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Episode Transcript

Eileen Beard: Welcome to episode 30 in season four of the School CEO podcast. Can you believe it? I'm your host, Eileen Beard. I was actually out of the office last week, attending my very first National School Public Relations Association's annual seminar in Washington DC. I noticed several topics were trending at the conference this year, notably all things AI, enrollment marketing, bond campaigns, student voice, and hospitality. The sessions that I attended with the largest audiences were first a presentation on combating dis and misinformation, and second, and maybe not surprisingly, stress management. Because first, reacting to keyboard warriors puts you on the back foot, which then can lead you to burnout, and we don't want that. Schools need school communicators. So how can you get more proactive in your communication? How do you get ahead of some of these issues? Well, in the last episode, I said that it starts with getting strategic. If you were at the conference this year as well, then you probably saw Lesley Bruinton, APR, president and chief executive officer of School Spirit PR, received the 2025 NSPRA president's award for her amazing work in the field. So we'll start our conversation about proactive communication by replaying one of our favorite podcast episodes of all time, our interview with Lesley Bruinton from 2021. Hear how she used the four step process of research, planning, implementation, and evaluation or RPIE to create strategic communications at Tuscaloosa City Schools in Alabama. I hope you enjoy it. 

Brittany Keil: Welcome, Lesley.

Lesley Bruinton: Hi, everybody.

Brittany Keil: Just to get us started, can you tell us about your path to education?

Lesley Bruinton: So my path to this profession comes about because both of my parents were public school teachers and I shunned going into that field. Did not say, this is not what I'm going to do. I'm going to hightail it out of Dodge. My mom, dad, grandmother, great grandmother, aunt and cousin are all teachers. And I wanted to forge my own path. I thought that it would be fun to go into broadcast journalism and, as my mom said, be a big star. So I left after college to take my first job in local television news in Panama City, Florida, where I cut my teeth in journalism and got a chance to have a very broad portfolio. When I tell you how many things were in this portfolio, you're probably gonna laugh. I covered five municipalities, courts and crime, and the local school system. So that is definitely a small town television market experience. But in the process, I got to meet the school PR person. And she really took me under her wing as a very young Cub reporter, doing things like showing me the ropes, helping me understand a board meeting agenda, helping me understand the board packet, the ebb and flow of the meeting and what was to come. So after that experience, I kind of thought if I ever got out of TV news, this would be a cool job. I think I would enjoy working in school PR. I got a job in Birmingham, Alabama. And then after getting married and having my first child, thought, might like to have nights and weekends and holidays off because at that time I was a weekend sports reporter. So, when the position came available, I thought, well, put my name in a hat. This is one of those things that said, if I ever got out, this is what I would do. And kind of a long winding point to where I am now, but I've been in the profession for about twelve years.

Michael Cruice: I definitely can understand that both my parents are high school math teachers, and pretty much everyone else in my family are public school teachers as well. So I definitely understand that. I was curious. Were your parents like, were they encouraging you to go into education, or was it something that they didn't encourage you to go into education?

Lesley Bruinton: You know, I think my parents know that I'm a very headstrong person. And once I kind of said that I wasn't going into education, the conversation kind of ended. But at the time when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, education was still a great profession for a woman to go into. And so it didn't have what current educators are maybe dissuading their own children from now. So that was not the era that I grew up in. It was still a great profession. I went to school in a one high school town. My dad was the tennis coach. He was the basketball coach. My mom was the middle school science teacher. You know, we all showed up at the football field on Friday night and the basketball gym on Friday nights in the fall. So it was a great experience for me. And, you know, being a parent myself, now working in a school system, it's a great way to be very, very involved in knowing what's going on in your child's school.

Brittany Keil: Yeah, can imagine that's really true. So does your child go to Tuscaloosa City Schools?

Lesley Bruinton: Yes, I have two kids. Both attending public school here in our school system.

Brittany Keil: Can you tell us a little bit about your district?

Lesley Bruinton: Yeah, we are a suburban urban district outside of the largest city in the state of Alabama. So Birmingham, Alabama is the largest city. We're about an hour Southwest of Birmingham, Alabama by car. We have a little more than 10,000 students. We're a Title I district. About 73% of our students are African American, 23% white, and then we round out the 100% with children and families from other backgrounds.

Michael Cruice: And Tuscaloosa is obviously pretty famous for the University of Alabama. And so how does the university being there, which is a very large university, kind of factor into the school district?

Lesley Bruinton: We're very fortunate. We have three institutions of higher learning right here in the city of Tuscaloosa. We have the University of Alabama, which is a public four year institution. We have Shelton State Community College, which is a two year junior college through the state community college system. And then we have an HBCU in Stillman College. So there are lots of opportunities for college students, whether they're education majors or doing research to connect with the local public school systems, there's two of them in this community, that benefits us in a lot of ways. One, tutoring is the real easy one to look at. When college students are getting involved in their community and trying to do service learning and do volunteer work, then connecting with the schools is an easy and great way to fulfill those hours. That benefits our students to be around other folks who are a little further down the road, know what they want to be when they grow up hopefully, and can talk to our students about some goals they've set in their own lives and challenge our students to think more deeply about what they want to do in the future. There are grant opportunities, there are research opportunities, there are volunteerism opportunities. All of those things have intrinsic value on both sides of that relationship.

