Editor's note: You can’t stop the presses, so you have to manage the message

The Model T and my Uncle Gerald each celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. I don’t know what Detroit is doing to mark the occasion, but back in western New York this spring we had a grand old party, in keeping with Uncle Gerald’s political affiliation. Prominent among the honors and mementos on display was a plaque from the New York State School Boards Association: “For 22 years of service on the Ellicottville Central School Board.”

Uncle Gerald was the president of that school board when I covered it as a newspaper stringer, paid by the column inch for stories on local events. I would study agendas, attend board meetings and take careful notes trying to make sense of the proceedings; afterward, Uncle Gerald would patiently set me straight about what had really happened and why it
was important.

Years later, after a bachelor’s degree in English launched me into an assortment of teaching stints and, ultimately, to California, I returned to journalism as a full-time newspaper reporter. I wished I had an Uncle Gerald on the school boards I covered here—first in the fast-growing foothills east of Sacramento, where they coped with exploding enrollments, then in a tourist town struggling to teach the children of Spanish-speaking resort workers. I also remember writing about teen fashions, anti-drug programs and a Harley-riding district superintendent; I didn’t have time at the party to talk to Uncle Gerald about her, or them, but I’m sure he would have had some strong opinions to offer.

Every school board could use an Uncle Gerald, and so could every journalist who covers schools. At many newspapers, the education beat goes to the least experienced reporter. It’s unfortunate and shortsighted, considering that surveys show many parents read the local paper mainly to find out what’s happening in their children’s schools.

But that makes it all the more important that school districts and county offices of education get their stories straight when it comes to dealing with the media—not just newspapers, but radio, TV and the unfiltered, increasingly common Internet blogs. (Not to mention YouTube. Did you see the YouTube video where a class mercilessly baited a teacher just to watch him blow his cool? Your kids probably did, and so did the news media in the community where that taunted teacher taught; they promptly descended on the school demanding to know what policies might have been violated, how the teacher would be disciplined, and so on.)

“There’s a strong belief among educators that the job of the media is to help get the good word out about schools,” Frank Kwan, director of Communications for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, told regular California Schools contributor Scott LaFee for his story, “Talking Points.” “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding,” Kwan warned. “Reporters don’t see themselves as cheerleaders for schools.”

“It’s not the media’s job to report good news,” confirmed Jim Esterbrooks, a public information specialist for the San Diego County Office of Education.

But there’s hope. As the subtitle for Scott’s article says: “Savvy message management helps you put your best foot forward, not in your mouth.” It’s easier said than done—but it can be done, and it has to be done. Scott’s article will help point the way.

Perhaps the hardest message to manage regarding public education in California is the convoluted system this state has for financing its schools. (Back in western New York, in contrast, the simple majority in a bond issue election championed by Uncle Gerald was sufficient to replace 15 one-room schoolhouses and one nineteenth-century building with a modern central school campus. True, it took six years and the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the matter, but that’s another story—for now, suffice it to say that Uncle Gerald prevailed. You don’t mess with the Taylors.)

Ted Mitchell, chair of the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence and now the president of the California State Board of Education, understands the challenge that school board members here face in trying to explain their finances to their communities. Mitchell is honing his own public relations skills this summer in a series of public forums on the Governor’s Committee report, “Students First: Renewing Hope for America’s Future.”

“The system is too complex,” Mitchell says in “A Conversation with … Theodore R. Mitchell.” “Our finance system makes it very difficult for local school boards to deploy resources efficiently to meet the needs of their community. And so, in the face of this system that hobbles the very, very best professionals and community leaders, we think an underlying theme of the report is to move more decision making—about staffing, budgets, the structure of the school day and the school year, about the deployment of special professionals or special programs—into the hands of local school boards, and then to hold those community leaders accountable at the end for the results that they achieve through the decisions that they make.”

It’s debatable whether the solutions that Mitchell’s committee proposes will solve the problems that he identifies, let alone result in a truly fair and equitable funding system for public education. There’s no debate, though, that the problems are real.

“You can’t talk about fairness and education and finance for California in the same breath,” asserts Malcolm Sharp, president of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District school board. Like many school board members, Sharp can trace his involvement in the public schools back to his days volunteering with a local education foundation that stepped in to help bridge the gap between school needs and available resources, as California Schools staff writer Marsha Boutelle reports in “Foundation Fundamentals.” “The overarching issue is that foundations have become more of a necessity given the craziness of K–12 finance in California,” Sharp told Marsha.

Launching a foundation “is a process, and sometimes it takes a while to get it right,” advises Susan Sweeney, executive director of the California Consortium of Education Foundations. CCEF represents 600 local education foundations in the state. In 2006, Sweeney says, those groups raised more than $130 million to benefit public schools.

Raising money for schools is one contribution that public-spirited community members can make toward children’s development. Raising food—or better, helping children to raise food themselves, in school gardens that are nutritional, educational and recreational—is another, as staff writer Carol Brydolf reports in “A Growing Trend."

“The children of California are indeed making education ‘come alive’ when they are learning in a living laboratory called a garden,” Delaine Eastin, who established the “Garden in Every School” initiative as state superintendent of public instruction in 1995, tells Carol.

“I believe very strongly in the power of gardens to transform students’ lives. When I left office in 2003, there were gardens at 3,000 schools and some wonderful research from UC Davis that showed gardens had a positive impact on student learning. We worked on curriculum frameworks showing how gardens and cooking from gardens could be used to teach the academic standards.”

Uncle Gerald could relate. The eldest brother of my family’s “greatest generation,” he can speak with authority about victory gardens, world wars, peace in our time and just about any other subject under the sun. He might be a little flummoxed by the finer (and coarser) points of California’s state budget process, but that’s where CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin’s father comes in.

“My Dad would have immediately thought of Rube Goldberg, who was famous for developing extraordinary contraptions with complicated mechanics that were designed to carry out such simple functions as turning on a light switch,” Scott helpfully explains of California’s budget process in “Rube Goldberg, the Rubicon, and the ‘May revise.’ ” (The state’s legislative process wouldn’t have been much of a challenge to Rube; the UC Berkeley engineering grad worked in San Francisco’s Water and Sewers Department before going on to win a Pulitzer Prize in cartooning.).

You don’t have to be an engineer to get through this issue—just pinch the corner of each page between your thumb and index finger, flip it over and repeat until something catches your eye, and thanks for reading!

Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is the managing editor of California Schools.