a
014lot of different fam our families in different ways but we really don't know where are they going which one which one are they going to a lot which ones do we need to put more effort into which ones do we not i mean are there ones out there that we're spending time enough for doing that nobody's going to so the the hubspot i was fortunate enough to be able to see the back ends of that working and it is pretty impressive with what it can do um it tracks uh information not only of how a families are accessing it um but it gives you a whole lot of analytics on the back end that definitely can be beneficial um i i also you had asked about um i was just writing some notes you had
015asked about how we are marketing and communicating now and i don't mark one thing that um i wrote down too that is done is there's a lot of marketing materials that highlight opportunities that are in the schools um that such as the ib program and different specialty schools that we have and that that marketing material is out in buildings and mark can probably elaborate a little bit more about how that is used as well virtually every program we have has collateral materials yes and i also and and i'll just add on to mark's as well i i like the idea of hubspot also to have that district message stay consistent but while still giving that flexibility to schools to add their own types of communication on it too so i think that's important i i
016think too um that we and i haven't run the numbers but a couple of years ago i did on free media and we had thousands i i think it was up around 70 in two years free media exposure 70 000 different hits um a good deal of that i will say is lebron james it was it was then it wasn't most of it but if you were to take it and look at one if there's one person one school one that was responsible for a larger piece of that than anybody else it was lebron and that's helped us greatly but uh if we took him out of the mix completely we would still be i i can't and most reporters have told me that they don't see any other school district with with the kind
017of coverage we have in free media and as hard as it is to get on cleveland television we actually do a pretty good job of it because we have interesting stories to tell and they have reporters who um who are interested if you know certain reporters and you know what they like to cover or you sort of follow the news every day and see what they need and you have good relationships which we do the reporters will just will call and ask if you have anything going on because we're transparent we're very forthcoming i always say they don't call us first because they're going alphabetically they they call us first because we respond our people we make our people available to do good stories with them we don't we give them access when it isn't
018always easy to do it isn't always convenient because teachers are busy administrators are busy but people stop and make the time uh here to talk to reporters whenever we can to show everybody that we are it's not about necessarily promoting what we do i mean it is but it's also about saying that we are publicly funded we are an open book we're transparent here's who we are here's what we do good or bad do some reporter calls about something that's happening that you know we're not crazy about we still talk to them uh and a lot of places don't do that a lot of people shut the door and say no we don't want to do that and uh david's been great david james has been great about being open with uh with everything that
019we have going on here and i really think that that's helpful because it shows people that we're um television is still a really great way to get your story across because it shows images of of children and people's emotions that are hopefully happy and it positions us as a as a diverse and fun school system for kids to come to yeah thank you um miss altruism if you have any questions so it's good to hear all of this some of this is really familiar to me you know with my pta background i think the district does a really good job of communicating our positives um i think most anybody can tell you a little bit about the performing arts school and the i promise school um just because and you know our various awards that
020we get i think we do a really a really good job um so i'm gonna i'm gonna turn it on the flip side because we need to have some of those uncomfortable conversations i can remember probably about 10 to 12 years ago there was a period of time um where the beacon journal um who's doing a lot better by this let me clarify they're doing a lot better now there was a period of time where you know any crime that happened on the west side of akron they would reference booktube um and it was just really challenging because we already have challenges number one um and i i felt and this is my pta hat i didn't feel protected by the district i was waiting for the district to somehow come out against that and
021say well hey stop cease and desist whatever because we were getting hammered by any crime that happened on the west side it would just sell down the street from book though or former book though graduate and it was really i mean to the point where we had a campaign with the pta where we bombarded the beacon journal with emails and whatnot and phone calls to you know stop that because it's just it wasn't fair to the school and the hard-working staff so i think it's important that we have something in place that can combat those types of things when they happen um because we have i mean if we're one district we have to value all of our schools so that's just one thing um another thing that i think is very helpful um are
022the all calls that go out and i can give you an example at one point in time when i was on the akron council of ptas and we were doing the city-wide talent show and somehow all call went out with my personal phone number you know if you want to audition and i tell you it worked probably for a one week straight my phone did not stop ringing um and i can't help but think about if we had you know something in place that could you know better manage that it was an effective way to get information and of course it was an interesting event so people were passionate about it um but the all calls work especially if we're thoughtful about you know if we're getting four and five all calls a week i
