Blogging with the doors open: he may receive 1,000 posts on a controversial matter, but this superintendent wants to keep a finger on the public pulse

School Administrator, May, 2006 by Clayton Wilcox

Have you ever asked yourself whether you really wanted to know what your community thought about an idea?

"A stupid and bad idea. Leave the times the way they are. High school students actually have jobs after school that they need to go to at 2:30, plus numerous after-school activities and sports, so keep the times the same. Have the elementary and middle school start later in the day."

This was one of a thousand posts I received expressing a similar sentiment --though many not as politely--when I asked the community for their thoughts about changing our schools' daily starting and ending times. I thought it was a fantastic idea, and several of my key staff members agreed--at least they said they did. But with apologies to "The O'Reilly Factor," if you really want to enter the "no spin zone," read a blog focused on a hot topic.

Monitoring the Pulse

New to the Pinellas County, Fla., School District in 2004, I was looking for a way to connect and communicate with families across the county in a way that would complement our communications plan. Pinellas County, the 7th-largest school district in Florida, has 150 schools serving 115,000 young people in kindergarten through grade 12. Almost 9,000 teachers and another 6,000 employees support our classrooms. These demographics add up to some fairly tremendous communication challenges.

I've always liked to tinker with technology, although I'm not a technology geek or even a cutting-edge kind of guy. Yes, I have a Blackberry attached to my hip and I, like hundreds of other superintendents, can't set it down for fear I will miss something going on in the district. Yes, I have a wireless-anywhere card so I am always connected. But I'm not obsessive or even compulsive about technology; it's just a tool that helps me keep my finger on the pulse of a large school district.

Hosting an online discussion or blog seemed like the perfect tool. When word got out that I was moving forward with the idea, The St. Petersburg Times approached me about co-hosting a blog on Blogger.com. They would publicize the site in the newspaper and provide a link from the newspaper's website to the blog. The blog, which we call The Classroom, would be my venue. The newspaper promised to exercise no control of the site.

Opening the Door

Today, The Classroom is flourishing. More than a simple communications tool, it has played a part in school district decisions about such issues as our student dress code, transportation, start and end times, district finance and issues related to race and student discipline. While sometimes dominated by passionate folks who want you to see the world the same way they see it, the blog also serves as a sounding board for folks who don't normally participate in district discussions.

For example, within hours of posting the findings from a district transportation study that offered what we (or I) thought the community wanted--later school start times for tired high school students--the "thread" of the discussion, which we called "Flip-Flop," was inundated with hundreds of impassioned posts about the topic. Needless to say, they weren't all supportive.

Flip-Flop blogger posts seemed civil when they characterized the idea as "out of touch, misguided and stupid" and perhaps not so civil when the comments stopped being about the idea and focused directly on those advancing the change. Yet even those not-so-civil posts paled as frustrations boiled over into bitter personal attacks between anonymous posters questioning the marital status of posters' birth mothers or assaulting each other with sharply carved political attacks.

Some topic threads, such as school choice, cross-town busing and performance-based pay, have inspired such emotion that The St. Petersburg Times online editors and I have stayed up late into the night monitoring posts that crossed the line between conviction and profanity. We allow anonymous posts, which makes the blog dynamic but invites some problems as well. Some threads have incited posters to challenge each other to the point of distraction. Some individuals repeatedly bombard the blog as if they were a groundswell of interested community members.

Self-proclaimed online monitors spring up from time to time to help moderate conversations and cool the flames of cyberspace's equivalent of hijackers--folks determined to take the thread to a place it was never intended to go and squelching real dialogue on tough topics.

Each post requires a careful review for purpose and intent, and then the application of some level of decorum. This is, after all, a site associated with the school system. The decision to delete posts is never an easy one, but it has been necessary at times and likely will continue in an environment that invites anonymous thought and idea sharing. Most often, however, the dialogue is thoughtful, on point and helpful as we struggle to lead a large school system with seemingly endless opportunities and challenges.

Facing the Challenges