School: Meridian CUSD #223
Location: Stillman Valley, Illinois
Enrollment: 224 full-time employees, 1,700 students, 4 buildings
Website: https://www.meridian223.org/
Social Media Profiles:
Facebook: Meridian-CUSD-223
Twitter: MCUSD223
Instagram: mcusd223
We interviewed Dr. PJ Caposey, the Superintendent at Meridian CUSD 223 in Illinois to find out more about how Class Intercom is empowering their staff to share the stories that are going on in their classrooms.
Prior to Dr. Caposey’s entrance to the district, he was the 5th superintendent in 3 calendar years, there was a million dollar deficit (a 17 million-dollar-budget) and on the brink of insolvency. He found that transparent and open communication was his best bet to solve their problem and that social media was the platform to use. Dr. Caposey has now been at Meridian CUSD for 6 years and still sees the value of open communication on social media.
How Class Intercom has helped Meridian empower teachers to create social content?
We encourage teachers to share their story because parents want to see what their child is doing at school. It grows naturally because one person sees another getting recognition and wants the same thing for themselves, which becomes a huge hit with the parents.
What problem has Class Intercom helped you solve?
Once we realized that we needed social media in our district, we quickly realized that it was a major time suck for the one or two people in charge. So then we distributed it to our leadership team and made it their responsibility. However, we lost the voice of students and teachers. People would tell us something great was happening, but we wouldn’t be able to get to it until 2 or 3 days later when the event had passed. We are working on getting content creation back down to the students and realized we have a huge opportunity to give them their voice back.
When did you realize you needed a product like Class Intercom?
Our goal was to reach the majority of the district in an open and transparent way. After looking at the analytics, it became quite clear that social media could do more than a newsletter could do, and it could do more than a press release. Instead of just sending messages that people couldn’t interact with, we realized social media was a bigger attention getter.
Three ways Class Intercom has improved your school’s social media?
- We built a brand centered on our school.
- We created a transparent and open communication culture within the community.
- We created more efficiency by training more than just a few people how to run our social media.
To learn more about how you can start using Class Intercom at your school request a demo.
