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Sustaining Reform
VUE Number 9, Fall 2005
An interview with Carolyn Akers,  Audio Clip 3
Executive Director, Mobile Area Education Foundation
At this point, at the end of 2005, how would you characterize the relationship between the community and the schools? Are they in fact true partners, or is there still work to do?
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TRANSCRIPT:
Oh, there's still work. I don't think you ever stop working. It's about always, continually, going back to the community and connecting. For me, when I try to simplify this and I'm talking to people, I talk a lot of times about the vision of an interstate. People have on- and off-ramps where they enter at different times. All the process stuff and just keeping the goals moving require an awful lot of reflection and an awful lot of reconnecting into different kinds of groups and different kinds of worlds. So for me, and for us in Mobile, continuous public engagement is part of the equation.
Now, I don't think we will ever be satisfied that everyone is connected and that everyone is as involved as we want them to be. I would say it's slightly improving. Education is still the number one issue in this community, particularly as a strategy of economic development. We have had lots of major new economic development announcements that have been made in Mobile County–big companies that are coming here–and a lot of that has been because we are beginning to turn our school system around. It is extremely important to those folks.
I think we have done a great job at creating a new public story. We've done not as good a job at telling it. And so a lot of the work that we are doing right now, because communication continues to be the biggest challenge, is trying to make sure that we connect with everyone and that we have two-way communication among all these different kinds of stakeholder groups and folks that want to be plugged in. I would say that our community is beginning to believe, finally, after fifty years of tearing down our school system, that we really are on to something. Of course our data is improving. And with the involvement of a little bit of civic journalism and good reporting on what the real facts are, our media has been responsive in trying to be that connection to our public at large. I would say that, most folks, when interviewed, would probably say they think we're improving.
We still have governance issues. When you live in the deep South, like we are, there are lots of issues around trust of elected officials and those kinds of things, and what we've found is that's code for, we want to hide behind the rock a little bit longer. So just look at that as, we're not going to spend a whole lot of time worrying about the elected officials, whether they're on board or not. What we've found is, they get on board really quickly when you have created a civic infrastructure and you have lots of new leadership developing and lots of not-usual suspects involved in the work. So we don't dwell on that too much.
But I think that overall, I would say, objectively, that we're moving, we feel that we're moving forward, but that we have a lot of work to do.
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