023think that can be overwhelming to a lot of family so just keeping that in mind when we do put them out um so that's one thing i'm trying to think another thing that i know is a challenge from my experience in pta is when we're trying to reach our families they're they have like seven eight different phone numbers on file sometimes and even just recently i volunteered for the uh career expo for the ninth graders and i had a list to deliver some items to different families and on that list were the phone numbers so that i can call and say i've dropped your package off and some of those students had seven phone numbers to call i'm not calling seven phone numbers to figure out which one you know so i can imagine when
024important information needs to go out you know how is the secretary managing that you know how are we managing that as a district when we put those all calls do all seven numbers go in the system um do we have something in place where you know we can weed out the bad numbers i mean that's a whole separate you know piece of time that's required on top of you know what our support staff is already doing so those are just some thoughts that pop up in my mind we have a telecommunications department which is um infrastructure you know phones and and communication lines and things like that and a gentleman named joe tulack runs that and joe has joe's really good and i agree with you on the all calls i think we have to
025be more judicious about the way we use them they are effective but they're only effective if we use them wisely and not overdo it and we need to keep the messages short and as far as phone numbers everyone is asked to submit one main number that they want calls to go to and joe has that one number for each family and that's and if something goes wrong and it bounces back or someone notifies us of the change then he changes it in his database but uh this year has been pretty smooth with that i haven't heard i'll check and see but i haven't heard that we've had too many issues with that um as far as as book till goes the uh the beacon journal has has made a a a stark change in the
026way that it looks at what you're talking about as of maybe three years ago three or four years ago and they have they they don't do that anymore i'll just say that and if you see that they do let me know keep in mind journalists do what they do and we can make suggestions and they still do what they do and i've i've been doing this for a while now and i'm pretty good at talking to reporters about you know maybe we'd like to see this or we'd like to see that or we'd appreciate it if you didn't do this but still they they're going to do what they're going to do and i give the beacon journal credit for taking a really more focused look at that pattern and and you know being more
027mindful of it i will also say that i don't know if you notice this but about what's the date almost exactly eight years ago which is when i started working here the uh west side leader began covering the near west side of akron because i'd had a conversation with somebody there saying the west side is is the west side it's all west akron west akron isn't just northwest akron and fairlawn and they said you're right and so they've covered quite a few stories at schumacher and krause rankin you know back in the day they they've they covered uh book doll you know a lot of good stories um it's obviously been more of a challenge since we've been out of the buildings but they're very open to covering stories there and i think that's been
028i think that's been really good it's been good for that paper and it's been good for us as well um what was the second you mentioned the second thing it just flew out of my brain you mentioned book tool and you mentioned all calls and what was in between dianna what was their family phone numbers what's that family phone numbers no no i mentioned that with joe tulac there was something in the middle wow um yeah i said the multiple numbers the all call um and the news i think that was the three the news outlets and the journalism yeah i don't know if i answered all those or not but but you know i i do think though with the and i'm sorry about the all call thing with your phone number oh i
029know what i was going to say it was wonderful we had a great show i just i don't know what i thought with 20 000 kids in the district you know yeah well we now well we also now can email every family and they have actually um in their infinite wisdom given me some control over that somebody took a big chance on giving me the the button for that for the nuclear codes on that one but but i'm you know there are things that we need to get directly to our families in a lot of different ways and an email believe it or not it goes to 20 336 email addresses and a lot of folks respond respond to those messages so it's a combination of all these different things it might and our strategy
030has to be that we don't use everything all the time unless it's a dire emergency then we will but we have to be strategic about when do we use the email when do we do an all call you know when do we we don't always use twitter you know facebook is much more valuable to us for most of our stuff than twitter is but twitter is really good for certain things and so it's it's not even just about what you put out it's how you do it what time you do it where it goes yeah i definitely appreciate um everything that you share so um i'm gonna ask one more question then we're gonna move on to the next which is around community engagement and how do we after we send the message how are
031we connecting families to the resources and things that uh the message uh actually is directing them to go to or to utilize so um my last question um has to do with non-traditional um routes of getting our news out there so for example the devil strip is a growing readership here in the akron area in the reporter newspaper which is uh the black press here specifically i know that they shared that they don't they don't get anything from akron public schools but would like to so i'm wondering how do we utilize those entities as well well um the devil strip isn't isn't the publication that's going to give you even five stories a year probably you know you might get two big stories in the devil's trip and we we communicate with them we communicate
