All you gotta do is ask

Heuvelton Central School, that ginormous public school district in the center of the known universe, is hiring a public relations firm to shape public perception of its operations. As with giant corporations, politicians, rock stars and Tiger Woods, it is important to the Heuvelton Board of Education that just the right pristine image of the district is conveyed to the public.

Of course, Heuvelton Central is not all that large – its enrollment is about 600 – and it is the center of the known universe only if your universe extends from Gouverneur to Ogdensburg and from Hammond to Canton. It is a middling sized district in a rural area that still has a significant number of sons and daughters of farmers and laborers roaming its halls, and it sends about 50 youngsters a year out in that big, wide world. So, you might ask, why would it need to hire a spinmeister?

And if you asked that, you would be asking a reasonable question. Just what image is it that the board thinks Heuvelton needs to protect – and why? A representative of K12 Insight, the company the board has hired to spin rumor into gold, said the company uses a series of surveys of the community to shape the public's view of the district. "Our surveys are an exercise in communication and public relations that are about framing the discussion of the community," company spokesman Jesse Leib said.

In other words, this company uses what are called in the trade "push polls" to turn district residents' skepticism into approbation. Push polls use carefully crafted survey questions that turn the respondents' answers toward a specific direction. It is the "Do you still beat your wife?" kind of question, one that either turns the answer toward a positive view of the district, or away from a negative view.

According to a story in the Times, the school board hopes to use K12 to improve communications between it and district residents. Our story in Monday's Times said Dr. John P. Zeh, school board president, said the company will be a benefit to the district because it will help the school better understand what direction the community wishes to go.

Hmmm. There was a time, not all that long ago, when a good way to communicate was to talk to people face to face. Call a public meeting, if you like, and let the conversation flow. It's how reporters get information: ask questions, write down the answers, ask more questions, write down those answers, and so on. It is a GREAT way to share information.

Now, however, that seems to be too, well, PERSONAL for a lot of elected officials. Increasingly, local elected boards seem to think it is much, much better to carry out public business in as private a setting as is possible. Hence, we see the proliferation of improperly called executive sessions, discussed last week by the Committee on Open Government's Bob Freeman at Jefferson Community College. And we find villages, towns, school districts all forcing Freedom of Information Law requests for information that is clearly in the public domain and should just be provided when asked for.

In Heuvelton, the fear that people may criticize the Board of Education has gotten, apparently, so consuming that the district will now pay $15,000 – more, if this service lasts more than a year, and it appears it will – to have a bunch of PR hacks from Virginia be the outside agency interposed between the elected board and its constituents.

While Heuvelton is the first to have taken this drastic a step, there is evidence across the north country that this is a trend, not an isolated, Area 51 kind of thing. General Brown Central School officials are muzzling district residents at their board meetings and requiring full-fledged FOIL requests for lunch menus. Lewis County presented one FOIL requester with 14 pages after it first denied his request for a document, and when that citizen got the same document from a state agency that also had it, he received almost 140 pages. Massena Central School's budget committee wanted to meet in private, a clear violation of the Open Meetings Law, because it didn't want the public to hear it discuss cutting positions at the school. I could go on and on and on.

And the saddest fact from all this is, none of this would be necessary if public boards and agencies would remember that they are simply part of a larger whole. The Heuvelton Board of Education is made up of community members. If they want to know what their neighbors and fellow residents think, they can very easily ask them. They don't need to spend $15,000 to do this; all they have to do is spend some time in the coffee shop and at the feed store and the barbershop. Or call a public discussion at a special board meeting and open up the floor.

Local elected officials are not rock stars and they're not Tiger Woods. If they're doing what they should be doing, transparency is a natural extension of those actions. If they're doing something they shouldn't be doing, they'll want to hide it. So here's a simple operating principle: if it feels like you should be doing public business in private, don't do that business. And here's another one: if you want to know what your community thinks, ask the people to tell you.