Brittany Keil: So we're excited to talk to you today because you are the first communications director that we've had on our podcast.

Lesley Bruinton: I'm putting that in my Twitter bio. Okay, absolutely. And

Brittany Keil: when we talked to you last time, you had a lot of really interesting thoughts about your role and how you conceptual conceptualize it and how you describe its value to the school district. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Lesley Bruinton: I like to think really deeply about some of the challenges that school systems face. And there are lots of schools who have a public relations or communications professional, but don't really know how to utilize us. We're kind of this undervalued, underutilized resource. And so some of us kind of hang out in the background waiting to be helpful, waiting to be asked, and trying to figure out how do I fit in. And even the mentoring I'm doing of practitioners that are just starting their careers in school PR, they're finding that too, that no one has expressly told them what they want them to do.

My own trajectory in this profession was that I worked for the school system for about nineteen months and the Great Recession happened and the system decided that it wanted to keep cuts away from the classroom as much as it could and eliminated my position. I later came back twenty two months later with this renewed idea of what school public relations could be. And what I saw in my first go round was that people treated me like the district photographer. And I know I'm so much more than the district photographer. I know that this profession is more than about taking pictures and posting on Facebook and planning parties. We are capable of far more. And so as I started this journey in my own personal professional self growth and self development, thinking about what did I want my career to be like? How can I contribute to the larger mission of the school system? Surely I can do more than take a picture, right? And thinking through the idea that how can I use what I know as a communicator to effect change for students and families in this community? So school systems are really keen on recognizing and hiring content specialists. It's taken me a while to get to this point, but to confidently say, I am a content specialist in the field of communication. So school administrators, district administrators pick up bits and pieces of communication tactics, not fully understanding why that tactic was chosen.

So for me, sometimes I'll be on social media and I'll see an Edu speaker, shall we say. Any and many Edu speakers say, do thing x. And I'm thinking that doesn't work in all scenarios. Why are you recommending that? I would never have a decree and say all schools should do X. You've got to know your audience. And for me, I do talk a lot about strategic communication. Strategic communicators use something that's known as the four step process: research, planning, implementation, evaluation. Over time, I started realizing there's a correlation between the work that strategic communicators do and the work that educators do. And this was born out of my experience of sitting in many curriculum meetings, kind of not understanding the language, but picking up some words here and there. You know, down in the South, you might say little kids over here in Grown Folks Business. And what I realized was here's the crosswalk. So for a communicator, I'm going to do research as my first step. Any good teacher is going to do a formative assessment. We're going to do a pretest. We're going to figure out where our students are and what they need to do to grow. Then the next step for me would be planning and then obviously teachers would do lesson plans. The next step for me would be implementation. That's the fun part of what communicators do. That's the party, that's the social media posts, that's the big event, the ribbon cutting. And then for teachers, the fun part for them is instruction. I've never heard a teacher say, Hey, I can't wait to administer a formative assessment.

So that's the part that teachers kind of hang their hat on. I just want get in there and teach. And then we also check to see the effectiveness of our work as communicators. That's the evaluative phase and for teachers that's just a summative assessment. So how well did that lesson go? What do I need to reteach? How do I retool myself so that we gear up in the next chapter, the next unit to help our students? So it is a very cyclical process. The research in the first phase, you finish, you get that evaluation, that evaluation becomes research in the next phase. So once I was able to explain to my colleagues how that operated, I could see a light bulb go off and lo and behold, I have teacher friends now that give me communications plans. They will send me an email that says, and my superintendent will do it too, Like, here are the things that need to happen. And some are more complex, some are just kind of, here are the bullet points, but I get it. I can follow that. And it makes my work faster, more streamlined. I've built capacity in others to be effective communicators. So that's how I see this evolution in what I do from being a district photographer to building capacity in others to be effective communicators.

Michael Cruice: So, we talk with a lot of superintendents and, you know, a bunch of them mentioned how much education has changed over the last decade, how different things are now. And I was wondering for you, with communications, how do you feel or how have you seen school communications change since you've started?

Lesley Bruinton: I think part of my own personal growth has allowed me to evolve the position, and my district has been willing to take that journey with me and have seen some of the benefits of it. But I can tell you that when I first started, when I look at a job description from when I first came on board, it was largely the idea that this person would go out and yield good media relations. They would get us on TV and spread the news. That was in 2007 when I got hired. So as a former reporter, I could see, Yeah, sure, I can do this. I know how to write news stories. I have friends that work in television. I'll call my friends in TV and hopefully they'll come out and do a story. Well then over time, you start to realize as the technology changes and school systems have more abilities and capabilities, we were given tools like automated messaging platforms. We were given tools like social media. So no longer did I have to rely on people to have appointment television viewing, get home, get settled, it's 05:00, I'm going to watch the newscast, it's 06:00, I'm watching the newscast, I'll watch the 10:00 newscast. A real shift from disappointment viewing to on demand viewing. And how do I capitalize on that using my skills as a former journalist?

