Category: Communications

Transparency and truth in communications

Key points:

Dear Superintendent,

Your job now requires a new level of transparency that you are reluctant to provide. This media crisis will burn for several more days if we sit silent. We are in a true leadership moment and I need you to listen to your communications expert. I can make your job easier and more successful.

Signed,

Your Communications Director

As superintendents come under more political fire and frequent negative news stories about their school districts circulate, it is easy to see where the instinct to not comment and just focus on the work might kick in. However, the path forward requires a new level of transparency and truth-telling in communications. In fact, the work requires you to get out in front so that your teachers and staff can focus on their work.

I recently spoke with a school district facing multiple PR crises. The superintendent was reluctant to address the issues publicly, preferring one-on-one meetings with parents over engaging with the media or holding town hall-style parent meetings. But when serious allegations of employee misconduct and the resulting community concerns arise, it’s crucial for superintendents to step forward and take control of the narrative.

While the details of ongoing human resources or police investigations cannot be discussed, it’s vital to inform the community about actions being taken to prevent future incidents, the safeguards being implemented, and your unwavering commitment to student and staff safety. All of that is far more reassuring than the media reporting, “The district was not available for comment,” “The district cannot comment due to an ongoing investigation,” or even worse, the dreaded, “The school district said it has no comment.”

Building trust with proactive communication

A district statement or email doesn’t carry the same weight as a media interview or an in-house video message sent directly to community members. True leadership means standing up and accepting the difficult interviews, answering the tough questions, and conveying with authentic emotion that these incidents are unacceptable. What a community needs to hear is the “why” behind a decision so that trust is built, even if that decision is to hold back on key information. A lack of public statement can be perceived as indifference or a leadership void, which can quickly threaten a superintendent’s career.

Superintendents should always engage with the media during true leadership moments, such as district-wide safety issues, school board meetings, or when the public needs reassurance. “Who Speaks For Your Brand?” looks at a survey of 1,600 school staff who resoundingly stated that the superintendent is the primary person responsible for promoting and defending a school district’s brand. A majority of the superintendents surveyed agreed as well. Promoting and defending the district’s brand includes the negative–but also the positive–opportunities like the first day of school, graduation, school and district grade releases, and district awards.

However, not every media request requires the superintendent’s direct involvement. If it doesn’t rise to the severity level worthy of the superintendent’s office, an interview with a department head or communications chief is a better option. The superintendent interview is reserved for the stories we decide require it, not just because a reporter asks for it. Reporters ask for you far more than your communications chief ever tells you.

It is essential to communicate directly and regularly with parents through video and email using your district’s mass communication tools. You control the message you want to deliver, and you don’t have to rely on the media getting it right. This is an amazing opportunity to humanize the office. Infuse your video scripts with more personality and emotion to connect on a personal level with your community. It is far harder to attack the person than the office. Proactive communications help build trust for when you need it later.

I have had superintendents tell me that they prefer to make their comments at school board meetings. School board meeting comments are often insufficient, as analytics often indicate low viewership for school board meeting live streams or recordings. In my experience, a message sent to parents through district alert channels far outperforms the YouTube views of school board meetings.

Humanizing the superintendent’s role

Superintendents should maintain a consistent communications presence via social media, newsletters, the website, and so on to demonstrate their engagement within schools. Short videos featuring interactions with staff and students create powerful engagement opportunities. Develop content to create touch points that celebrate the contributions of nurses, teachers, and bus drivers, especially on their national days of recognition. These proactive moments of engagement show the community that positive moments happen hourly, daily, and weekly within your schools.

If you are not comfortable posting your own content, have your communications team ghostwrite posts for you. You never want a community member asking, “What does the superintendent do all day? We never see them.” If you are posting content from all of the school visits and community meetings you attend, that accusation can never be made again. You now have social proof of your engagement efforts and evidence for your annual contract review.

Effective communication is a superintendent’s superpower. Those who can connect authentically and show their personality can truly shine. Many superintendents mistakenly believe that hard work alone will speak for itself, but in today’s politically charged landscape, a certain amount of “campaigning” is necessary while in office. We all know the job of the superintendent has never been harder, tenure has never been shorter, and the chance of being fired is higher than ever.

Embrace the opportunity to engage and showcase the great things happening in your district. It’s worth promoting positive and proactive communications so that you’re a seasoned pro when the challenging moments come. There might just be less of them if you get ahead.

Greg Turchetta, Apptegy

Greg Turchetta is the Strategic Communications Advisor at Apptegy and was the Senior Chief Communications Officer for the Richland School District in Columbia, South Carolina.

