District 204 opens lines of communication

Indian Prairie District 204 officials say they’re pleased with the results of three new communication initiatives launched last year.

Ÿ About 8,600 people saw the school board at work through on-demand videos of meetings available at 204tv.org.

Ÿ The district has more than 500 followers on Twitter.

Ÿ “Inside 204,” the district’s internal newsletter for staff, receives 2,000 views within the first 24 hours of being posted each month.

Director of Communications Janet Buglio was pleased with the success of the initiatives.

“I think it is safe to say that 204tv.org has exceeded our wildest expectations for the popularity meter,” Buglio said. “We never could have picked that number, a number so large.”

Views peaked in March — before local elections and during the candidate forums. Meanwhile, the district reached its goal of 500 Twitter followers within a year and received a Golden Achievement Award for exemplary internal communications from the National School Public Relations Association, largely because of the new monthly staff newsletter.

This year, Buglio plans to tweak those initiatives to best meet the needs of district staff, students, parents and the public. “It takes some effort to maintain those initiatives and to make sure they are top notch and delivered in the right way,” she said. Also, there are plans to overhaul the district’s website, ipsd.org. Last year, the district site had about 2.9 million visitors, translating to about 10,000 visits per day during the school year.

Before making changes, online tools are being used to identify trends on use of the website. “We want to see what is of interest and what people are looking at,” Buglio said.

School board President Curt Bradshaw said he’d like to see the district do a better job explaining the rationale of changes and practices, particularly those that affect families. For instance, Bradshaw thinks if families better understand how much money is saved by the district through resident verification, they might more happily comply with the requirement. Or if they knew lunch prices hadn’t been increased in years and no longer fully covered the cost of meals, they would better understand a price increase. Getting information out on “those types of things win us a lot,” Bradshaw said.

Superintendent Kathy Birkett agreed and said it will be a job for everyone in the district to do more to explain the whys of decisions to the public.

There are many other ways the district communicates with staff and the public. They include posting agendas and supporting documents for meetings online for public viewing; mailing a “Report to the Community” explaining academic and financial information to all district residences; and sending out 204 e-News, stories that are communicated online and via email directly to 20,500 subscribers a little more than twice a week.

Last year, the district also made it easier for individual schools to post information on their websites, leading to more postings.