So when I started doing that and making that shift and going directly to our stakeholders, one day a reporter called me and said, Lesley, I just feel like you're going around me. I said, You know what? I am going around you. I have 10,000 email addresses. I have 10,000 phone numbers. I'm absolutely going to use the tools in the toolbox to connect directly with my stakeholders. And he kind of huffed off and walked away. He's since left that profession and is now doing public relations as well. And that is the interesting thing about this is that I think largely the advice that was being given to district and school leaders years and years ago, like you gotta get on the news, you gotta get your story out, was that we had to go through a gatekeeper. We no longer have to go through the gatekeeper. We have the gate. We keep the information. So why not use that to your advantage to make sure that you're connecting with your stakeholders? And those things are good things, That consistent steady drumbeat of what's going on in your community builds trust. It promotes transparency. That's why I think the model of we just have to have good media coverage doesn't always work as you see newsrooms shutter, as you see school systems and communities without a news platform an hour, two hours away from the local media market. So media relations training is not enough, and you still have to be able to connect with your families. And that's what I champion.

Brittany Keil: One frustration that I've heard communications professionals express is that they aren't in the room when decisions are being made. Is that something that's a priority for you in communicating the importance of your role to the superintendent and to other leaders in your district?

Lesley Bruinton: I have always had access to the room where the decisions were being made. My voice became more heard the longer I had been with the organization. So for sometimes, I think that school systems will hire the local former reporter to come in and expecting them to snap their fingers and all this stuff is going to happen. You have this great news coverage and never a bad article again and no one will ever dislike you because you've got great news coverage. I think it misses the opportunity to live up to this idea that communication is a strategic management function. Like the core definition of public relations talks about it being a management function between an organization and its publics on whom its success or failure depends. So in schools, we kind of wanted everybody to get along, everybody liked each other. We want to talk to the people that like us because sometimes it's a challenge or an inconvenience to talk to the folks who don't like us. But effective communications means that we maintain and establish these relationships with the people who do like us, moms and dads and teachers, and the ones that are just not so sure about us yet. So that consistent relationship building and managing of that relationship and going out and taking the tough questions, it doesn't yield change overnight, but it does yield, a willingness to stand in the arena to take those tough questions.

Michael Cruice: Mhmm. Well, and one of the words you mentioned there was publics, and you use plural there, which I I think is really interesting and I'm pretty sure is probably deliberate. Because I think a lot of times when, you know, superintendents, for example, maybe think about communications, they think about, especially external communication with the community. But this is something we're thinking about strategically. Your internal communication matters just as much, if not more, because those people are going to be the ones that are really interacting with community members and going to be where really most people are having their touch points with the school district.

Lesley Bruinton: Right. So in public relations, you talk about stakeholders as being a public or publics, plural. So the interesting thing here is that in public relations, there's no such thing as the general public. You'll hear people talk about, We need to let the general public know that doesn't exist. So to use terminology that educators would use, we need to disaggregate our group of stakeholders. So we need to disaggregate the group of parents. We could break that group down a little bit more from elementary parents to secondary parents. We need to disaggregate our group of teachers as being an independent stakeholder group. They have different needs and need to know different stuff than maybe parents need to know. We need to identify maybe business interests that we need to connect with. They don't need all the technical details of every little step. Maybe they just need big picture. So when I'm talking about strategic communication, I want to disaggregate my audiences, think about what each of those audiences need, and deliver it in a way that they understand. This is the same thing that good teachers are doing. You have tier one instruction, tier two instruction, tier three instruction. So it's no different.

People think, I don't have time to do that. You don't have time not to do those things if you want to be the most effective at getting your message out. We should not just hand over the entire manual of how to do school to the business community, the local chamber. They don't care. They just want to know what's in it for me. What's the ROI? Like, when you finish this thing, what's gonna happen and what can we expect, and how can we go out and celebrate our community from delivering a top notch, high quality educational system.

Michael Cruice: And one of the things that I think I've seen from, especially educators, there tends to be this, tendency to almost like word dump and just try to provide as much content as possible because it's almost a thought of, well, if we get everything to them, then that's good. But the thing is is that people just stop paying attention if there's too much. Right? People like, if it's not relevant to them, it's just noise, and they're not gonna even listen. And you've actually hurt your credibility by putting out something that people are going to actively turn away from and not consume.