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October 16, 2025
Report highlights growing movement to elevate student voice in school communications
Key points:

As K-12 leaders look for ways to strengthen trust, engagement, and belonging, a growing number of districts are turning to a key partner in the work: their students.

A new national report from the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) and SchoolStatus reveals that districts that incorporate student voice into their communication strategies–through videos, messaging, and peer-created content–are seeing real results: stronger family engagement, increased student confidence, and more authentic school-community connection.

The report, Elevating Student Voice in School Communications: A Data-Informed Look at Emerging Practices in School PR, is based on a spring 2025 survey, which received 185 responses from K-12 communications professionals. It includes real-world examples from school districts to explore how student perspectives are being incorporated into communication strategies. It highlights the growing use of first-person student storytelling, direct-to-student messaging, and student internships as strategies to build trust, improve engagement, and strengthen school-community relationships.

“School communicators do more than share information. They help build connection, trust, and belonging in our communities,” said Barbara M. Hunter, APR, Executive Director of NSPRA. “Elevating student voice is not just a feel-good initiative. It is a powerful strategy to engage families, strengthen relationships, and improve student outcomes.”

Key findings include:
- Video storytelling leads the way: 81 percent of districts using student voice strategies rely on video as their primary format.
- Direct communication with students is growing, but there is room for improvement in this area: 65 percent of districts report at least some direct communication with students about matters that are also shared with families, such as academic updates, behavioral expectations or attendance
  
  However, just 39 percent of districts copy students on email messages to families, and just 37 percent include students in family-teacher conferences, allowing them to be active participants
- Internships on the rise: 30 percent of districts now involve students as interns or communication ambassadors, helping create content and amplify student perspectives
- Equity efforts around student storytelling vary significantly. While some districts say they intentionally recruit students with diverse perspectives, fewer encourage multilingual storytelling or provide structured support to help students share their stories
Early results are promising: Districts report improved engagement, stronger student confidence, and more authentic communication when students are involved.
- 61 percent of districts that track comparisons report student-led content generates higher engagement than staff-created communications
- 80 percent of respondents observe that student voice positively impacts family engagement
- A majority (55 percent) said direct communication with students improves academic outcomes
Building Inclusive Student Voice Strategies
The report outlines a three-part approach for districts to strengthen student voice efforts:
- Start with student presence by incorporating quotes, videos, and creative work into everyday communications to build trust and visibility
- Develop shared ownership through internships, ambassador programs, and student participation in content creation and feedback
- Build sustainable systems by aligning student voice efforts with district communications plans and regularly tracking engagement
The report also highlights inclusive practices, such as prioritizing student consent, offering mentorship and support for underrepresented students, featuring diverse stories, involving student panels in review processes and expanding multilingual and accessible communications.

“When districts invite students to take an active role in communication, it helps create stronger connections across the entire school community,” said Dr. Kara Stern, Director of Education for SchoolStatus. “This research shows the value of giving students meaningful opportunities to share their experiences in ways that build trust and engagement.”

The report also explores common challenges, including limited staff time and capacity, privacy considerations and hesitancy around addressing sensitive topics. To address these barriers and others, it offers practical strategies and scalable examples to help districts start or expand student voice initiatives, regardless of size or resources.

This press release originally appeared online.

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August 14, 2025
University leaders can be more adventurous in championing each other’s institutions

It’s a new year and higher education sector challenges remain the same. However, with a new year always comes the opportunity to rethink, reframe and reset – a moment to consider new approaches and even new behaviours whether individual, organisational or cross-sector.

The last few months of 2024 saw the sector start to step up to the challenge laid down by Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson to reform and transform. In December, Universities UK unveiled its taskforce on efficiency and transformation in higher education, with a focus on partnership and collaboration to deliver transformation and cost savings through new models and ways of working. The promise is that the work of the taskforce will drive “meaningful change” that has longevity through “working well together and being productive for the long term.”

Long term, embedded change is great, but the need for something to shift is tangible and urgent today, this week, this month. I’m not sure we can wait too long for taskforce outcomes. So, as we start 2025, what can we – university leaders and sector bodies – do now to rethink, reframe and reset approaches and behaviours to enable meaningful change to happen?

System advocacy

Many of us are familiar with the practice of advocacy – supporting or defending an individual, arguing in favour of a cause, acting on behalf of others. A great advocate is skilled at providing a voice to marginalised individuals or communities, often those who do not have the social or cultural capital (in effect resources or networks) to enable their voice to be heard.

Sustained advocacy work has the potential to enable others to understand different viewpoints, can influence policy development, brings key issues to the fore and enables decisions to be made. Critically, advocacy represents the individual or community faithfully and truthfully, because the individual or community is involved in the process.

