Authentic Community Engagement Essential for Today's Schools

While it has always been true that authentic community engagement is essential for school districts, it has arguably never been truer than it is today. Declining enrollment across the country, teacher shortages in many areas of the country, a bifurcated public, uncertainty at the Federal level, and the increasingly complex learning needs of our children are just some of the contemporary challenges facing schools.

Having come off of two recent comprehensive and successful community engagement efforts in previous districts, resulting in the successful passage of $168.5 and $179.6M referenda, I was asked to facilitate a roundtable discussion this past fall at the RTM Conference in Baltimore. I titled the presentation Comprehensive Community Engagement Strategies to Support Long-Range Planning and Systematic Decision-Making.

My current district, Northport-East Northport on Long Island, has partnered with the St. Louis firm Discovery Works for this purpose. Northport-East Northport has found itself in a place not uncommon to school districts across the country. It developed a Strategic Plan that was thoughtfully crafted, but not implemented or monitored with fidelity. Though there were some good things that came out of the current plan, developed in 2017, it has not been updated and never drove the work of the district to any large degree. Thus, the primary goal of the current process is to ensure that there is a viable plan for the district that the community understands, supports, and is reflective of its values moving forward.

Northport-East Northport has experienced a 25.7% enrollment decline in the past 10 years from 5,583 students to a projected 4,146 next year. The district is rich with opportunities for students, but finds itself in a situation in which it will need to make difficult decisions involving programming that the community has come to expect. A settlement with the local power authority reduced its share of property taxes, increasing the burden on homeowners. In addition to declining enrollment and financial stress, aging facilities further complicate matters.

My presentation included a discussion of strategic planning and other characteristics of authentic community engagement. Among them, authentic community engagement should:

• be ongoing vs. issue specific
• ensure two-way dialogue
• include multiple data sources and reliable data
• provide the ability to shape the narrative with factual information.

The beauty of the Discovery Works process is that it is community engagement driven by the community. The key to the process is the selection of a Facilitating Team comprised of community members representative of the different perspectives and characteristics of a particular community. Too often parents think that they are the community, or teachers think that they are the community. In reality, districts need a much broader perspective of community. Districts much be intentional about creating an inclusive definition of community that goes beyond parents, students and staff to include business owners, retirees, youth organizations, municipalities, and the faith community.

The Facilitating Team works with the administration and consultants to develop the actual program of engagement. In an era in which it is a challenge to find quality people to run for the school Board, members of the Facilitating Team often feel such a strong sense of ownership in the district that at some point they run and are successfully elected to a seat on the Board.

The community engagement sessions include a presentation on various topics followed by table top activities that allow for participants to share their opinions, provide feedback, discuss potential options for next steps or ask additional questions. Though surveys are also a part of the process, often times traditional surveys ask for people's opinions on things that they don't completely understand. The sessions provide context for the issues. They are videotaped and can be viewed in real time or on the website at a later time. All of the information gathered at these sessions is shared with the entire community verbatim and in summary form. The community engagement sessions are not Town Hall meetings. In my opinion, Town Halls are the worst form of "community engagement" because, while they allow for people to share their opinions (or, more often than not, simply vent), the information cannot be validated in any meaningful way, and they rarely result in any actionable outcomes that can lead to legitimate solutions.

At the outset, the Facilitating Team brands the process so that communications are identifiable to the community. In an era in which people too often rely on social media for their information, an authentic community engagement process provides a means for the district to ensure that people have convenient access to legitimate, factual information.

One common trap for districts is that they often wait to reach out to the community until after there is a crisis of some type or another--overcrowding, safety issues, facilities that are in disrepair, financial concerns, etc. Though a district is not going to do a formal process like this annually, or even every five years, the key is to authentic community engagement is to be proactive and genuine. Failure to do so creates a perception that you only communicate with the community when you need something from them. Upon the conclusion of a formal process, there should be ongoing ways to involve the community and to formally report out regularly on the progress of anything that was determined as a result of the process.

At least as important as the points already discussed is that Boards of Education need valid and reliable information from multiple data points in order to make informed decisions. Without it, Boards can easily make faulty assumptions that the three emails that they received, the handful of people that speak during public comment, the social media crusaders, the opinion of their social circles, or the experiences of their kids, etc., represent the opinion of the entire "community." Boards deserve better. They often have to make tough decisions representing millions of taxpayer dollars. Sometimes these votes will upset segments of the community. During those times, they should at least be confident that they know where the community stands and that it has been heard.

The Facilitating Team for the Northport-East Northport Union Free School District recently held its first meeting to plan for this coming fall's community engagement program.