Lesley Bruinton: We value in education people being really smart. We just do. And we use smart talk and big words, and then sometimes we get around other adults and try to communicate with them, And it comes across as being belittling. We may be pushing them away with our language and the words that we're using. So taking a look at the things that you're sending out and breaking it down for parents in a way they can understand. I think every school system probably has an administrator on hand that is really adept at breaking down whatever thing that's happening and can really get into a community and build that trust. I see it as a communicator when I am sitting in meetings with educators and they want to get to the front of the room and say, Can everybody hear me? I don't need the microphone. I am just going to use my teacher voice. And I am sitting in my seat thinking, Ma'am, stop yelling at me. I am an adult. So the way that I communicate with my peers, being adult to adult, is a little bit different than maybe a teacher would command a classroom. So I feel like I need the people in the room to one, understand what I'm saying clearly, take action on it, and hopefully be inspired to keep following me for more. And I don't want to borrow strategies that might be off putting.

Brittany Keil: So I know you've talked about having different stakeholders, and one kind of unique stakeholder that you can have is the superintendent themselves. So I know that you have transitioned a couple of superintendents while you've been at Tuscaloosa City Schools. What has that been like?

Lesley Bruinton: They each have a different personality. And my mentor gave me the best advice ever. I give this to communicators all the time. She reminded me that you serve the ring and not the king or queen as it may be. So what that says is that I'm here to help a superintendent who is the current office holder be successful and effective in communicating his or her vision. There may be people on the outside that says the communication person is too closely aligned with the superintendent. That's my job. I need to understand what they're trying to accomplish so that I can help translate it for others. That's difficult. That is such a challenge for those communicators that don't have access to the table, who don't even know what room the table is in, let alone have an invitation to participate at conversations at the table. So you do have to take great care to build relationships with your superintendent. There are 12 functions of public relations and one of them is called trusted counsel. The idea that you would have this working relationship, working partnership with your superintendent that you can tell them stuff that maybe other people can't. Maybe it's my personality, maybe it's coming from a different profession, but I tend to think that me and my capacity as a communicator can help our school system guard against groupthink because all of them went to a college of education. I didn't. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I was across the street of the College of Communication. So I just look at things said and done differently. Sometimes they kind of scratch their eyebrows and endure it, but if I'm scratching my eyebrows, there might be parents out there doing the same.

Brittany Keil: As a nation, we probably have the most transitions that we've ever had. What recommendations would you have for a school communications professional trying to help that transition? Because one major frustration with transition is that things can get lost in the shuffle.

Lesley Bruinton: Even before the pandemic, I think I'd heard a study that the average superintendency might be eighteen to twenty four months, and that's hard. Can't even get kids out of a middle school in eighteen to twenty four months. So that's difficult. I think you have to have patience. You have to be willing to put in the work to build and foster a relationship. And it can be hard if a school system has turnover in that superintendent seat where the new superintendent wonders how closely aligned that communications professional is. So getting in there and saying, Look, my job is, although I got along with the last superintendent, I told the last superintendent what I'm about to tell you. My job is to serve the ring and not the king. I'm here to serve the office rather than the office holder. So the things that you value, the things that you want to communicate, I'm here to help you do that. The challenge for some communicators is the new superintendent comes in, the new superintendent thinks that they want to bring in their own communicator, want to bring in they saw a reporter on television they'd like to poach or what have you. The one that is currently in the seat, unless they've demonstrated otherwise, probably knows your community really, really well. So when you're talking about doing that research portion of the work, They have established the relationships, they understand the needs of those stakeholders, they can be a really huge asset to a new superintendent as they come in the door. And many of the superintendents that come in the door come in with their thirty, sixty, ninety day plan. And they all say they're going to go out and visit every civic group and they're going go visit all these parents. Your communicator can help you with that because chances are they know the folks on the civic group and they know the people in all of the little coffee shops and barber shops around your town and should be able to help facilitate that conversation.

So if a superintendent can appreciate that relationship building, the communicator's already done, then maybe you can share in that gravitas and have that carpet be laid out for you a little bit easier. Even though the school PR professional is, I would say, a high profile job, a high visibility job, because in some cases, just to get that position on the books takes a lot of debate. And people come out of the woodwork because they perceive it as being high profile, maybe the salary is a really attractive salary. I think that when you have that person that has done the work to be a part of the community, to get to know the stakeholders, they can help a new superintendent navigate the pitfalls. Here's what we shouldn't say to this group and here's why. Here's the history of an issue that is ongoing for this group. They can help you jump start that work on that thirty, sixty, ninety day plan.

Michael Cruice: And I know a lot of districts across the country are very small. A lot of districts just can't afford to hire a full time communication professional, But I know being president of Inspra, that's something you do work with a lot of people across the country who aren't solely within the public relations role. And so for superintendents coming into these, like, smaller districts or who are on smaller districts, what would you recommend for them on how to possibly start getting more strategic with their communications?

Lesley Bruinton: One, I don't think that this profession per se is exclusive. I think this is a very inclusive group. When I was president of the Alabama School Public Relations Association, At the time, I think we only had about 12 school systems statewide that had a dedicated school PR person. So as we saw it to grow, how do you grow that? I can't create another PR job. That's not going to happen. I'm in Tuscaloosa.

Michael Cruice: And you can't all of a sudden make a community raise their taxes Right. To provide one.

