The Case for Comms Directors

Why your district needs communications professionals.

By Melissa Hite

At this point, you know a strong communications strategy is crucial for a successful school district. (If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this magazine.) But as a superintendent, you may be trying to squeeze communications into a teacher or staff member’s already long list of priorities. You may even be trying to handle it all yourself.

We get it. Money is tight; hiring a new central office staff member is a big investment. And as the school leader, you should be involved in your district’s branding and communications strategies. But you don’t have to go it alone — and in fact, we believe the benefits of hiring a full-time school communicator far outweigh the costs. Here are a few reasons why schools need public relations professionals.

School communications professionals save you time and stress .

In AASA’s most recent Decennial Study on the American Superintendent, released in 2020, superintendents ranked “job-related stress” as the most pressing problem they faced in their positions. Only 8% of those surveyed said they felt “little to no stress”; 56% felt “very great or considerable stress.” And that was before the onset of COVID-19. More recently, a 2023 survey from nonprofit think tank RAND Corp found that school superintendents were more than twice as likely as other working adults to report job-related stress. In that report, nearly 80% of the school leaders surveyed said work was “often” or “always” stressful. We’re sure none of these numbers surprise you.

All that stress seems to come, at least in part, from the myriad demands on a superintendent’s time. In the Decennial Study, “excessive time requirements” ranked second among school leaders’ most pressing problems. “For the superintendent, the position is a 24-hour-a-day job,” write the study’s authors. “The challenges and the demands upon time are never-ending.”

Faced with all those challenges, are superintendents actually spending their time on the issues they’d like to? It would seem not. When asked which issues consume the bulk of their time, school leaders cited “school-community relations” in the top five — above “school reform/ improvement,” “curriculum/instructional issues,” and “educational equity/diversity.” However, when asked which skills they would like to improve, 30% of superintendents listed “school reform/improvement,” and 26% answered “curriculum/instructional issues.” Furthermore, only 34% rated themselves “very effective” in handling diversity issues. It seems that superintendents want to improve in areas that they simply don’t have time to focus on. Communications issues are no doubt important and no doubt time-consuming. But just as important (if not more so!) are concerns about academic rigor, continuous improvement, and equity. You can’t do it all, and trying to do so might be destroying your mental health and worklife balance. So why not bring in some expert help in the form of a communications professional?