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Blogging to my advantage: a superintendent discovers a new tool with unlimited possibilities for two-way connection with his community

Scene: Early one snowy morning in the central administration office of the Wawasee Community School District in northeastern Indiana.

5:51 a.m. Turned on the computer, logged onto wawasee.blogspot.com and posted the two-hour snow delay on The Wawascene, my personal weblog. Typed a sentence or two describing the current road conditions and clicked "Submit Post."

5:54 a.m. Called the traditional media outlets on my phone call list to report the delay.

6:11 a.m. Scanned the headlines of major newspapers on the Internet, cutting and pasting the URLs of two interesting education news stories into Microsoft Notepad.

6:21 a.m. Logged onto statcounter.com and noticed that the hit counter for The Wawascene had already cleared almost 1,500.

6:22 a.m. Returned to The Wawascene, posted a comment and hyperlinked to the URLs of the news stories I had noted earlier. Decided to publish the post later in the afternoon so saved it as a draft.

6:30 a.m. Started through the stack of snail mail and e-mails that had built up since yesterday afternoon.

Just another morning in the life of a blogging superintendent.

What's a Blog?

Superintendents readily understand the concept of a public flogging, but what about public blogging? What is it? Should superintendents even care?

Blog is shorthand for weblog, which is a series of items posted on the Internet for others to read. It usually includes text, images and links to other websites. Bloggers--those are the people who maintain blogs--usually update them at least daily. As a result, blogs provide a running commentary or conversation.

Although many people use blogs as online journals, detailing the events of the day and expressing their feelings about personal topics, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication in the professional world as well, eliciting lively dialogue among people around the world.

Some days I spend 10 minutes blogging and some days I spend an hour. Sometimes I get on a roll and publish several posts in one day. I save them in "draft mode" and post them on days when I have writer's block. The time it takes to maintain a blog is more than worth it. Nothing else has allowed me to speak to thousands of people every day. It is the most time-efficient method I have found to get messages out.

I heard recently from an influential parent in a major school system on the East Coast. Frustrated with her school district's leadership and direction, she started her own blog site to alert the public to her concerns. She also uses her blogs to recruit superintendent candidates to ensure the applicant pool includes the kind of people she wants in leadership positions in her school district.

Is blogging for you? Consider this: If you don't start blogging to your patrons, they are going to start blogging about you.

Benefits of Blogging

Most superintendents struggle to find the time and the avenues to make connections with the local community. How do patrons get to know you? How do they know what you think about an issue? How do you know what they think?

Blogging is an answer. You can communicate an important date or squelch a harmful rumor. You can brag up the local football team or explain how you blew the school delay decision by not predicting the ice storm that hit two hours after your decision was made.

Blogs can make people smile, such as our popular weekly post called Friday's Funnies. There, I share humorous stories involving students or parents. Or blogs can address serious topics such as the tribute I posted about my mother on Mother's Day. The story of Barbara Stock, the widowed mother of three young children who went to college to become a teacher so she could pay the bills and feed her family, brought many readers to tears. Stories like these bring a human touch to the superintendency.

Blogging lets you reach beyond your community. I was curious about what our patrons thought about a four-day school week. So I asked! I stressed that the topic was not under active consideration, that it was a trial balloon. Not only did I hear from the community, I heard from teacher's union employees in British Columbia. They found my blog post and e-mailed me links to research about four-day school weeks.

Blogging also has a tremendous potential for connecting local patrons to the often disconnected world of state and federal politics that affect their children. Imagine the massive communication network that would span the country if every superintendent in the United States began blogging weekly to his or her faculty and community. Whenever your state legislatures issued an education bill, you could post a comment about it, link to the bill and encourage patrons to take 90 seconds and send their legislators an e-mail with their opinion. Citizens' participation in the political process could skyrocket.