This story by Tommy Gardner was published by the Stowe Reporter on Oct. 10.
For the past year, the Lamoille South school district — which encompasses Elmore, Morristown and Stowe — has been entrusting much of its communications to a public relations company that has helped turn education lingo into plain language.
The district signed a contract last year with Leonine Public Affairs, a Montpelier firm that touts itself as a “one-stop shop for government affairs and strategic communications services.” The district budgeted $60,000 this year and last for the services.
According to superintendent Tracy Wrend, the need arose a few years ago, when the Stowe School Board conducted a survey to help determine the best means of spreading information to the public, and residents replied that they needed better communication from the board.
“The goal is to improve our communications and, obviously, professionals have a lot of skill in doing that,” Wrend said. “I, for one, can get too far into the language of our profession.”
Alex MacLean is one of four consultants at Leonine who work with Lamoille South — other people at the company work with other partners, mostly in the nonprofit and private sector. MacLean said Lamoille South is currently the only school contracting with Leonine.
She said the crew works with the school district on myriad tasks, helping the school board define its mission and goals, and setting up communications systems to make sure the district is speaking with one voice.
“It can be tricky to communicate with all of those voices,” MacLean said. “There’s a lot of information in a school system that people want to know and want to know in a timely manner.”
Leonine is a public affairs group, and MacLean said it’s “part of the PR world” — her team is listed under “issue campaigns and public relations” on the Leonine website, with her listed as president of that subset as well as a company partner — although Wrend tends to stick to more official language.
“I truly think of them as communications support, and not PR,” she said.
MacLean may be familiar to some political news consumers — she was Gov. Peter Shumlin’s campaign manager in the 2010 and 2012 elections, and she was his chief of staff from 2008 until 2012. She’s been at Leonine for more than five years.
She said she got a rush from the frantic pace of the campaigns and day-to-day administrative adventures, but she said keeping a low profile is more her speed now.
“I prefer to be behind the scenes,” she said. “And it was not possible” while part of the Shumlin team.
Neither she nor her team members who work with Lamoille South live in the district, but she is familiar with the area, and “all of us grew up in Vermont and attended Vermont schools and work here.”
Plus, a little distance can be a boon, a way of looking from the outside in, something that is impossible when you’re a board member or supervisory union employee.
“It’s helpful to have an outside view so you don’t get sucked into one lane or another,” MacLean said.
Real talk
In 2017, based on the survey by the Stowe School Board — which is no longer, after the Stowe and Elmore-Morristown school districts merged this summer — the Lamoille South Supervisory Union board added $60,000 to either hire an in-house communications specialist or contract with an outside firm.
“Lamoille South currently has the intellectual capacity to get information out to the community, but we have no time to deliver,” Wrend said in an October 2017 budget meeting. “There is a constant need to communicate, but we are constantly moving on to the next meeting.”
School officials ultimately scrapped the idea of having an in-house person attend meetings and report to the public, and opted for the contract, requesting bids for the word. The services listed in the request for proposals:
• Communication of Lamoille South’s mission, goals and major initiatives.
• Informing the communities about events, successes and initiatives at the schools through written articles and press releases, personalized for each school community.
• Coordinating and consulting with administrators and school leaders to help share their news and message beyond existing family communication channels.
• Creating and distributing clear information about the annual budget.
• Consulting on the “development of the LSSU voice.”
• Assisting in strategies for engaging the community.
Leonine has helped with all of those things, MacLean said, both big and small.
And Lamoille South has certainly tackled some big issues in the past year, none bigger than the Vermont Board of Education’s decision to force the Stowe and Elmore-Morristown school districts to merge into one.
There’s also been work on communicating the implementation of proficiency-based learning, putting together school newsletters, crafting twice-monthly missives from the school board in the local newspapers, helping with the different schools’ websites — expect a new website more in line with the merged district soon, Wrend said.
There have been controversies other than Act 46, the school district merger law, that Leonine has been there for in the past year, often to just provide a set of eyes on a piece of written communication. For instance, MacLean vetted a response from Wrend to the paper when asked for a comment about a recent climate-change school walkout at Peoples Academy.
Wrend said, however, Leonine is not involved in communicating information about a lawsuit against her by a former teacher.
Another thing you don’t see Leonine doing, or the school district embracing, is social media, like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
“From the days of our study, and through Leonine, the advice has been, it’s not wise to have a voice in social media unless you can dedicate resources to it,” Wrend said.