Lesley Bruinton: So the light bulb moment that happened for me was that while not every system has a dedicated full time school PR position, every school and school system has a need for effective stakeholder engagement and stakeholder relations. So what I sought to do as the president of Alsbra was to build capacity among district leaders, particularly smaller districts, for how do you do these things? And that's where the idea of being able to translate what I do as a communicator, what educators do, so they could rely on that prior knowledge, the expertise that they had as an educator and apply those skills to be effective communicators.

So I wasn't necessarily starting out in algebra trying to grow the profession as much as I was trying to grow the capacity. And over time, I don't know how many dedicated school PR people we have, but I think we're probably close to 30 school systems that have a full time person. And I can tell you just in the past year alone, my superintendent has put me in contact with two or three other school systems as they've tried to spin up communications programs. I think the pandemic has shown that importance of effective communications, particularly when you look at March 2020 when we sent everyone home across the nation. No longer did that idea of, we'll just put a flyer in their backpack work because nobody was there with a backpack to take home the flyer.

Michael Cruice: If it worked previously too anyway.

Lesley Bruinton: If. Yes. Exactly. It works to a point, and that point is probably fourth grade. I don't know if it works. It doesn't work as effectively as people think that it works. And sometimes as a mom, it gets to a point in the school year I'm maybe not cleaning out that backpack as often as I need to. I got to the point where I was like, it's your responsibility to put the papers on the counter for me to go through.

Brittany Keil: You know, not only does effective communication need to happen for a school district no matter how small it is, you would argue that school communications professionals can also impact student growth. Correct?

Lesley Bruinton: I would. I like looking at challenges that our school system are trying to tackle and figuring out what tools do I have at my disposal and my toolbox that maybe they haven't considered. So usually when a school system has a challenge, they bring the best and the brightest educators around the table, former principals, some teachers, the curriculum specialists, they figure out how they can solve the problem. And I'm usually sitting in the corner listening to this conversation thinking, well, do they know that we paid for this tool? Do they know that we have this tool? What if we use that tool? And it took a while to gain the confidence to speak up in a group of folks that have been doing this their entire career. But slowly and surely, you do your homework. You go to the meetings, you listen, you ask questions. If you don't feel comfortable asking the questions aloud, you find a friend and you ask them later, What does this mean? Can you help me understand what you're trying to accomplish? So for us, and I think it's very timely because of the pandemic and children were out of school for a while, about five years ago, we were preparing for a summer school program. School systems have done this for years. We always invite those students who need more time with the content to come back. And if school wasn't their thing during nine months, they probably weren't too excited about coming an extra one or two months during the summertime.

So as we were planning that year, I think it was in 2017, I asked them, could they take a pause and let me run a survey of our families? And I said, When you're investigating a summer program for your student, what do you value? What are the things you value? I've told you about the demographics of our district, Title I district. I had some assumptions. I assumed that our families would be looking for childcare. Working class families, I assumed that they need somebody to watch their kids to make sure their kids stay safe during the day. The survey results came back and it showed that our families wanted full day affordable enrichment. Those opportunities do exist through our Institutions of Higher Learning and other partners in the community, but it was like a Venn diagram. It was full day but maybe not affordable. Maybe it was enriching or it could be enriching and affordable but not full day. So how do you apply those concepts to a community that would want it, but maybe can't afford it? If you have a working class job, you can't get a child to a nine to 12 program. A nine to 12 program that costs $800 for two weeks. That's going to be tough. So we took that research, well, I'll tell you this too after I did that. I started looking at this, I know the demographics of our district. Is this just a factor of the fact that people took this survey online? Because they took a computer based survey, did that have any impact on the results? So we offered the survey via phone and we also offered it in Spanish too, and they mirrored. Our family said overwhelmingly 74% affordable full day enrichment.

So I was able to take that data back to the curriculum team and said, Look, folks, our families say they want affordable full day enrichment. I think that if you build a program that meets those three marks, then you'll have some folks show up. So we started talking about the importance of summer learning to STEM the summer slide. We started talking about we're going to build this program affordable full day enrichment, and we put it out there. I think at the time it was going be $50 a week. It would go from eight until five and kids at that time had the opportunity to pick their own classes like a college student would. You'd be given like a course catalog and you could pick classes. There was a class called A Piece of Cake, and it was a class structured around baking and bakeries and using fractions and math to do measurements to bake, and they visited the local donut shop when they got through. So we sold this to our families and said, Here are the programs your child can pick. Please sign up. What we didn't realize is that on day two, we'd hit capacity. We figured this out on day three, and we had a wait list.

Michael Cruice: Oh, no.

Lesley Bruinton: Yeah. So now I've created a demand for something that we've always supplied, but maybe people weren't showing up in previous years. Well, business community heard about this and said, If you had more money, could you serve more kids? Probably the first time in the history of a school system did someone show up and just offer money that we didn't ask for. So in a week and a half's time, our business community crowdsourced about $40,000 that allowed us to serve more children.

