School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 20 | JANUARY 8, 2004

Are You Maximizing the Return-on-Investment of Your Accountability Reports?

In December, I spent two days with superintendents and school board members at their annual CSBA conference in San Diego. I've returned with a bushel basket of smart, practical ways that leading districts have put their annual accountability reports to work. In these hard financial times, every dollar and every person has to work both harder and smarter. Shouldn't your accountability reports also do the same?

Here are two accounts of education leaders who expect their accountability reports to do more than satisfy state and federal law. Compliance alone is not enough. Their stories are evidence of innovation, of expecting investments in SARCs to pay off in new enrollments and voter support.

(Upcoming issues of SARC Bites will bring more success stories and the hard numbers that reveal why maximizing returns, not minimizing costs, can be your path to success, too.)

NEW ENROLLMENTS: WISEBURN ESD

Supt. Don Brann of little Wiseburn ESD in the backyard of Los Angeles International Airport has been busy recruiting new students to his district. With SARCs in hand, he has called on the neighboring companies whose employees work in the aviation industry. When their children are ready for kindergarten, they can attend schools in any one of four nearby districts — Inglewood, LA Unified, El Segundo, or Wiseburn — or 77 other districts in the county if their parents are commuters — or opt for private schools. Supt. Brann makes sure that the human resource directors of the major employers know that Wiseburn's doors are open, and that their schools shine.

His SARCs convey the key facts in a clear, brief format. These printed summary SARCs are nicely designed by an architectural firm that is already under contract for school modernization plans. Supt. Brann leaves dozens of copies with each local firms HR manager. His message is welcoming. Wiseburn wants you to know their facts and to visit their schools. Wiseburn expects its parents to know how its schools are doing. The result: the addition of 191 new students over one year: an 11 percent gain.

This active recruiting effort using SARCs as a promotion tool, plus his interdistrict transfer agreements with neighboring districts whose schools are crowded, have brought his district an additional $1,146,000 (at about $6,000 per student). It has enabled Wiseburn to weather the storm. Over the past several years, the gain has amounted to over 500 students. So this is no mere hiccup.

See what Wiseburns SARCs look like. The district's architectural firm created the documents in printed form, and they reflect the craftsmanship of professional designers (even though they load slowly in the online environment).

You'll note that they are designed to be read. They are shorter than most. And they read well. By investing in design and writing, and not relying on the CDE's technical data presentation known as the template, Supt. Brann has created a recruiting tool that works.

NEW MOVERS AND VOTER SUPPORT: SAN MARCOS USD

The fastest growing district in San Diego County, San Marcos USD, has a lot of new movers to reach. The prospective homebuyers who tour model tract homes every weekend are not only shopping homes. They are shopping schools. One of Asst. Supt. Susan Lloyd's dozen jobs is to make sure these homebuyers believe that San Marcos USD is a good bet.

The district enjoys a strong reputation. But Susan Lloyd and her boss, Supt Larry Maw, are too wise to rely on the district's reputation alone. They invest in school specific accountability reports that enable homebuyers, as well as resident parents, to rely upon each schools implicit promises of a sound education. The district's great reputation is a fine starting point. But schools (not the district) are where their kids sit down and learn. And schools' prior results are the best evidence of future success.

Every homebuilder and every realty firm in this prosperous pocket of northern San Diego County have San Marcoss SARCs in hand. They are printed in ample quantities in summary format, in a two-color (blue and black) treatment that fits on two sides of an 8.5 x 14 page. Of course, they also reside online on the district's website, both in summary and full-length form. But by funding the printing of the summary reports at about 14 cents per copy, San Marcos USD is able to reach far more parents far more easily.

Supt. Maw last went to the voters for a bond measure in 1996. And school board elections are an annual event. With only one in four households having children of school age present in the household, Supt. Maw and Asst. Supt. Lloyd knew the district needed to tell its schools' stories in order to keep the community's non-parent voters engaged. In order to stimulate voter turnout, they aimed to keep education issues on their citizens minds. Rather than rely on news stories alone, they decided to use school accountability reports to keep voters informed of key facts, school by school: accomplishments, needed improvements, resources, teachers, students and test scores. They turned to the local newspaper publisher, who agreed to carry SARCs as an insert in the paper close to election time.

Some candidates for school board raised a challenge, that the SARCs were effectively political campaign material on behalf of the incumbent school board members. But because of the neutral tone of the SARCs, they were not considered partisan campaigning, and the challenge was denied. The timely distribution of these relevant school facts worked.

San Marcos commissioned School Wise Press to create summary and full-length accountability reports for its 13 schools. (School Wise Press is also the publisher of this newsletter.) The summary reports were the ones that were printed and distributed to the community and staff. We created a Spanish language version as well. See a sample summary SARC in English (PDF document).

And the full-length SARC was used with more interested readers: newspaper reporters, business partners, realtors and their clients, community and civic organizations. See a sample full-length SARC (PDF document).

RESOURCES

You can find additional information on the Wiseburn district web site and the San Marcos district web site.

Additional resources will be emailed to subscribers on this return-on-investment study of accountability reports in action.