As part of Superintendent Wendy Sinnette’s goals for the year, she presented to the La Cañada Flintridge Unified School District an update on her communication goals and appointed a longtime district staff member, position.
Paszkiewicz’s new role of LCUSD director of communications and outreach was approved by the Governing Board at its March meeting.
He has worked for the district since 2014, serving as a lead instructional specialist, helping to oversee instructional, curricular and technology initiatives throughout the district. His new duties will begin July 1.
“I think it’s a wonderful beginning to this plan,” said Governing Board Vice President Josh Epstein.
Sinnette’s communication goals presented at the March meeting included an overview of the district’s current practices and ways to improve. A working committee made up of Sinnette, Paszkiewicz, Jamie Lewsadder, Joe Radabaugh, Caroline Anderson, Nayri Vartanian and Toby Lewsadder has met over the past two months to come up with recommendations.
Sinnette presented in the March meeting an update on her communication goals and the work of the committee, which has been meeting for the last two months. One of the main outputs of the committee will be a themed calendar of events, things to celebrate and some goals. Major topics from the committee centered around finding ways to tell our story, becoming more proactive versus reactive in district communications, and finding efficiencies for family communication.
The committee focused on the needs of the audience and looked at the strengths and weaknesses they have on their website.
“What are the actions, services, metrics and targets that we need to engage to make sure we are achieving success?” Sinnette said, as an example to one of the questions the committee analyzed.
The committee decided on what needed improvement by revisiting their mission statement and looking at other websites.
Some best practices that came from research included:
• Meeting people where they are
• Be transparent
• Be reliable
• Be consistent
• Tell our story
“We want to be able to take some victory laps and always want to do better, committed to a cycle of continuous improvement, but we have to celebrate, because there is so much great happening in this district and that’s part of telling our story,” said Sinnette.
One of the outcomes from this group is the creation of the communication calendar for the academic year.
“We thought if we created a superintendent’s communication calendar, we could have the formula for intentional success and so [we] took a theme and assigned two months out of each year to a theme,” said Sinnette.
Within each theme, the academic calendar list topics, events, holidays and remembrances that should be included in communication within a two-month period. The committee also added set minimum standards for outcomes, for example: one newsletter and four emails.
The themes include:
• August and September: Back to School
• October and November: School Life
• December and January: Intentional Success
• February and March: Academic Excellence
• April and May: Wellness
• June and July: Community
Regarding the creation of the new director of communications position, Sinnette said the only way the district could make it work would be to “review existing certificated and classified administrative and support staffing models to determine potential ways to restructure roles and responsibilities in order to ensure the recommendations of the committee are implemented and sustained,” said Sinnette.
“I think that’s a nice way to say, ‘we don’t have the money for this,’” said Sinnette. “And we need someone to take ownership of it and lead it.”
Paszkiewicz would work with Vartanian, Lewsadder, and district administrators to implement the communications calendar and take lead on communication outreach via website and email.
The goal would be to come back every year to the board to show what bases they covered, communications wise.
“I think to take it from sort of this vague notion that we want to improve communications to a very specific plan about how you are going to do that is just phenomenal,” said Governing Board member Dan Jeffries.
First published in the April 6 print issue of the Outlook Valley Sun.