Now, for “community” read “higher education sector” and reflect for a moment on advocacy effectiveness for and within higher education as the sector faces considerable challenges. How good are we, collectively and individually, at providing a voice to support those providers who may be experiencing marginalisation?

As university leaders do we really understand, value and advocate for different missions and models of operating, especially within our own localities or geographical regions? Do we harness a spirit of advocacy to bring key issues to the fore, for the greater good, in order to precipitate systems change through coherent and collective decision-making? Are we all fully involved in a process of advocacy for our sector, to ensure that representations are made faithfully and truthfully and that diversity is properly accounted for… or is it only a few voices that are actually heard?

I believe the advocacy picture within the higher education sector is patchy. On the plus side, I do think that sector representatives and mission groups have absolutely stepped up in terms of advocating for the value our sector brings. We have a strong, consistent and evidence-based narrative now in relation to the economic impact of universities, alignment of our work with the government’s five missions and the positive career outcomes for individuals who gain a higher education. One could define that work as “systems advocacy” perhaps. However, with the government promising higher education review outcomes later in 2025, time will tell if the sector’s well-crafted narrative influences policy change in fundamental areas across our system such as funding, student maintenance support and more.

Self-advocacy is also reasonably successful if viewed through the lens of “type” of higher education provider. For example, small and specialist institutions particularly across the creative sector are good at advocating for the value of what they provide. My own university is part of the Cathedrals Group, which celebrates and advocates for those universities with a faith foundation. The Russell Group is another clear example of a collective that successfully advocates for self. However, the danger here is that we only advocate for what matters to us with reference to that particular grouping; the collective needs of the “system” as well as the particular needs of individual institutions can be lost.

What I think is missing is a more generous sense of individual advocacy, by senior institutional leaders across the sector – vice-chancellors, senior team members, and chairs of boards. Imagine a context where university leaders are supported to work through a particular problem or supported to self-advocate with an issue that is especially perplexing. Better still, imagine senior higher education institutional leaders advocating positively for each other and their organisations when the one for whom they are advocating for is not even in the room. Now that would be a breakthrough.

Networked advocacy

To be clear, I’m not describing here ongoing informal moral support, empathy and practical “tips and tricks” within an inner circle. As a vice-chancellor I have a small group of trusted VC colleagues who I know I can pick up the phone to, test ideas and speak the unspeakable.

What I envisage is a more open, public and objective approach to advocacy from senior leaders within the sector for other institutions and leaders within the sector – basically, shining a light on the good stuff and value that is delivered by another institution. Behaviours that show understanding, value and advocacy for different missions, models of operating and institutional strengths. Advocacy approaches that support respectful, coherent and collective decision-making across the full diversity of our sector. I do not dispute that there are pockets of such advocacy activity taking place across the sector, but it does feel a tricky concept and perhaps not widely practiced. What are the barriers to such an approach becoming more commonplace?

I suggest that the top barrier relates to nervousness from institutional leaders in relation to market competition and the disclosure of commercially sensitive information. To be blunt, it’s hard to trust the competition. The need to chase student numbers makes advocacy for the “opposition” extremely challenging for many of us. This is underlined by the fact that my trusted informal “inner circle” of mutually supportive VCs is made up of colleagues from different regions and/or totally different provider type, where competition is not an issue.

So what would it take to unlock a spirit of advocacy by sector leaders?

Well, I speak for myself when I know that I need to better appreciate the value that individual higher education providers bring, whether that be on a local, regional, national or global scale; I need to better understand where different providers “fit” in the higher education ecosystem and how, in turn, all providers work together to deliver what our nation needs.

However, that conversation demands that I step out of my own comfort zone to genuinely understand synergies and differences across our sector, and advocate for those synergies and differences rather than myopically focus on my own organisation in isolation. I admit, it is hard to shine a light on and advocate for the great stuff happening elsewhere, especially when I want the world to know about what my own university is achieving and contributing.

As university leaders, if we genuinely believe that higher education is critical to addressing the challenges faced by not only individuals and communities but also our nation and our planet, then we need to think of the sector as a collective and as a “system” of interlinked and interdependent providers. Our system is wonderful in its diversity but could garner even more impact through intentionally public approaches to provider recognition, celebration and support from organisational leaders.

As we start the new year, it’s time for some adventures in advocacy. This will demand that as leaders we invest time in building relationships and garnering trust, beyond our comfort zone. I challenge myself in embracing the inconvenience of becoming a better advocate for those providers that may not be immediately relatable, but who play their part in transforming lives, communities and in providing opportunity for all.

If we all commit to a new year adventure in advocacy, we will have a great platform on which to build a sector truly ready for reform and transformation through respectful and supportive collaboration and partnership.

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January 12, 2025