THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 15, 1995 TAG: 9511150217
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
Before School Board member Robert Williams moved to the city nine years ago, real estate agents and future colleagues urged him to look elsewhere for a home. Norfolk, he heard, was plagued with crime and other urban ills, and the public schools were second rate.
Williams, a researcher at Eastern Virginia Medical School, ignored the advice. Today he has three children in the city's schools. The naysayers, he says, were way off base.
But Williams says the negative public image persists, and he and other School Board members hope to do something about it.
On Tuesday, a committee of parents, business and civic leaders and school officials recommended adopting an aggressive public relations and marketing program to tout the success stories they said are often overlooked.
It's not only a matter of city pride: the city's future economic vitality is at stake, they said.
``Everybody concluded that the perception of the school system is a critical area for economic development and the development of our city as a whole,'' said school board member Anita Poston, who co-chaired the 35-member Image Enhancement Committee.
``It is no longer acceptable for Norfolk Public Schools, which competes with neighboring cities and private schools for students and support, to remain passive in promoting and marketing to all of its audiences . . . '' the committee wrote in its 15-page report.
With political pressure building in Virginia and elsewhere for experimental charter schools and publicly funded tuition vouchers for kids in private schools, the competition for dollars is becoming critical, Superintendent Roy D. Nichols said.
``The school system has to change the way it's doing business and respond to the needs of the community,'' Nichols said.
The school board formed the committee in response to a survey commissioned in 1993 by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority. The results confirmed that potential home-buyers are scared away by a negative public perception of the city and its schools.
More than 61 percent of 258 recent home-buyers, for instance, viewed Norfolk's schools as worse than those in neighboring cities.
Nichols said he hopes to piggyback some of the efforts onto a City Council plan to hire a marketing firm to polish the city's image.
The cost of the schools' proposed marketing program is unknown. The board cut a planned $175,000 ``community information initiative'' to $40,000 last year after public criticism that the money could be better spent in the classrooms.
KEYWORDS: NORFOLK PUBLIC SCHOOLS by CNB