So when I knew I was onto something was I sent my videographer out to the sidewalk of the school on day four of the program and he's interviewing parents about their children's experience. One mom says, Yes, summer learning is important because it slows down the summer slide. And the next mom says, My child had a great couple of days. I picked my kid up and by the time we turned the corner, they were asleep in the back seat. Another mom said, I tried to pick up my child early because we were going go out of town for this weekend and she told me to come back at the end of the day because she didn't want to miss. Over time, we've gotten to refine those skills It's delivering summer learning, but we did the research on it. So how effective was it? We took a look at those students that participated, compared them to all students to see what their universal screener at the beginning of school. We compared the test, the standardized test at the end of the year to the beginning of the year test to see if they grew. Did we grow kids? And we had some phenomenal numbers that some of our kids grew months just from that experience. And so our families had a great experience with summer learning. Their children liked it. They told a friend it was a great deal. They did all these cool things. I didn't have to come out of pocket a whole lot of money to do it. My child deserves every opportunity in the world as families that might be able to pay for it.

We no longer had a problem with people not coming to summer because it's what we do. And so we spent the last five years normalizing the idea of summer learning, expanding the program, then COVID hits. And there is a huge concern about making sure that kids have what they need to catch up and federal money's coming in the door to support that. I'm pleased to say that our school system was ahead of the curve in doing the work and in understanding how to engage families and attract them into that program.

Michael Cruice: Well, I think that story also illustrates something where right now, I mean, there's obviously been a ton of conversation around school competitions, school choice, things like that. I know a lot of districts have started looking at communication, things like marketing because of that. The thing is even if you're not in the heavy school choice area, for example, parents still have choice. Right? Parents have a choice to come to that summer program. Parents have choice to come to the parent teacher conferences. Right? They're making those decisions on a daily basis. And so communications is absolutely essential if you're wanting parents to everyday choose to be actively involved and engaged with the district. Because most of them probably want to, they just either don't know how or don't know the best way to do so, and it's a district's role to teach them.

Lesley Bruinton: Yeah. I think I want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier. When I started in the profession in 02/2007, we were communicating with families through the conduit of the media. So if you think about that, and I'll use some business terms here, we in 2007 were largely B2B. We're talking business to business. School system talks to media and it funnels out that way. What I would like to see more district leaders do is to stop thinking about a B2B prospect in communicating your school system's value and go to a B2C and move from the business connecting directly with your consumers, your, I hate to use customers, but your stakeholders in this case. And so that's the shift that I want to see more school systems making, going from the B2B prospect to the B2C prospect. Because at the beginning of the school year, we're asking parents to do things like, can you bring in a bunch of school supplies and some Clorox wipes and provide us with a donation to the classroom? But we really want a sustained relationship with our families throughout the year.

We don't want it to end when they bring in the bag of school supplies, we want it to continue. So what are we doing to manage those relationships and foster those relationships throughout the year? This is why I don't think B2B prospects work in school systems to help, one, to meet families where they are and two, to help them understand all the opportunities their local school system is able to provide their child and make sure they're taking full advantage of it.

Michael Cruice: Well, your story here about student learning, student success, I think, also illustrates that even for smaller districts, this investment in strategic communications and even a communications professional can have real impacts. And I'm thinking about smaller districts. I know earlier that's, you know, I mentioned that can't afford a communication professional. But, I mean, if we're thinking about a smaller district that has maybe a 100 employees, 200 employees, that's still a midsize business. And a midsize business would actually have probably a team of eight people on marketing staff alone. So, I mean, even for a a small district, having one person is still probably understaffed. So it's interesting to think about just that difference and how actually for small school districts. Probably, actually, there is reason to invest financially in it.

Lesley Bruinton: Yeah. I'm sitting here and listening to what you're saying. I picked up my annual report this year because I wanted to look at budget. So our annual operating budget is almost a $150,000,000. And when you think about the amount of money coming in the door and how you run a school system, part of it is making sure that you're being very transparent with your community saying, this is the value that you get for your dollar. You are contributing your tax dollars, whether it's sales tax or car tax or property tax. This is what it means for the investment that this community has made in its local public school system. So even though you may be a small school district, when you look at that annual operating budget, it's likely a big number. And so part of garnering trust and faith in your school system is making sure that you're transparent in showing how you're using those resources and using them wisely.

Brittany Keil: And I think that most district leaders understand that we're in an era of school choice. And if effective communication of effective PR means that more families feel confident in sending their kids to the local school district, that value is going to make up for itself.

Lesley Bruinton: Right. And, you know, different communities, different states have different rules on advertising or marketing. So not to get in too much down that road, but I will say always the best advertising is word-of-mouth. Always the best, always the best. And so I spend a lot of time championing, making sure that parents and families are involved and have information. Because even in the era of COVID, when we have people who might be working from home and have a little bit more time on their hands to dig into stuff online and dig into conversations on social media, there are people who are looking at the resources that you're putting out, the messaging you're putting out, maybe scrutinizing it. I always believed as a former reporter, every friend group, every friend circle has its own reporter. There's always this one person who is paying attention to stuff, whether it's sports and he's on some sort of sports blog and he knows all the deep recruiting news, or whether it's somebody that reads the newspaper every single day and maybe goes to county commission meetings just for fun because that's fun for them. There's always this one person in each peer group that takes responsibility of telling you what's going on. And I need to make sure that person has the right information. So absent school systems providing that information, how does the void get filled? And it might not seem like this is a big deal right now, but where it becomes a big deal is when you have to go out for bond and you need to convince your school community to reinvest in your school system or if you need to levy a bond that has never been there. So how do you champion that and make the case for it? So I always advocate that good, effective communication and stakeholder engagement does allow you the opportunity to champion your school system and show the value of that investment to its community.

