Book excerpt: Communicating with parents of pre-school students

This article is an excerpt prepared for Apolitical from ‘Persuasive: 40 Lessons in Communicating for the Common Good’, written by Marrianne McMullen.

In Persuasive: 40 Lessons in Communicating for the Common Good, Marrianne McMullen draws useful lessons from her career in government, nonprofits and journalism, closing each of the 40 chapters with a lesson. In this excerpt prepared for Apolitical, she describes a unique outreach campaign to reach parents of preschoolers in a public school system.

Miriam Calderon led the early education team at the District of Columbia Public Schools System in 2010, when Michelle Rhee was the Chancellor there. Under her leadership, the early childhood program experienced rapid growth. In 2010 alone they added 25 new preschool classrooms across 18 schools, serving 700 more students than the year before. They were driven by the belief that what they did for these 3-year-olds each year would have a direct impact on how many high school graduates DC would have 15 years later.

The large influx of early ed students in August 2010, though, presented challenges. Calderon wanted to be sure to allow teachers and staff time to do thorough assessments of each child during the first week of school. To do that, they needed to start in smaller groups.

Calderon shared a “staggered start” idea with Rhee, explaining that children with last names that began with A–L would come the first two days, and those with last names beginning with M–Z would come the third and fourth days. Rhee supported the plan but needed assurance that every family would be notified. When Calderon and her staff came to me for help on this communication effort, I told her the only reliable way to reach a low-income, low-literacy population is to knock on each of their doors and talk to them. Her team didn’t blink.

The early ed team formed an “Innovation Team” for anyone who wanted to help address this challenge of visiting up to 4,000 families with preschoolers. In August. In sweltering DC.

While the message and the messengers are important in any communication campaign, this campaign showed the channel—door-to- door canvassing—could be the key determinant of success.

Over the next months we talked to labor union field directors and Obama campaign organizers and found everyone in central office with any political campaign or canvassing experience.

This cross-department team learned everything they could about cutting turf, walk routes, at-the-door scripts, likely number of contacts per hour, and canvasser safety tips. They decided that they’d deliver a small gift for each child—a book—and found a group to donate them. The DCPS Office of Youth Engagement wanted to participate to communicate about immunizations. They merged their data with early ed, making it possible to have each child’s immunization information on the walk sheets. Canvassers could give families information about how to update their children’s immunizations before school began.

On the weekend of August 14 and 15, more than 50 central office staff and other volunteers gathered at ward bases throughout the city, checking in with their “ward captains” for doughnuts and walk sheets. They fanned out across the city.

In our training role-plays the day before, we practiced how to deal with hostile and confrontational parents and families. We wanted everyone to know how to manage difficult situations in a way that would de-escalate conflict. But those situations didn’t happen.

In follow-up conversations and surveys, staff spoke effusively about the powerful conversations they had with families. Staff were trained not to enter people’s homes, but many found it impossible to turn down invitations, finding themselves in lengthy and intimate conversations around kitchen and coffee tables.

Often families were initially cool and suspicious when someone they didn’t know asked about a preschool child by name. And it was usually a white person inquiring about a Black child. But then they were handed a book for the toddler and assured that the canvasser was just there to make sure the child got a strong start in the first couple weeks of school. Coolness and distance often became surprise followed by genuine warmth.

“You’re really going to every family’s house?” I was asked as I canvassed.

“We’re going to try,” I replied.

“God bless you.”

From these families we learned about everything from potty-training challenges to neighborhood dangers, from housing values to new grand- babies. This was no political canvass. This was intimate. And it was effective: the first week of school had unusually high attendance for preschoolers. While the message and the messengers are important in any communication campaign, this campaign showed the channel—door-to- door canvassing—could be the key determinant of success.