Education Department Internship Field Experience Journal Reflection

Intern Name:
Dates:
Amount of Time:
3/1/16
2
3/3/16
30 min
3/7/16
45 min
3/8/16
1
3/15/16
1
Name and Description of Activity

ISSLC Domain
Standard 4 Collaborative Leadership (CL)

Wrote proposal for project.

Met with building principal to discuss my project proposal.
Met with our districts communication specialist and my principal to discuss the proposal.
The districts communication specialist came to the newspaper club to talk to the students about how to write
an article to be published outside of the school setting.
Reflections and Insights
When I first thought of this project, I thought that I could serve as the liaison between the local newspaper
and our school to have student work and school events highlighted. Our school has never been featured in a
town paper, and being a magnet school with students from over 36 different districts attending, this seemed
like a great opportunity to showcase what makes our school unique. I already run the newspaper club, so it
seemed like a natural extension of the work I was already doing to publish what the students were writing
about to a larger audience. As a parent, every Sunday I read the In the Towns section of the Hartford
Courant and see students in surrounding districts doing interesting things in their schools, and I thought that
other parents would be very interested in the work that our students were doing as well, especially since they
have an opportunity to send their children to our school as a choice option.
However, I was completely unaware of the complex process that is involved in order to make this happen.
Our district, like many others, has a communications department that oversees and publishes events both
intradistrictly and occasionally to the community at large. After meeting with my principal to discuss my
project, he thought it was a great idea and would bring some much needed publicity to our school. He did
also warn me that it was challenging and time consuming to make this happen which is why our school is
rarely in the intradistrict publications and has never in the local newspaper. I told him I would still like to
try, and, knowing that I was starting early enough, would have been pleased to just have one submission this
year in the local paper.
In order to have a student article submitted, I first need to have the article approved by my building
principal. Then, I need to fill out a project request form that is like a work invoice for each submission. This
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ticket goes to the communications department for review. I have found this is not as fast of a turnaround as
I thought it would be. Someone in communications reviews the article and checks to make sure that it is
edited according to the districts standards. The article is then sent to the supervisor in communications for
approval and then to the director of whichever department the article pertains: science, humanities, athletics,
social services, etc. Once everyone in the chain has approved the article, it is sent back to my building
principal for a second approval with any changes that were made. Once my principal approves the final
copy, it is sent back to communications to be forwarded by them to the Windsor Journal. I receive an email
confirmation that this has taken place. With so many steps in this process, and so much time that it takes to
make it happen, I can understand why more articles and school highlights are not sent by schools for outside
publication.

Questions
Is there a way that I can streamline my end of the process to make submitting articles to the
communications department less time consuming?
How can I involve the students more in this process?
How can I better facilitate communication within my building to alert those in the newspaper club to events
happening all over the building?

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