Michael Cruice: I do want to just maybe pick your brain a little bit on maybe some trend here because I know earlier you mentioned about when you first started, the kind of the trend was pluck someone from local media because it was about media relations. I feel like a lot of times in education that if it's not education specific, that it's, you know, the person that seems to have some connection to it is usually tapped to do it, whether it's the person that brought the computer to that to the meeting that's now the tech director because they brought the computer. But I'm worried now that maybe school districts might gonna take the approach of, well, you know, getting young teachers in. They see a teacher who maybe is really active on social media, post a lot on social media, they think, okay. Well, that person would be great for that communications role. And they might be, but I'm worried that maybe what you were talking about earlier about that strategic aspect still needs to be there. And maybe sometimes when school districts are making these decisions, that sometimes maybe isn't as important in that decision or doesn't come up as much as more of that just task oriented mentality.

Lesley Bruinton: I think that's a really interesting premise. One of the things that, in speaking to my district friends who might be listening, is that when you decide to engage in a communications program, maybe you go out and you talk to your other friend districts that have a PR person and you pluck their job description and apply it. You say, Hey, we're going to post this job description. When the person comes, however they arrive, whether they come from the classroom or come from a newsroom, I think you have a responsibility to have conversations with them about what your expectations for the job are. They read the job description, but sometimes when we get in a job, we know the job description is not what the day to day is and there can be a disconnect. So what kind of goals do you have as a system? What do you need? Were you really looking for a strategic thought partner or were you looking for a district photographer? People that come from television I think need to be afforded an opportunity for a learning curve. They've got to shift this idea that no longer you're going to have a sense of completion every day. Every day there's a 05:00 newscast. Every day I'm going to turn a story and I'm going to go home and I get a fresh start the next day. My desk now has stuff on it that I've been working on for a little bit and that was a huge learning curve for me to move past that I wasn't going to have this sense of completion every day.

So being realistic about what the school system needs, being honest with your communicator on what you need them to do and what you need from them. I also think that it's important that you provide professional development for this person, particularly if you've plucked them from another industry, if they're not a communicator by trade, you wouldn't just pluck anyone else off the street and give them a job and not provide them with professional development. And professional development comes in ways large and small. It might be, can you send that person over to the school system next door and shadow a couple of days with their veteran PR person? Can you get connected to your state school public relations association so they can build a network of other folks in your state who do the same thing, who have access to the same information that your state is putting out, understands the challenges that your state is facing in K-twelve education, and can support that individual. Or whether they are linked up with the National School Public Relations Association where we believe that we provide the best professional development for folks in this profession. All of those are great ways to support practitioners.

So you have these informal channels, meet some friends and grow your network. You can advocate for more formal ways, whether you seek accreditation in public relations that is akin to an accountant getting a CPA behind their name, encouraging your practitioners if time is right for them to go back to school. Those are things that I've done, but all professional development does provide for professional growth, I think it's valuable. So even listening to a free webinar they find while they're managing the social media channels that scrolls across their feed, that's important. Making sure that your communicator has time to develop those skills so they can support the mission of your school system.

Michael Cruice: And since we're on that topic of new communications professionals within the district, I guess, what mistakes have you seen or or what rookie, you know, mishaps have you kind of seen that you would recommend kind of avoiding or tend to advise new professionals to watch out for?

Lesley Bruinton: Okay. They hire these folks, and they forget they've hired them, so they don't invite them to the meeting. They don't tell them about the meeting. They don't tell them about events. Just remember how anyone feels when they are brand new to a job. So a new teacher, if no one told you where the copier was, if no one told you where the drink machine was. Those things make you feel like you're part of community, that you know something. So don't just hire these people and expect them to go to town. Well, you're the communicator and you solve it. That's the relationship part public relations. And sometimes people forget about that part of it. So as you onboard this new employee, making sure that they're integrated into your leadership structure if that's what you intend for them to happen, if you don't want them at the table in the room but provide them with access to the information. I see that as being a frustration for folks that they feel they leave a profession and come work in school PR and feel isolated. They're isolated from other people. They're isolated from decision makers. They're isolated from the decision. And they may just be trying to figure out what do I do with my time? So as a result, they're managing the website and they're taking pictures and putting stuff on social media. But is that the most effective use of your time if your system has something big happening? You could use all hands on deck and what tools and what's in the toolbox of the communicator they can bring to help solve some of those large challenges. So don't forget them once you hire them.

