New Elementary School Name Community Engagement Project

Published June 4, 2022

As part of Prince George County Public Schools' adopted polices, the Prince George School Board is tasked with "soliciting and accepting input from the public regarding the names of schools and school facilities but reserves the right to make the final decision regarding the name of any school or school facility."

At the time of this project in April 2022, the school division's new 850-student campus was approaching substantial completion and the School Board voted to move forward with beginning the process for determining the new elementary school's name. Working alongside the Division Superintendent, Michael Campbell developed a plan for soliciting comments from our community, ensuring as many stakeholders were aware of and could participate in the survey.

Planning

In his role as the district's Communications and Public Relations Coordinator, Campbell assessed all the available platforms the district could utilize as avenues to share the survey, including:

• Division website (http://www.pgs.k12.va.us), and connected child pages, e.g. school-level pages
• Division social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter)
• Division-wide automated communications (all-call) system, 
• Internal messaging to employees
• Paper flyers
• News release to media partners

Following discussions with the Division Superintendent, a communications plan was developed and implemented upon the submission period's opening on May 2, 2022.

Implementation

• On Monday, May 2, the online form was published to the division's website. A tie-in article with links to the survey was also published on the division's website and all school websites (1)
• Posts to the division's social media channels were made beginning Monday, May 2, through the duration of the survey period. Posts were scheduled at different times during the survey window to try and capture different groups at different times (2)
• Printed flyers were posted at: School campuses, School Board Office, Prince George Government Building, Prince George County Library (3)
• A news release was shared with the local news media via email. WWBT NBC12 News and The Prince George Journal (4) newspaper shared the information with their individual audiences 

Outcomes

The submission period ended on Friday, June 3, 2022, and the online form was closed to the public and paper submissions were no longer accepted after that time. Results were provided to the Division Superintendent for further research and distribution to the Prince George School Board. This campaign saw the following outcomes:

• ### submissions were made during the month-long response window
• Across approximately a half-dozen social media posts, the following results  were seen on the school division's Facebook* page.
  • Link Clicks: 742
  • Facebook Shares: 66
  • Post Reach: 9,394

*While Twitter posts were made during this campaign, the district's account was only one month old and had only three followers at the time.

Add further information once the survey ends 

Assets from Campaign

(1) - Online Form Created for the Survey

(2) - Example of Social Media Posts

(3) - Flyers Created, Distributed in High-Visibility Locations

A flyer posted at the county government administration building on the first floor near the front entrance and elevators A flyer posted on the front window at the main entrance to the county school board office.