Issue #3 Communication

Problems

Trustee Communication: Our trustees typically gather information from the public and respond at a later date. This is true of board meetings, and also of the entire Sustainability process in 2010. Individual trustees are often great listeners, and get things done for parents and schools, but their input and consultation procedures make this harder.

Website Communication: The district website has lots of information, and has improved since 2010, but is also confusing to navigate and does little to celebrate student success.  Many links are dead ends, catchment maps have not worked for two years, and the design does not have the professional appearance that might be expected of a district with a $125 million budget. Many of the school sites have the same issues. Teachers report that the site controls are too difficult to use and as a result are no longer involved in website contributions. Our biggest high school (PGSS) has given up on the district-provided website system and has their own dynamic website embedded within the dysfunctional one.

Parents Communication: parents get conflicting information when they ask for reasons behind decisions and data about their schools. In 2010, parents were shown three conflicting lists of school capacities and projections, and were made to wait for freedom-of-information requests for information that should be publicly available.

Solutions

As a parent recently requested at a board meeting, the trustees should be willing to respond to questions and presentations from the public, either immediately after the input, or publicly (if appropriate) on the district website. Parents and others who give input are rarely offering private concerns, they are bravely representing the concerns of many, and those many wish to hear what the school board has to say, even if it is bad news. Some kind of regular interaction and input on plans is needed, not just “thanks, we’ll get back to you later.” Revising the official consultation process is a tall order but must be addressed if improvements are desired.


I'm not the only trustee candidate to suggest this (Don Sabo has clear ideas about this), but I think as many trustee meetings as possible should be public.  Keep personnel matters private, but almost everything else can be dealt with out in the open as a public institution. This should also extend to the so-called "senior learning team" that has set out some excellent topics for their consideration. See p. 5 of the District Plan for Student Success. There work will be so much more powerful if their discussions, at the developmental stage, are not confined to the board office but are open to others. They can't succeed if the people who have to live with their plans (like parents and teachers) have been excluded from the planning process. More about this in Issue #8.

Add interactive functions to the school district website, fix the dead ends, and remove content that is.  It has come along way, but we can learn from other districts that have attractive, functional, dynamic websites like Kamloops-Thompson, Gulf Islands, Columbia-Kootenay, etc. The access to reports, plans, organizational charts, info for parents and educators, etc. on these sites is excellent. Let teachers and students have access to websites again, so that school websites can easily reflect the character and spirit of each school.

The board office, as part of its planning cycle and ongoing attention to sustainability, should publish a yearly synopsis of school data, accomplishments, issues that were dealt with by the board, issues on the horizon (financial, educational, community issues). We should partner with the DPAC on this, as they have already filled the gap in recent years with the excellent resources and data on their website.