July 3, 2001
It’s been a busy year for the Ulster BOCES Community Relations team. In addition to providing communication services to Ulster BOCES and four Ulster County school districts, the team also received recognition from the National School Public Relations Association
(NSPRA) for the production of various school publications.
The Ulster BOCES team is especially proud of an Award of Excellence it earned for the production of a community newsletter for the Rondout Valley Central School District. As an Award of Excellence winner, the newsletters will be among only 133 publications nationwide to be on display at the NSPRA National Seminar in Minneapolis, MN from July 8-12. Also, both the Rondout Valley Central School District and the Ulster BOCES Community Relations team will be presented with a plaque of excellence.
The Ulster BOCES Community Relations team consists of community relations coordinator Holly Brooker and community relations specialists Dorothy Wills-Raftery and Nori Gartner-Baca.
Other publications to achieve recognition include: the Highland Central School District Community Newsletter and the Highland Central School District Special Budget Newsletter, Awards of Merit; the Ellenville Central School District Calendar, Award of Merit; the Ulster BOCES Annual Report to the Community and the Career & Technical Center Program Guide, Awards of Merit; and the Ulster BOCES Spotlight Community Newsletter, Award of Honorable Mention.
The Ulster County BOCES Community Relations team provides participating school districts with a variety of services to enhance their communication and public relations efforts. By utilizing a skilled team of public relations professionals with specialties in marketing, journalism/writing, graphic arts, and photography, participants of this cooperative service benefit from the efficiency and effectiveness of a planned and targeted communications service. The team can handle all aspects of creating publications for a school’s internal and external audiences, including newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, event programs/journals, and presentations. Other services that can be provided are the development of news releases for local newspapers, TV, and radio; internal communications; and the development of student and staff recognition programs.
In addition to saving districts’ resources on the purchase of expensive design equipment and software needed to produce school publications, the Community Relations team also saves districts’ time and money through the strong relationships they have built with many area service providers, which foster a smooth production schedule and generate economical printing quotations. Districts also benefit from valuable relationships with local media that have been built and nurtured on the basis of trust and respect. The service can even handle the details of preparing and delivering the bulk mailing of the finished projects to the post office.
“Public schools today recognize that they belong to and derive their strength from the people of the community; and for a community to be supportive, the residents must be knowledgeable and interested in the aims and efforts of the district,” says Mitchell. “Our goal is to kindle that interest by working to create effective means of keeping the community knowledgeable of the district's activities.”
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