Communications director reports higher engagement, more targeted bus messaging and WCAG work

Ms. Skinner provided the board with a communications report showing year-over-year gains in audience and engagement, new tools for transportation messaging, and steps to bring the district website into compliance with web-accessibility standards. "We had 245 parents this year versus 164 last year," she said, noting the family survey reached respondents by text, email and app push and that 16 schools were represented in responses. She also cited specific metrics: a culture campaign that generated about 99,000 impressions and 1,130 pieces of posted content over the school year.

Skinner described technical improvements meant to help families: a transportation dashboard embedded on the website, nightly data feeds to create bus-targeted messaging, and an app update that will send text notifications when a teacher messages a student's family. She said the communications team reviews social-media comments daily and flagged web accessibility as a priority, noting the district is working to meet WCAG 2.2 and expects remediation of PDFs and other digital documents. Board members asked whether the anonymous family survey could have duplicate responses; Skinner said the survey was intentionally anonymous to encourage candid feedback and that she reviewed qualitative responses for patterns but could not fully validate deduplication.

Board members praised the communications work and requested periodic follow-up showing how survey feedback is being used at the school level. The communications team committed to continuing data cleanup, template standardization for schools, and training on new web and app features.