032with the acronists you know we do um uh they do more in-depth reporting so when we have stories that go deeper uh sort of like npr does but even more so than npr uh we use those those sources um but again it has to fit their hey marcus i jump in yeah um so yeah to that question i just want to just want to say that that devil strip audience you know since 1955 akron public schools has owned a radio station and um you know we run it differently over these last 15 years um but you're reaching that audience we run 2500 spots a year that mark gives us currently we have nine in rotation those are on just about every other hour on our radio station so know that and we reach an audience
033of tax paying adults that that work that are engaged in the community um that are kind of hard to reach that is through our audience so we do cover that devil strip um i don't know that that that medium i believe the other thing mark said that i i um i think he used the wrong word he calls it free media i think mark's done a great job of putting everything out there and as somebody who used to work in television like mark um it's earned media mark you you've put it all out there and i think that they find the stories easy to do you tee them up for them and um we can always do a better job but i don't think it's free media i think it's earned and in my 20
034years in the district 20 plus years honestly the stories that they're running right now to me are better than i've ever seen in my two decades um with the district and um i just wanted to wrap up and say you know when i started you know we had a problem of we had an image problem 20 years ago a much more significant image problem that we've ever had over these last 10 years and we launched a campaign called your successes our success and we keyed on graduates that have done great things and we did billboard and print and media and it was a good campaign but in that time i interviewed so many people about this district i mean hundreds and hundreds of people just getting them to give us that little sound bite and
035it's just interesting because i was looking back on my notes and i interviewed 677 teachers or 677 parents and of them 75 plus said the reason they send their kids to akron public schools and i would bet 100 bucks right now that it hasn't changed is the teachers that the teachers are the single greatest asset we have in this district and i would venture to say that you know those stories mark of telling the stories about great teachers and about how dedicated they are and how experienced um is one that's really important to tell um and then the last thing i'll say is you know gilby came around because we were losing students for the first time in the district's history at the elementary level you guys know that you know making the choice to
036send your your youngster to an elementary akron public schools is one thing akron public school the middle school is where things start to you know drop off and they have a lot more choices and high school obviously is magnified from that but gilby came to be as a marketing tool to reach those youngsters and their parents so just before we move forward i just thought it was important to look backward and give mark a little pat on the back because and ryan for that matter ryan read the house um you know we had six in that department when i started six plus in that department and there's not six people in that department right now so that's all i'll say and i'll leave it open to the floor thanks tommy i you know i would
037i would also mention um you mentioned the reporter and we do we've done a lot of advertising in fact the reporter is about the only publication left that we've done advertising in we've uh reduced that this year just because of covid and we haven't had the same kinds of programs to to really promote in the same way but um and generally when i have sent things to them it doesn't it generally does not get coverage in the in the traditional way where a reporter calls and asks questions um and i've i've been a little bit um it's a little bit disconcerting and i'll have a talk with bill over there about it but um i'm i'm pretty sure he's on my media list because i've got a long media list and i'll go back and
038check it but i can't uh that's that that sort of surprises me um thank you very much uh curler uh the next item is uh yours and really trying to see what what do you see as the challenges to uh once the messages are sent out what's the challenges in getting our families and community members connected to those resources yeah so um i'm just gonna reference the the i think it's three bullets under engagement where the family and caregiver connections are listed we talk a lot and um joanne and mark and i is it every friday joanne we meet and have a conversation um related to internal external communications and we talk a lot about where families get their information um parents and caregivers and um we know that most of our families and caregivers
039are either going to get their information i know mrs audrey knows this from a trusted caregiver or uh a neighbor a friend or the school right and so how do we um best equip our schools to share both district information and school information so that's one of the challenges and and and opportunity i would say that exists as well and one of the reasons why we're looking at the facebook redesign and how that gets used at both the district and the building level um because we know that people are first going to go to their school right and to their teachers and to their other family friends and then the other thing i thought of as i was listening to you all converse about communication is how can we strategically use our family liaisons to
040be those message ambassadors and so family liaisons are uh typically neighborhood residents right or or current or former parents but they have this amazing um community capital right this relationship capital with families and how well are we at really equipping them to be message ambassadors so i think that's one of the challenges and opportunities that we have is to really be more than we have and i think we do this because mark provides us with collateral material and information to share but really being strategic about what they share when they're in conversation with families because we're really trying to get at who is going to miss whatever happens on tv who's not going to get it on radio and who's not going to read it on the newspaper or pick up the all call right