Brittany Keil: And you don't really have an opportunity to be strategic with the information if you aren't given information at all, if you're just kind of given directives or the end result.

Lesley Bruinton: True, but I do think that people can lead from where they are. So a position of even the school secretary that says, I make no real decisions or feels like they make no real decisions. We all know that a lot of the power is right there at the school secretary. She's the gatekeeper. He's the gatekeeper. Control access to the school and the principal as well. How do you exhibit leadership where you are? So whether you're looking for small wins, maybe you're not in a position where you can do the big win, where you can ask for, Hey, can we hold up a little bit and do some research? But what can you do? How can you prepare yourself before you go into that meeting so that you can make yourself as valuable as possible to the larger organization?

For school systems that don't have a dedicated PR person and you have to do PR by committee, maybe it's you set aside a few minutes thinking, do we need to do any more research to help sell this idea, this prospect to our community. And really, it's not going to slow down anything. People think it's going to slow down stuff, but it doesn't really have to slow down anything to crank out a simple survey, take the time to analyze it and figure out how do I apply what I learned in this survey to this larger thing I want to do.

Michael Cruice: Yeah. And what's way more waste of time is going through everything with wrong assumptions and then you end up with something that's actually not going to work. That's something you've wasted your entire time at that point. Doing that little bit of work on the front end usually probably helps save a lot of time in the end.

Lesley Bruinton: Yeah, exactly. I would support that anytime. So when I think about summer learning, I think I just kind of caught them in a weird time of the year in January. Said, Hey, do you mind if I do this survey? And it was like, Yeah, sure, whatever. Do the survey. We've got other stuff to do. And I didn't. I came back with this treasure trove of information and I found an ally that I could go to and say, Hey, I learned this thing from this survey and I really have this suspicion or hypothesis that if we were to market our summer program in this way, I think you could get some people. And that's a chance. I mean, that's a risk to step out to your organization and say, Hey, I know you've never done this before. It seems a little crazy, but what if we did it? And we did, and it worked. And then I started thinking year two, how do I refine that and get better at it? I said, great. Okay. The children who were doing well and their parents value the idea of summer learning, they were gonna come anyway.

Now that we've got a great program, they're gonna come anyway. What do I do to crank up the the participation of students that we really want to be there? So in year two, we started doing things like we would tell everybody about it, but we went out and did some direct recruitment of marketing of students that we really wanted to be there and really have that opportunity. And so that's how it got refined for us as we started promoting summer learning and growing our skill that way.

Brittany Keil: I feel like this is a good time to ask. And we ask everyone on our podcast list, but this is a little different for you, I think. What has been your proudest moment working for Tuscaloosa City Schools?

Lesley Bruinton: It's really hard because there's been some really big moments. Early in my career after I came back, a tornado hit our system. It destroyed three of our schools when I was nine months pregnant. And then a week and a half after that, had a baby. And so championing the idea of we need to be on social media because in 2011, the technology directors wielded all the power and said, Nope, no social media. We're going to put that on firewalls. So the ability to, in a crisis, respond at nine months pregnant and tell the acting superintendent, I need the technology director to drop the firewall. This is really hampering our ability to communicate. After that, one day I was online that summer and saw that our response to that crisis was mentioned in I found out on C SPAN. It was mentioned in the congressional record and congressional testimony. Yeah, it also appeared in some FEMA training too. That was pretty significant.

I spent seven years as a television reporter and then you come of age and this idea of what's a viral video. And so how do you orchestrate that? I had a young man who graduated, I believe in 2016. His mother was in the military, had been stationed in Guantanamo Bay and we got her back to be able to come to his graduation. Crazy story. We hid her in a clean garbage can, covered her with a blanket, wheeled her through the arena, past her own family who did not know she was going to be there and had her surprise him on stage at graduation on Memorial Day weekend. So seeing what a viral story can look like, being involved with the summer learning program. And I've had these moments in my career and I say, Man, this is the highlight of my career. This is the best thing I could have ever done. This is the hallmark of my career. And then something else happens and I have a new thing that I can celebrate. So that's been the fun part for me, even up to being president of Inspira and saying, this is really a hallmark of my career. This is a high point. I am no longer going to say that these are high points. These are points in my career and I expect other things, great things to happen. As long as I keep working hard, keep being willing to learn and being humble enough to learn from other people and learn from whatever information I'm around, data that I'm around, then I can continue to get better. And I don't want my best to have been in my rear view mirror. I want it to be on the other side of the windshield.

Brittany Keil: Oh, that's absolutely beautiful. And that's really inspirational too. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure and I think there's a lot of really great information here. So thank you.

Lesley Bruinton: I am happy to support school leaders any place, anytime. So I've had people reach out to me on Twitter or email me if there's something I can do to help someone. I don't think knowledge is about hoarding. I think it's about sharing. So I'm happy to do that even up to being a thought partner. And so I've collaborated with folks in other districts just kind of thinking deeply about it. I get a charge from thinking deeply about some of these large issues and enjoy helping other people do that as well.