Step 3- Seeking Votes
You’ve submitted your file of Local School Council nomination papers and survived a challenge to your nomination. What next?
Campaign for office
First prepare a statement of why you are running for LSC. The school will give you a form for this purpose, but you can submit your statement in another form. The Chicago School Leadership Development Cooperative advises you to focus on three points to communicate:
- What is the most important issue facing the school
- Why would you be a valuable member of the LSC
- Who are you? Say something personal but also pertinent to being an LSC member
You can put a heading on the document, calling it your Candidate Statement, Form 2-12. The school is required to post all of these on a bulletin board for the public to review. Submission of this statement is not required.
As a member of the community you’ll have concerns you wish to bring to the LSC. You decide if the Waters School Garden is a weed patch or an environmental statement. You decide if Budlong School should enforce no parking in the crosswalks. You decide that an arts budget is more important than a computer lab at dozens of schools.
Maybe you want to do more research into the school.
There are a number of resources for finding information on the schools. The Bulldog has been aggregating these over the past 18 months and it has covered LSC meetings. Use our search function with the name of the school as the keyword.
Here is a that summarizes some basic facts about our local schools. Here is our . Here is a link to our report in September on the University of Chicago Consortium report.
There is a similar report for every CPS school. Find it by going to the cps.edu site and search for a school. Once on the school, use the ‘Scorecard’ tab to open a list of documents. At the top of the tab is a summary of information about the school. At the bottom of the tab are some dcuments. The “School Progress Report,” written in English, Spanish, Polish and Chinese, has a good summary of the quality of the school.
Here is a link to a sample page at cps.edu showing the school report card for Budlong.
Based on the reports of CPS it appears there may be an issue with the culture and climate of the school. CPS ranks Budlong low on creating a supportive environment and on ambitious instruction.
The University of Chicago report digs deeper into the issue.
The University of Chicago cites course clarity, weak math instruction and collective responsibility as issues. Teacher trust at the school has crashed and the report seems to point to the leadership of the principal with poor grades in two areas.
Then it cites the support students receive in the class from school professionals, the expectation of the school for students to do their best and finally peer support for academic work as being weak.
Another excellent source of understanding is the LSC minutes of the schools. You can find a list of the schools that participate in posting their LSC minutes on this Bulldog post.
All these sources create a wealth of information. Now you can refute or support a statement made to you, based on your understanding of the issue.
Prepare Your Literature
Valencia Ria-Winstead of Designs for Change recommends you prepare a palm card. A palm card is much like the Candidate Statement, except you use it as a business card. You give it to everyone. You leave it at the grocer for people to pickup. It is your all purpose summary.
Ria-Winstead recommends you use a 1/4 sheet, 8 1/2″ x 11″. Pick a colored paper. Write the palm card in the primary languages of the school.
Answer the following questions and you should be on your way to winning the election:
- What is your name?
- What school is this for?
- When is the election?
- What is your slogan? Can you write it in five words?
- Post your photo (people will identify more with a candidate with a photo)
- Print on both sides. Include different information on the second side
- Write in the primary languages of the school
Get endorsements from people. Join a slate of other candidates and campaign as a team. Print flyers and posters. Go to neighborhood stores and ask to leave the flyers and posters. Write the local media and blogs and submit commentary on education posts.
Ask for votes and support. If you have limited time to campaign, and let’s face it, who doesn’t? Campaign in the hours when parents are present at the school:
- Before school drop-off
- During mid-day Pre-K Drop-off and pickup
- After school pickup
- During the hours of any before and after school programs when parents are likely to be present
Identify neighborhood groups that might be interested in your message and attend their meetings. The 47th Ward has many new neighborhood groups and several old and established groups. You’ll find announcements of their meetings in The Bulldog events list.
Read Part 2- Winning Without Campaigning
Related posts:
- Only 750 Running for LSC Openings Citywide
- LSCs- The Who, What, Where, When & Why?
- Updated High School Report Card
- DeVry increases profits as government looks at for-profit schools
