Media in the New Millennium

Posted by Melissa Vizcarra

When my parents moved to Colorado 20 years ago, I was about to enter kindergarten. We moved to Colorado about three weeks before school started, we didn’t know a soul and my parents didn’t have the faintest idea where to send me to school for a good education. Turns out, the only options I had were the two public schools in my district or to take the private school route. My academic fate ended up being influenced by a random person (now a very close family friend) who recommended the school her children attended.

I ended up attending a private school for my first year. After the year was up, I pleaded with my parents to send me to public school, mainly because all the neighborhood kids were walking to school together; pretty important stuff when you’re entering 1st grade. Point is, at the time I was the only person rallying my parents on why I should go to one school as opposed to the other.

Twenty years ago, unlike today, school principals weren’t knocking on my parent’s door with info about schools. My parent’s phone was not ringing off the hook with marketing reps from the public school system or any private schools telling them why they should send me to one school over another; there weren’t posters, billboards or mailings with information on the school systems Colorado had to offer and there sure weren’t 20-plus schools in the area to pick from.

If you wanted to send your child to public school you went with the designated neighborhood school; if you didn’t happen to like that school, you moved. If you wanted to send your kid to private school, then you looked in the phone book, called the school and hoped they had an available spot. Back then, private schools enrolled students based on reputation or reccomendation.

Things are different today. Now, schools are literally going door-to-door looking for students to enroll.

According to the recent Denver Post article by Jeremy Meyer, “marketing has become a necessity for schools to survive in the increasingly competitive world of school choice- where schools are in direct competition for each student who is worth thousands of dollars in state and federal money.”

Schools are now creating positions specifically for their PR and marketing efforts, which I think is great!  With today’s changing technology and new media practices, schools should be one step ahead of the game, and they are going to need a communications strategy in place to survive.

One thing schools need to watch out for are PR campaigns against them. With more schools opening that means more competition, which in turn means the claws will come out and everyone will be out for themselves. The chances of negative campaigning are pretty high, considering it’s already starting to happen. I just hope schools will lead by example and not let competition get the best of them.

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