041we need to ensure that we are strategic about how we use folks who have those community connections how we work with them and then um the other bullet is the engage and form and build support with the community for the passage and ongoing support of operating levees um you know we talked a lot again one of the challenges is how do we deploy our human capital in ways that take them into the community to speak about our schools about our good work when there is a delay right um and so we have this incredible machine that we gear up for but it also presents itself as an opportunity to utilize our central office teams our teacher teams as sort of these ambassadors of district messages at the neighborhood level and that could mean those board
042meetings it can mean those community events and i know we do a lot of that right but um how can we maximize this opportunity of when we do that what are we sharing um and how do we do that when it is most important around kindergarten registration or you know graduation dates or um whatever might be happening that would require folks to know more about open enrollment you know and so um rather than relying solely on our traditional methods how do we better use our um human capital our staff in buildings in communities so that we're reaching folks and i think you said it dr akbar where they are um because some folks are still only going to get their information from a friend or a trusted source or a teacher or a principal um
043and we want to be sure that we all have a way of ensuring that people are equipped to support that work thank you very much uh miss autry yeah and just kind of piggybacking um on what carla was was talking about in terms of the family liaisons i mean that is such an important role because we have such a big district those liaisons are going to be better able to identify the specific cultural differences at each building so because what works at one school is not necessarily going to work you know at another school um and then just throwing in as far as you know you talk about central office teams teacher teams you know i'm going to go ahead and say where we can really probably have some growth is engaging our coaches and
044our advisors on extracurriculars because we see how passionate our community is around sports and these coaches i mean have captive audiences i mean these families they're going to do whatever the coach says yeah and so it comes with a lot of responsibility if you're a head coach then i feel like you should be a part of the team that helped get district messages out yo and i know me and carla you know that pta survey you guys came out to a football game and booked those 500 people there it died at the pta they were at the game i mean that's an example of you know but that night might not necessarily be the same situation at a different school so those family liaisons and our coaching staffs and our you know advisors of extracurricular
045activities who have those large groups of students banned you know things of that nature i think valuable uh on getting these district messages out they have captive audiences yeah i i really like that that is i mean we say all the time that our liaisons you know they're not our academic specialists they're they're not our curriculum specialists or discipline but they are outreach specialists right they know who to speak to who to go to how to get information in the hands of their audience yeah carl i know that you i'm you and i've talked about this quite a few times one of the issues that we have struggled with is that uh and as diana said this is a big district and we have you know 40 to 50 45 50 buildings and 21 000
046students and we each school has a has a sense of its own identity kids and families identify with their school more than they do the district i think the schools themselves are that way too they don't always think about the school district so when we have you know news or something for them to put out to their families um you know we created websites for every school so they could use those to get to their families they haven't really been utilized used i'm sorry the way that they should be and that's why we're sort of moving into the more of into the facebook realm because i think it's it's more like a living breathing uh information source where people can respond quickly if they so desire we're going to use carla had an idea of
047using the cluster captains that we have for each cluster of schools via hubspot to start to help with messaging for the individual schools themselves which i think will be good but i think there has to be a mix of an identity of the schools where they keep their identity of who they are but they also have a realization that the school district itself is important too and that's it's unlike it's unlike a lot of other models that you could think of i tried to think of something similar like a bank right there's a big bank downtown and then it has a lot of little branches out about well that's easier i mean the bank president says everybody do it this way and they all do it this way every bank looks the same they're all
048the same colors but each school has its own personality and and we try really hard too through the earned media thanks tommy to to showcase the different schools the different kinds of students they have you know akron early college has a sort of a totally different profile than robinson elementary than ellet than you know hatton they're all they're all different and when people see stories about our kids i get responses from people that they're shocked that wow i can't believe that somebody that talented or that smart you know goes to that school and we we have so we want to we try to help the schools promote themselves individually as the district but the schools themselves don't necessarily it doesn't go both ways and that's something i've been working on and you know have not
049been terribly successful at remedying that one [Music] i would say one more challenge um is definitely and we sort of we ponder over this uh the misinformation too uh even with all that we do and all that goes out and communication efforts and conversations i could go to a meeting and someone would say whatever happened to our career education you know and it just drives you a little crazy because you think well how did we miss whatever this population might be in ensuring that they too know that right um so there are still those challenges with just just managing what people will take and run with um well let me let me let me say this as an apples to apples example if we put out a story about something at mason school or something
