School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 29 | DECEMBER 17, 2004

Your SARCS May Be More Popular Than You Think

Your district's leadership is likely to include people whose views of SARC popularity range from the moderately hopeful to the outright cynical. But who has any factual evidence to support their opinion?

You can be the one to bring facts of SARC readership to your cabinet meetings. It is easy, it is cost-free, and the results may surprise you or your colleagues. But in any case, it will enable you as SARC liaison or accountability director to advance your leadership to fact-based decision-making.

Take heed of San Jose USD's success in creating a feedback loop which lets them know not only how frequently their schools' SARCs are accessed, but which schools' SARCs are in demand. Under the leadership of Asst. Supt. Bill Erlendson, and an intrepid tech team led by Liliane Patel, their method was simply to count how many readers requested access to their schools SARCs online, using web analysis tools that turned page accesses into countable events.

The good news for San Jose is that they enjoyed more than 17,000 page views in the prior 12 month period. Their web admin staff compiled these logs monthly with relative ease.

ROOTED IN COMMITMENT TO PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

In their case, this effort reflected a sincere interest in public engagement. This interest is now deeply rooted from the board level down to staff. Its an attitude that is born of necessity. Their public has a wide range of educational choices, including Catholic and independent schools, as well as many neighboring districts. San Jose USD's leadership wants to persuade its public to enroll their kids, and this leads them to embrace the need to market each and every school. What initially drove their interest in marketing was a court-supervised consent decree to desegregate their schools. The consent decree is now behind them, but what remains is that the district's leadership and staff understand that their success rests on a relationship of trust between them and the public they serve. As long as parents are free to choose where their children go to school, district leaders know they need to invest in building bridges of trust with their customers.

This led San Jose to invest in SARCs that work. School Wise Press provided these reports in prior years, printing summary reports that were mailed to parents. It was one way that leadership made sure that the public understood the key facts about their 51 schools, and that their schools' results are easy to find. The district also funds an annual climate survey, which samples a large proportion of each schools teacher corps, students and parents. This attitude check provides another vital feedback loop, alerting leadership to problems in the making, which often emerge early enough to be nipped in the bud. With an engaged and informed public, San Jose's leadership believes their chances of winning enrollment and running vital, parent-supported schools, are likely to be high.

SARCS GET READ BY THOUSANDS OF PARENTS

Relative to their enrollment of about 33,000, San Jose's SARCs were popular: about one SARC page viewed for every two students enrolled. While counting page views is not exactly the same as surveying parents, and while we must certainly allow that one parent or educator may be responsible for dozens of page accesses, we believe that San Jose's SARCs are darned popular.

Other elements of their success include a commitment in prior years to printing the summary form of the SARCs, and distributing them to parents Elementary school students carried them home in backpacks. But middle and high school students parents received their copies by mail. Those summary reports contained links to the full-length SARCs online, which fostered a habit among parents of relying upon online access. And SARCs are one of the few links available from their home page.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Run to your web admin team, and tell them to put counters on the web page which is your SARC table-of-contents. And insist that they also put counters on each of your schools SARCs. If they are a full-service department, ask them to provide you with monthly statistics for page views or unique site visits every month.

2. Bring those reports to your cabinet. Suggest that these logs be included in measures of parent involvement, right along with attendance at parent-teacher conferences, attendance at Back-to-School nights, and attendance at spring Open House events. Consider analyzing the differences in accesses among schools, and share that information back with principals.

3. Survey your site visitors. Parents and educators opinions may provide perspectives you are not privy to otherwise. Online survey tools are available from vendors like Zoomerang http://info.zoomerang.com/

4. Aim to improve parent use of your SARCs. If you can count your baseline pages accessed each month, you can also set goals to improve accesses per month for each school, if you wish. The strategies you use to improve SARC readership can include sending more frequent notes home, translating brief SARC snapshots into Spanish, and publishing a SARC snapshot in English, as well. If an improved design improves readership, you can show return-on-investment.

5. Set a goal to improve your district's return-on-investment in your accountability reporting program. In tough times like these, it is wise to demonstrate whether you're getting a sufficient bang for your scarce bucks. Dividing your total SARC costs by the number of pages accessed or by unique site visits in a year is a good place to start measuring the cost of informing your parents about your schools key vital signs.

6. Measure the cost of your current SARC program. Use this free cost-calculator from us at School Wise Press, to make sure that everyones time is accounted for.

FOR REFERENCE

San Jose's public engagement story is well-told in this five-minute Powerpoint presentation, which was delivered by their board at the California School Boards Association conference, 2003.

Parent-friendly, summary SARCs and Fact Sheets similar to those used by San Jose USD can be seen on the School Wise Press website.

Weblogs are offered by a variety of firms. Some are free. But your technology staff should be able to integrate this technology into your district's website with relative ease (if they haven't done so already). All you need to do is ask. Among those you can review are: