The current ways Mansfield High School sends out announcements are through Mr. Dowd’s weekly newsletter, the MHS website, and Skyward emails.
The unorganized nature of school communications has resulted in students, staff, and parents struggling to know relevant information and are not given enough time to prepare for changes.
In this school year, there have been numerous policy changes that have been put into place without much of an advance notice. Over the summer, schedule pickup was changed from an in-person pickup to being entirely online. They advertised the pickup days as a way to get IDs, parking passes, and senior parking spots. However, parking passes were soon removed from the pickup with short notice. Teachers were informed of the advisory policy on the Monday of the first week and essentially had less than 48 hours to prepare for the change. Although the Evolv systems have been public knowledge since mid-July, those who don’t keep up with board meetings had no way of knowing until its announcement a week before the scheduled launch. Many people simply don’t have the time to go to board meetings that drag long into the night nor do they know where to find this information that feels hidden in board meeting notes. These changes aren’t issues on their own—they’re beneficial—but the way they’re being implemented is a larger problem.
For the most part, information relevant to the school can be difficult to find unless you know where to look. As an example, student merchandise stores are typically up for less than a school week after they’re announced through email. Some students and parents don’t learn about these stores until well after their stores close and the shirts are distributed. This could be argued as a fault for students for not checking their school email inboxes often. To some, these stores are being sent out with plenty of notice for people to buy shirts if they please. But why should students be expected to monitor something if they aren’t aware that it’s being sent out? Other aspects that could be relevant to students and parents, such as lunch menus and school board meetings, aren’t always the easiest to find. The information is out there and isn’t entirely hidden from public view, but oftentimes the only way to get to it is to know how to reach it.
Staying consistent with every school in MISD, MHS has a website that makes staff contact information, upcoming events, and more accessible to students, parents, and staff. However, this website is operated solely by one teacher. From the perspective of a teacher who has to teach, grade, and respond to emails frequently, the last thing I’d want to do is to ensure the school’s website is constantly up to date with correct information. To me, this would just be one more plate added onto one teacher that could create more trouble than it’s worth. This also has the unintended consequence of leaving opportunities for outdated information to plaster the front page, by no fault of the teacher in charge at all.
As it stands, the current mediums and practices used by MHS to send out important announcements are inconsistent and unorganized. It gives people a very narrow opportunity to voice their opinions on changes and it leaves very little room for missing muted deadlines. Instead hiring a webmaster to upkeep the school website with all of the important information, while using Mr. Dowd’s newsletter as a secondary source for announcements such as school spirit days or smaller events would ease the burden off of the teacher presently in charge of the website and would make information more convenient and easily accessible.
To voice support for this change, the best policy is to direct suggestions to the administration at MHS. Contacting them through email and expressing ways that the current method of communication to students, parents, and staff could be improved is one step to shifting the system in a positive direction.
