The Kingston City School District (KCSD) made significant progress in 2023 in achieving its multi-year goal of enacting a communications plan that keeps all of its constituents in the loop on a district and school level.
During a presentation before the Board of Education last month, members of the Ulster BOCES and KCSD communication teams discussed how the district’s communications have already evolved, and what lies ahead, including a totally revamped website.
Holly Brooker, Ulster BOCES’ director of community relations, explained that the genesis of the communication changes began in the summer of 2022, explaining that a thorough inventory of existing communications was performed, along with a third-party districtwide performance evaluation survey. In addition, ten focus groups with various stakeholders were conducted, as were one-on-one conversations with district administrators, members of the KCSD communication team and school board trustees.
“We used that research and we built a focused overall communications goal centered around building trust and supporting the district’s mission,” Brooker said. “And with that goal, we identified six strategies and then multiple tactics underneath those strategies.”
The strategies include evolving from a reactive to a proactive communication approach, leverage communication assets, prioritize and enhance staff communication, standardize and strengthen building-level communications with families, improve communication and engagement with non-English speaking families and maximize community partnerships.
The first strategy remains a work in progress, with the development and deployment of key messages, professional development on effective communication for district and school leaders, a centralized fillable calendar and a KCSD “brand guide” to establish consistent messaging still in play.
The second strategy has been mostly completed, save for the ongoing efforts to schedule regular face-to-face opportunities for staff, families and community members to meet with district superintendent Paul Padalino. Other areas that have successfully been completed include standardizing the start time of the public portion of board of education meetings, resurrecting the Kingston Parent Council and training communications staff, including crisis communications.
A key component of the second strategy also includes a new KCSD website, due to launch in August 2024. Alyssa DeFelice, senior communications specialist at Ulster BOCES discussed the changes in store upon its launch, including a platform change from Blackboard to finalsite.
“Finalsite works with over 8,000 school districts worldwide, a lot here in New York and even some here in Ulster County,” said DeFelice, adding that the website will be built to meet needs specific to the KCSD.
“Some key features that I wanted to highlight are that it is mobile friendly,” she said. “So no matter what device you’re viewing it on, it’ll be the same as if you’re viewing it on a desktop.”
The website will also operate with a translation tool called Weglot, allowing non-English speakers an equitable experience, which ties it into the fifth strategy. While the new website won’t launch until the summer, other areas have already been completed, including establishing a structure for bilingual family workers to provide ongoing input to the communications department, determining the requirements for what gets translated, providing resources for simultaneous distribution and automating email and text messaging to Spanish-speaking families.
The fourth strategy, standardizing and strengthening building-level communications with families, includes a districtwide messaging approval process and an emergency messaging protocol established in January 2023.
The presentation included communication highlights for the current school year, with everything from capital projects to athletic fields projects, safety and security to a pictorial guide to registration already underway. Kristine Conte, a community relations specialist with Ulster BOCES and liaison with the KCSD, discussed details on communications efforts around the district’s community eligibility program for free school meals, which included printing and distributing flyers across the community, social media shares, direct parent contact and information posted to the district website.
“The community eligibility program is great, but we needed to let people know that you can take advantage of it, and that it wasn’t for a select group of people,” Conte said. “We got some information from the cafeteria staff that said, in 2022, 10,448 students took advantage of the free program; in 2023, it was 12,126. So it was 2,000 more people that took advantage of the free program. I’d like to think that our communications helped get that information out.”
Brendan Bartow, a digital communications specialist with Ulster BOCES focused on social media and how the district has seen its engagement rise on both Facebook and YouTube. On the former, reach, interaction and visits increased tremendously between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years.
Reach is a measure of how many people see content posted by the district or see the page, and is a unique number.
“If someone went to our page 20 times, it would only count as one,” Bartow said.
That number grew from 234,505 to 347,183 between the two school years, an increase of 48.3 percent.
Interactions on Facebook covers everything from likes to shares to comments, and that too has increased, rising by 94.2 percent from 37,429 in 2021-22 to 72,693 in 2022-23.
“I think a big attribution to that is just what we’re posting,” Bartow said. “So we’re taking pictures of kids engaging in school, kids engaging in class, what’s going on, their faces, stuff that parents would like to see of their students in class.”
Engagement is the final Facebook-related figure shared in the presentation and it is essentially a count of the number of page visits and is not unique to users. That number has risen from 68,477 in 2021-22 to 313,164 in 2022-23, an increase of 358.1 percent.
YouTube has also been an increasingly successful way of communicating with the community, with 28.1 thousand views (26 percent increase), three thousand hours of watch time (35 percent increase) and 302 subscribers (12 percent increase).
“I think a lot of the organic videos that we’re putting out are really boosting that,” Bartow said. “The athletic field updates, the (facilities) proposition stuff, everything that is really helping out our district that’s going up there, people are really engaging and looking at it.”
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