050at you know north high school it goes out in the same way as the message from the i promise school people are seeing that message people are seeing the i promise message it isn't that we're not using the right vehicles and all the proper evidence to reach all the people because whenever something goes out whenever i put something out for my promise whenever they put their own out um the foundation is a whole nother matter because they have their whole their own base of people but in terms of our people and our followers and our community that the issue isn't that we're not hitting all the right places i mean a lot of times you know people the tail sort of wagon the dog on on communications and you think we're doing we're doing pretty
051much everything we can do and maybe some things that we could we maybe could do more of or spend more money on some other things but but just because people aren't getting it or listening doesn't necessarily mean we're we're not doing something right and and lebron is a great example that stuff that that the number of hits that we see on facebook when there's a lebron story and then underneath it there's something about aps finances sorry ryan but i mean you know or or something like that it's it's totally different and it's at the same time on the same medium and the same audience and so so don't automatically just think that carla you know that people aren't hearing your message you know or they're not paying attention i i i think that sometimes they
052do sometimes they don't but you know you've done a great job at networking that you're the old-fashioned way one person at a time people you know meeting with families and kids and setting up the you know all the different activities you do for families it's unbelievable that all works it isn't terribly sexy in the world of communication but it really it really does work uh i mean i wish we could do what lebron does i wish we could be that and every time we put something out i got 93 000 views on facebook but unless it's a school closing because of snow where we'll get 40 000 which is pretty good we don't we we're not going to approach lebron's numbers just but i hope that makes sense did you just sideline call me old
053did i say that i think your sideline called me out no i don't think i did that because i'm older than you are so i would never do that thank you very much one of the things um that i think i'm gathering from this and i know joanne and diana both have um their hands up but i also want to say after that we're going to go to our conclusion um but i want to connect it to the ad hoc committee and the the advanced aps one of the things that we want to do based on what i'm hearing is uh maybe figure out between someone from your teams as well as some members of the community around what are some other ways we could um you know utilize uh platforms or um even suggestions
054that will help get at some of those challenges that um you mentioned um getting to um families and messages so that they don't just you know the the spreadsheets messages don't get lost um as much as the you know i promise messages get amplified so i want to figure out how do we amplify them and then the other thing is um um how we can work together with the community to either build a tool or utilize current tools uh which would be more preferable that might be out there uh to uh enhance um what you're doing if there's gaps so uh maybe we can do a survey or focus some focus groups to identify what are some of the gaps and what's out there that we're not thinking about you know you have you know
055snapchat and tick-tock for some of the younger people but are there things that the parents are using outside of facebook that we just aren't thinking about um or haven't utilized and i don't know what that is there may not be anything but there you know i think it's worth uh trying to connect uh some of the challenges and opportunities that you see with what parents and families and even community members because we're also communicating to individuals who may not have kids in our district yet or at one point had kids in our district and still have children that could come back to the district and so our communications really is going to all of those audiences um and figuring out how do we um close some of those gaps so i think the board wants
056to work with um all of you uh in order to help figure out how we work with our community to do that so um joanne i'm sorry i wanted to just connect that back to why we were here thank you um i just as i was listening to carla and mark i wanted to add one other challenge that i see is that keeping that branding of aps so a lot of times schools are out there showcasing this amazing stuff and you watch it and you have no idea if it's in akron public school so they you lose that that's us that's our kids that's we're doing that stuff um and i and i also think that along that same line sometimes there's amazing stuff and it's the way they put it out there so blurry
057and dark or it doesn't um it's not inviting to the watcher so even though it's great things it doesn't always look as enticing and i know that's part of the marketing piece too but i know that you know when you keep something well branded like college and career academies there's no doubt the college and career academies are part of akron public schools right because that's that's what they use as part of their message they're tied to us and i think that you know sometimes that doesn't happen across all of our buildings with all these amazing things that are happening um and i know dr akbar you said something about amplifying that and i really think one way to amplify that is to make sure that that that it all looks like it's akron public schools
058that was my that was my only comment thank you very much i appreciate that uh miss audrey yes thank you um i was just thinking about a comment that carla had about misinformation and i do find it amazing that i continue i still have people who don't know what new tech is and we're 10 years into that and i still have people who say you guys should bring back career and so i say all of that to say sometimes again the individual building cultures are affecting our communication because whereas the district might be pushing college and career academy and i'm using booklet as an example we're still talking about new tech we're still talking about okay we need a new principal so those are our conversations we're not at the college and career academy level
