Letter: School problem not public relations

• Published: Nov 4, 2009 - Page: 8B

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Three recent Advocate articles concerning the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board reveal an interesting view of its methods for success.

It seems that the board’s third annual phone poll this summer showed that the public’s confidence in its own school system continues to fall.

As Communications Director Chris Trahan put it, “ … we went down in every category.”

He blamed this year’s drop on two major occurrences: the takeover of eight low-performing schools, and an attempt to route the test scores of magnet high school students to neighborhood schools to boost their overall test scores.

Mentioned in a subsequent article was the abysmal graduation rate of 56.4 percent, poor even compared with Louisiana’s already-low average of 66.6 percent.

In the wake of such negative data, what did the School Board do to better its schools and students for the future?

Did it suggest researching curricula for possible improvement, or working on methods to better analyze teacher performance, or finding ways to get parents more involved in their children’s education?

None of these.

Instead, it hired a public relations firm from New Orleans to improve its image.

Jeff Zehnder, president of Zehnder Communications, told the School Board: “Perception is the reality in the absence of experience.”

In other words, Zehnder’s suggestion to the School Board was to replace the “reality” of the school system’s poor performance with the “perception” of a better-performing system.

Board member Bill Black, directly after telling Zehnder, “You don’t know beans about this school system,” quizzically pushed for spending even more on the contract: “A $425,000 budget for a $500 million organization is birdfeed.”

I submit that the School Board could do a lot better by the students in our public schools by allocating that almost half a million dollars on ways to better educate those students, rather than on a public relations contract to gloss over “perceived” (as well as real) problems.