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If you look at Birmingham as a metropolitan area, you find growth.
If you look at Birmingham as just the city proper, and you find a city that has been on the decline since the mid-1960s. Birmingham peaked at 340,000 and has “slimmed down” to under 240,000. Fewer people means fewer youngsters, fewer youngsters means fewer students, and fewer students means fewer schools. By the time I was reporting in Birmingham in the mid-1990s, there was an annual discussion and tension about closing schools and eliminating teachers.
Each year, the state takes in money for the Education Trust Fund (ETF), and allocates it to the systems based on enrollment. At that time, allotment was calculated by taking the average attendance for the first 40 days of class, and then each school gets funded proportionally from the ETF.
Birmingham’s problem was two-fold. There was the shrinking of the population, but also a cultural phenomenon where parents waited until after Labor Day to return their children to school, missing several weeks.
“Just Show Up”
To combat the problem, Birmingham spent more than $100,000 on a PR campaign called (I’m not making this up) “Just Show Up“.
Now that is an inspiration!
Needless to say, the program caught a lot of heat for sending the wrong message to kids. After all, we don’t want them just showing up. We want them learning things, and becoming better future citizens. The project was already being slammed as a dismal failure before it was halfway through.
At the halfway point of the 40-day census period, I asked for the enrollment figures from that year-to-date compared to the previous year. Based on my calculations (ones which the schools lacked either the ability or the creativity to figure), Birmingham’s Board of Education “saved” more than $6,000,000 that would have been lost had the students “shown up” along past patterns.
The Smothering Blanket
The amazing part of this story isn’t that the program worked. It’s that the success almost got buried under the blanket of bureaucracy.
Because of a history of “bad news,” the entire district was locked into a strict protocol for media information. I was the beat reporter for schools, and Birmingham was notorious for being the hardest from which to get information. You had to go through an official request with the Office of Public Information, which was staffed by very nice people who were lorded over by an Assistant Superintendent who demanded to clear any and every request personally. In other words, he was doing that job too, just not very efficiently.
One morning, I realized we had just crossed the first 20-days of the 40-day measurement period, and figured we could get a progress report on what “Just Show Up” had done to enrollment. Knowing how long it took to get clearance, I put in my request first thing. Then I made a back-channel call to the head of attendance, to explain the premise and let her start working on the numbers.
We went out to get video for a story that I did not have official permission to do – and I spent the day fighting off producers who were sure that my story was a big gamble and was going to bear no fruit.
During lunch, I got the preliminary figures from my source, and figured up the financial impact on the back of a napkin. It was a stunning success, and an impressive return on investment (not to mention the impact of keeping those kids in class.)
By 3 p.m., I got official permission to speak with select employees about the attendance figures. And by the next day, other stations and the newspaper were heralding “Just Show Up” as Just Brilliant, After All.
No Safety In Paralysis
A lot of things had to happen for that story to find the light of day.
- I had enough reputation in the community to build sources where I “wasn’t allowed”
- I had a track record of protecting them, and keeping them out of trouble
- I had a track record of pulling stories off the brink, which bought me more time with producers than other reporters were allowed
- I had to break the rules
At the time I was “breaking their rules,” we weren’t even sure what we were going to discover. We might have found out that “Just Show Up” had a negligible impact, at best.
However, the same firewalls that prevent bad news from leaking out often prevent good news from getting out as well. I can understand protocols for message consistency, and the motives for “Command and Control” of messaging. But there is no excuse whatsoever for an organization to know at 1 p.m. that it has great news on its hands, and wait until 3 p.m. to give the green light to the reporter. That two-hour gap almost killed the story, and it was nothing more than the Asst. Superintendent being busy and unable to respond.
Had his staff been empowered instead of imprisoned, there’s no telling how much better the news might have been.
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As an aside, I find it amusing that the campaign was called Just Show Up. Woody Allen is famously quoted for saying “90% of life is just showing up.”