A Lesson In Communication

Newtown learned this past week that the school district had retained the services of a communications specialist after a “letter of understanding” between the district and the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE) was signed by Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson on September 27 for “strategic communications services” from July 2011 to June 2012. The cost: $2,400 per month or $28,800 annually. While erstwhile Board of Education chairman William Hart said he was aware of the arrangement, members of the Board of Education said they were not. When pressed for more details last week, Mr Hart told The Bee that the money would come out of the district’s professional services budget, and “as this work had been going on for some time, it doesn’t seem like an urgent issue.” Reporting on the move, he suggested, could wait until Dr Robinson returned from a trip to China. In other words, this initiative by the district to upgrade its communications was old news; it only seemed like new news because it had not been communicated.

The kind of communication services Dr Robinson went shopping for last summer, however, do not have much to do with delivering complete and timely information to the public. She was specifically interested in “strategic communication services,” with the emphasis on strategic, meaning “carefully designed or planned to serve a particular purpose or advantage” (Oxford Dictionaries). That becomes clear from the promotional material circulated by Ann Baldwin, the specialist retained by the district, and her firm, Baldwin Media Marketing, LLC. On its website, the firm claims to have “built a national reputation for its expertise in supplying support in crisis management, media management, and marketing and presentation skills.” Clients learn how to “avoid negative perceptions in the media through media training.” The media training team “teaches you how to manage and control all media situations.” It even teaches clients “how to speak in sound bites so your message can be understood.”

The Bee learned a little bit about that communication style last week when we pressed Ms Baldwin to confirm that her rate of compensation was $2,000 per month, as we had been told by others. She said that figure sounded “a little high” to her, adding that she would “check on that and get back” to us. We finally learned the correct figure, but not from Ms Baldwin. The school district released Dr Robinson’s letter of understanding after The Bee formally requested it under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The initially reported rate for services, it turns out, was not “a little high,” but 20 percent too low.

It was doubly surprising to learn that the new improved communications strategy of the school district was in place during last summer’s public relations fiasco surrounding the school board’s decision to end the school district’s popular owner-operator system of transportation and, more recently, the cringe-inducing decision to join an effort to add the burden of proof in administrative hearings to the already considerable burdens of parents of special needs children. We think one basic lesson in communication should be to avoid insulting people by marketing sow’s-ear ideas and policies as silk purses.

Newtown is paying its superintendent of schools $169,932 this year. A salary of that magnitude should command an administrative skill-set that includes the ability to communicate, and by that we mean leveling with people, speaking plainly, and responding to difficult questions rather than avoiding them. It means delivering information and not managing it. Most of all, it means respecting the people of Newtown enough to listen to them and to respond honestly rather than serving up prepackaged strategic sound bites.