COMMUNICATION

Communication is something I believe to be extremely important when looking to acquire the resources needed to maintain a top-notch school district. After the last bond was soundly defeated the school committee immediately embarked upon another bond proposal. However, the only attempt to communicate with the voters was in a wide open survey, that could have been answered by anybody, any amount of times, and had no scientific or statistical value whatsoever. Even members of the school committee said publicly that they could not accurately draw any conclusions from the survey. And there has been no attempt to get information sent directly to the voter’s mailbox to try and figure out what the voters did not like about the last bond, and what they might support with this bond.

There are multiple avenues I would use to reach out frequently to every voter in North Kingstown to keep them informed. I often hear we have things on a website, or we have a Facebook page, or the information is out there and available somewhere. Well, there may be some information out there, but definitely not all the information people are looking for, and it is also not very easy to find the information. My dad actually spoke at a school committee meeting last year and offered some suggestions on how to improve access to school information, after he spoke one of the school committee members talked to him and said his ideas were excellent and they would look into it and let him know what they were going to do, he never heard back from them and the website looks exactly like it did when he spoke to them. I would push to make our websites and the information on them much easier for our citizens.

Another excellent way to reach out to our citizens that was suggested by the asset management committee, in February of 2023, months before the last bond, is to use inserts in the water bill. The last two water bills have included double sided, full color flyers from the recreation department, with a ton of information about their events and programs. I would absolutely utilize this to keep our citizens informed. By including a school department flyer in the water bill, we could give every household detailed information at least once a quarter. This would cost almost nothing. This would let everybody in town know what’s going on and give them an opportunity to weigh in long before a bond goes to vote or a policy is approved or a substantial amount of money is spent on any project.

If we had communicated like this when the last bond was first thought of the school committee would have had a much better idea of how little support that bond had. Approximately $1 million was spent on planning and development of the last bond proposal. With effective communication that $1,000,000 could have gone to a proposal that the voters would have supported, and we could possibly be watching a new school being built at this very moment.

The school committee must also understand voters want choices! They should have insisted that the last bond not be coupled with the public safety complex, and they’ve added insult to injury with the latest bond proposal not separating the new school from the repairs to existing facilities. Almost every single person I’ve talked to would have preferred the choice to approve them separately. And from the feedback I’ve gotten the repairs would get 100% support. A new WMS seems to have less support, because once again the entire proposal has been developed with zero communication to the voters of the town.