059necessarily that's not maybe the forefront of our conversations because hey our issues right now we need a principal or what's new tech so and then when i think about the fast pace of our district i mean things move fast and sometimes information trickles down and it's months old but it might be brand new in certain communities because once again we were dealing with xyz while abc is being introduced this whole new initiative and we're like you know what's what should we be focusing on so that's that's a challenge for us i think i just wanted to mention that we moved pretty fast we do and i i think that one of the one of the areas that is is a challenge uh in terms of because look you have to have human beings to do
060this this is i think people think that communications just magically happens with computers and you know you have to have people that make decisions good editorial decisions um you know we use uh you know people from the outside you know that help make us look good with graphics and really good collateral pieces and if we do billboards graphic arts and that all of that is really good and it looks professional and we get wonderful comments on that work what we do internally is more that the more day-to-day ground level kind of work and it requires leadership from each school building for this to work it doesn't and if i could think of a good analogy i would i don't have one right now but when we have something for a school that we think would
061be a really good thing for them to to get out to the public um sometimes it just kind of falls on the floor it doesn't it doesn't get out and i think that that's because the principles are really busy and i don't think that this is necessarily a priority for everybody um you know and i i get that i understand how people only feel that way but i think that we need to have and this is why we hope facebook is going to help because i think people go home at night everybody knows how to use facebook for the most part and they can post things and they can do it from their phone from their computer it's way easier than the website and i'm really i'm kind of pinning a lot of hopes on
062this development with hubspot to help us sort of take over some of that and and get the principles maybe to do some of this work or to have somebody in their on their staff who can oversee a lot of that work and it's not quite as intimidating as the website might have been yeah and um another thing that we are um rich with is we're rich with resources nearby so for example with the colleges and universities you have stark state um university akron kent state with their pr marketing and these you know visual communication programs and they all need internships you know how do we utilize uh that to support what we're doing because to be honest with you uh one of the things that in in my daily work i i you know we're
063doing diversity work and part of that has to do with communication and strategy and including people who may not um have the time to do or feel like they may not have the time to invest in the work that needs to be done because it's very time consuming this also is time consuming but it needs to happen as you said mark but is there a way to uh utilize some of those talents and resources to work with each school um to put some of those messages out because if we're trying to add more things to the principal's plate uh that's that's probably why uh some of the things get you know um kind of put on the back burner and they get put out three weeks after it happens and i'm not saying that the
064definite case but there's a potential for that because there's so much going on and as we look at returning back to school using our principles um to be able to do some of that message um sharing it's probably going to be virtually impossible um and so i just want to be sensitive to all of that everything that you said mark and joanne and tommy and carla and what you all have going on and saying okay so as a you know group this group here um and maybe some other entities in the community can we bring uh people together to come up with a mechanism that utilizes additional resources to fill those gaps um in a way that uh will be more effective well and i don't i want to just say for the record i
065don't want people to think that i'm telling principals to do more work i'm saying that there there would be somebody within the infrastructure of a school there may be somebody an english teacher i i don't know a support staff person who loves to use facebook that that we could have do it i it doesn't certainly i would not expect principals to do that but i think what we need is that support from first and foremost from each building before we even think about doing anything else they have to buy into this that this is something that's important there are schools that i never hear from i mean our schools that i never hear from we have certain ones that are wonderful the contact of principles are you know they say hey here's a good story
066idea i have a teacher doing this i have these three kids that did that we took a video could you use it could you and we get it out sometimes we get their videos on cleveland tv stations we have a whole series of black history videos that are going to run on channel 5 next week and we did a bunch for martin luther king day on channel five as well we've we've really done well with that but there are schools that i i can tell you right now i just i don't ever hear from and that's pretty amazing that's amazing because everybody knows that if you have a story idea whatever send it to me we'll try to formulate it into something get people together make it work that it would be helpful which is
