I decided I should chronicle a bit of the process we've begun to increase community/school and school/district relationships. This fall we're launching community Facebook pages for our district's attendance areas. In South Carolina, school districts are county-wide. Horry (O-REE) County Schools has nine attendance areas that will each have a community Facebook page. We're in the toddler stages of the process so far as the pages have been created, myself and another in the district tech department are admins of each page, and we're developing a plan for 'dissemination of the information' so-to-speak.The way I see this working (and it will most likely change to be a bit easier than my stream-of-consiousness take on things) is that each school administrator in an attendance area needs to have two things set in place:
1) They need to have a personal Facebook page.
2) They need to have a Facebook Page set up for their own school.
If I'm correct (and this post is rather preliminary) if the school admin selects to "View Facebook as Page" and selects their school page, they can not only post to their school page as the school (not as their personal user account), but also "Like" the community page.
Here's where it begins to get a bit cumbersome. Because of the content settings we're putting in place on the Community Pages, folks who post or share content to those pages must be administrators of those community pages. (Users or "likers" can post comments, but cannot originate a post, share links, or videos, etc...).
This brings me to the point of the Community Pages. Let's say there's an attendance area with one elementary, one middle, and one high school, each with individual school Facebook pages. A community page will allow those schools to share main events, school awards, or plans which may effect the community.
Our hope is that the dynamic and social features of Facebook will allow the greater attendance communities as well as county to become more involved in the life of the school district.
Again, we're only planning right now, so keep checking back.
PS - the Diigo links aren't live pages yet - they will be after August 4, 2011.
Here's another article on The Plan...
Sound off in the comments on what you think!
