If I had any doubts from the job interview, the first day on the job was confirmation. The next few months underscored it. If I could summarize it one word, my job as Director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools was all about chaos.
Every day was chaotic. Little if anything could be anticipated or planned for. I often looked at the office telephone (and my Blackberry; that was the phone we used) as the enemy. You answered a call, and your day instantly changed.
I learned that I wasn’t the only one dealing with chaos. The man brought in to take over the district’s finances (which were a train wreck; the district was not only technically but actually bankrupt) was a former corporate CFO. He dealt with impossible tasks every day. His wife later told me that she worried most about public meetings – Board of Education meetings, town halls, outreach meetings – because anything could and often did happen. She would look for me making a statement on TV news, and then she knew her husband was okay.
The district had all the problems of an urban school system – money problems, crime, declining educational standards and test scores, dropping enrollments, school consolidations. An outside management firm had been brought in to try to transform the district; school closures, budget reductions (the communications budget was reduced from $1 million to $20,000, and that had been spent by the time I arrived).
The problems had been developing for decades; now they were being addressed, and sometimes eliminated, in weeks and days. The entire system was experiencing an ongoing series of shocks. It made for unhappy people. Lots of unhappy people. Board members fighting change. Th teachers’ union. School principals. Headquarters people. People whose jobs had been eliminated. Parents furious over school closures. Vendors who’d lost lucrative contracts.
Yes, it was chaos. And I had to figure out how to communicate into it. And in spite of it.
I had no budget. No ongoing publications. I knew next to nothing about electronic communications. Fortunately, at that time, there was almost nothing to learn. This was the pre-social media era; no Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (or X), TikTok, or anything else. We had a web site that was seriously out-of-date and a television studio (the district had its own channel) that could barely afford to function. What had been a communications staff of 12 was now me and one-half of a headcount shared with another group.
So, we improvised. First was a newsletter.
We started a weekly email newsletter from the superintendent to top HQ staff and school principals. When I first mentioned the idea, it was met with serious opposition from the outside management firm. “It will be leaked to everyone,” people said. And I said, “Exactly.” And to make sure of it, we included this statement at the top: “Private and Confidential. Do Not Distribute.”
Yes, it leaked. To parents, the public, the news media, everyone. It was one of the most unusual ways to communicate I’d ever participated in, but it worked. People were gleeful that it leaked, thinking they had foiled the management team. One rather venomous critic even caught me at a school board meeting, saying triumphantly he received every weekly issue from multiple sources. I expressed shock and indignation. When the reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch figured it out, he simply said. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” I was properly aghast at the thought.
Second, I made myself available to the news media. I was never not available. I never handed out prepared statements written by attorneys. I provided background when asked. I answered calls from 7 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. I was interviewed one night in the den of my house. One Saturday, I did an interview at the car dealership where I was getting some maintenance work done.
What helped was that reporters had never experienced that kind of cooperation, and they knew I had what was close to the worst job in the district. They cut me slack. They gave me background information of their own. They knew I would always give a straight answer, and I would talk in English, not jargon.
I also made sure to treat all media the same. It didn’t matter whether it was a small independent radio station with a very limited reach or even Newsweek. It was something I’d learned from corporate communications. You might think the New York Times is more important than anything, but that small trade or neighborhood publication just might turn out to be the most important call you make.
Third, we did outreach meetings. When it was time to present the new budget, we took the proposals out to the public. We let people see what the problems were and make their own suggestions.
When this effort was being planned, it almost strangled at the beginning. At a meeting in the superintendent’s office, with what must have been 50 people, the acting superintendent walked the assembled group of administrators through the plan. One person said, “I am not going into that high school. It is not safe.” Heads nodded in agreement.
You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. I was sitting on the floor, because it was the only place to sit. And I said, “If it’s unsafe for us to go into that high school, then why are we sending children into it every day?” Silence. The objection was dropped.
As an aside, I went into a multitude of schools in the district, many during the day but also at night for outreach meetings. Yes, some schools had security procedures; one elementary school had barbed wire on the windows on both the first and second floors. But not once did I ever feel unsafe or threatened.
And we fought back with facts. One journalism teacher published a long article in the St. Louis Journalism Review, attacking the management firm and the changes that had been made. When I read it, I had to three times to make sure I understood it. In addition to a multitude of factual errors, the article was filled with grammatical errors and misspelled words. The article had never been edited; instead, it was published unedited.
I wrote a response. A list of the errors (it was long). A list of the grammar and spelling mistakes (also long). And then I asked, did any editor at the St. Louis Journalism Review even read it before they published it? My response was published. One notable correction I remember was that the writer had referred to me as a “district flak;” I pointed out that what he meant to say was “district flack.”
I learned letter from a friend who was on the Review’s editorial board that my letter had landed like a nuclear bomb. He told me it was the longest editorial board meeting he ever participated in, and, while the errors were bothersome, what was even more upsetting to some of the board members was that the lack of editing and oversight was publicly embarrassing. (To be fair, the St. Louis Journalism Review was run by former reporters and editors, and while they were usually reliably liberal in their biases, they did try to be factually correct. (And they usually edited their articles.)
The teacher who wrote the original article caught up with me at the next school board meeting. He was not happy. He felt humiliated. He said a response was being prepared. I told him that was fine, but to make sure someone edited it before publication. He was not impressed with my response. And then I said, “You need to understand. I am not your enemy. The management firm is not your enemy. They’re trying to save the district from a financial and structural implosion.” He didn’t believe me.
Not everything that we did worked. If we had known then about the term “derangement syndrome” we all might have understood it better. Some people simply could not acknowledge facts. The one advantage I did have, in a sea of disadvantages, was relative freedom. I could move quickly, respond quickly, and know that my back was covered. I learned to trust implicitly one of the management firm’s people; he had a mind like a steel trap and a command of facts and issues that was rather phenomenal.
But it was still chaos, served daily.
Related:
The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other.
The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had.
The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.
Top photograph by Wayee Tan via Unsplash. Used with permission.