067one of the reasons why we excuse me dr akbar one of the reasons why we really wanted to provide some some additional support through our cluster team people um who are assigned to buildings right during specific times of the year but what would it take to make a call right or a visit to to a building to say hey i'm just here for 15 minutes to hear about some things you're doing right and to help you get it on our new facebook presence you know that that's the kind of thing that might need to happen and it may be that the principal says i've charged this person right to do this for our building so they're gonna expect you every month and they're gonna have something ready yeah yeah perfect carla exactly um just maybe
068looking at how to set that system up will be great uh so we're running out of time the last thing i wanted to ask is uh as we think about um what we need to do i think we need to identify um now we've talked about some of the great things that we're doing and then also some of the challenges and potential gaps uh maybe um see who else should be at the table um to uh help us strategize on how to fill those gaps and uh to which gaps or gap or opportunities to focus on because we can't focus on everything and we can't slop everything but one of the things that mark uh started the conversation with was um the community our immigrant communities or community that have family members whose english is
069not their first language you know it'll be great if we could get some individuals who work more closely with that community involved in this conversation so that we can maybe uh feel some of those opportunities as well um and other communities that we feel like we can build build some of the areas so i'm thinking about the schools that um not you don't have to say them here but some of the schools that you mentioned you never hear from mark um because we have some schools who do a really good job of communicating what they do and there's others who don't and maybe part of it is um outside of this meeting trying to figure out what their challenges are in um getting those stories uh out there um and so those are the type
070of things i'm thinking about like uh some things we need to do in between meetings and then also who else needs to be a part of this as we move forward so that's something i'll say uh if you could think about um moving forward and then uh how often do you think we should meet is that a question you want us to answer right now yeah well i'm sorry the frequency yes yes all right yeah i wasn't sure it got so quiet i thought um but i don't i don't know i i that i don't know how to answer that one is how often we should meet i'm not sure anybody has any ideas is monthly too too much time between meetings i i don't think monthly is a is a bad idea i mean
071it's everybody has a lot of meetings with a lot going on and i'm not sure if if we add more for everybody if we just get less done i don't know i don't know and it may be that with um a few other uh voices to help with the work so i always think about our administrators in buildings right um who might need to be here because they ultimately own some of this work as well and it may be helpful to hear some of their thoughts about how i think lloyd should be here absolutely yeah she would be if you want to if you want one person that can speak for a really huge group it would be it would be dr nguyen she she would be uh helpful and she does the work i
072mean she's really in there getting it done on all these translations and she understands the cultural issues the language barriers and and all of that i will say that our our email when we email to our families at home it translates everything uh into into all of our languages which is pretty cool so that's those messages get through that's pretty awesome yeah and our website does too so when they go to the website they can translate to their language yeah that's another helpful piece uh definitely okay so i think what we'll do is we'll at least maybe i'm sorry joanne it was i was just gonna say would it be appropriate to have a principal representation so a lot of what we were talking about or how principles can maybe not them specifically but how
073does it work to get that messaging out in the structure of a school community or a school building and maybe it would be somebody who is you know who i don't know if it would be somebody who is doing um you know well mark sending you the information or maybe it's somebody who is not that can maybe shed some light on what why they aren't or what the issues are um for sure mary and mark mary kelly and mark black who can tell us you know what the structure is and what might be possible i don't know because if only one principle comes we can't really have them speak for everybody but mary and mark might and then they might then they're able to go to the principles and have that conversation so that might
074be that might work yeah and what we're looking for is perspective right so not that you'll speak for everyone but just perspective yep um and i think that that would be good i agree okay well um i think we'll um possibly uh we'll try to have a meeting um again in march and um look forward to uh maybe putting something together um for the committee to think about around who else needs to be at the table so we can get those invitations to them and then also out of everything we talked about what are you what do you think the top two or three uh opportunities are that we can work on um because one of the things we want to do is um have something tangible done by the start of the next academic
075year to hopefully start a process of enhanced communications with some of the groups that we're talking about so this isn't a long-standing thing but what are some of the things some of the short-term wins we can that we can as a board help uh the district uh get off uh into the start again our goal is to help with the um advanced aps around our engagement area and um uh communicating with all of our stakeholders and our caregivers and all of that so just wanted to put that out there but that's the goal of our work is to uh show our commitment to the investment of that of that work and helping with at least one um opportunity um as a board to to get that off the ground all right and the next meeting
076uh miss autry will be leading so i just wanted to put that out there um and so we'll be hearing from miss autry on some of that as well moving forward all right well i think that's all unless anyone has anything else they want to share thank you very much tommy joanne mark and carla and ryan rittenhouse and ryan pendleton for joining us today thank you and we will see everyone at the next meeting thank you thank you bye you