Communications for District Leaders

Establish a communications strategy informed by the vision for recovery and renewal.
Ensure communication is accessible to all stakeholders (including low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities, their families, and other authorized guardians) and that it is culturally sensitive and responsive.
Designate a staff member who will have single-point accountability over external recovery and renewal communications.
Define recovery and renewal and set community expectations for interventions and supports via an inclusive, transparent, multi-stakeholder process.
Establish a consistent vocabulary with which schools can communicate recovery issues (e.g., mental health vs. mental wellbeing).
Reevaluate stakeholders’ preferred communication channels and frequency of communication through means such as translated surveying. For example, build a simple email that includes a google doc survey with questions about preferences.
Build a framework to determine how multimodal communication channels (e.g., email, social media, online video, phone, text, website) will be utilized based on stakeholder preference and what is being communicated.
Create talking points for school communities about recovery, with translations for representative languages in the community. A helpful tool to help you build clear and consistent communication is this key messaging template.
Encourage schools to utilize the same platforms as each other.
Define a recovery and renewal communications calendar and make it available to the public to establish clear expectations of the frequency of knowledge sharing. Ensure that there is one owner of the calendar to make certain that it remains current.
Analyze communication methods to measure effectiveness (e.g. login, delivery, open, and response rates from students and families).
Determine what schools are responsible for communicating on issues related to recovery and renewal to avoid overlap.