As a result of President Obama’s ESSA legislation, states nationwide are looking to local stakeholders to contribute to decision-making processes regarding education. But bringing together educators, parents, local government officials, youth and community organizations from across the state was a huge challenge for Alaska — especially while faced with a $4 billion budget deficit and traveling freezes.
To overcome these obstacles, the Alaska State Board of Education turned to a digital platform called Powernoodle to engage and connect stakeholders via a series of interactive webinars.
Beginning in February, weekly webinars were launched over the course of five weeks to educate and engage a 43-member advisory committee composed of local teachers, superintendents, parents, Parent Teacher Association members, National Education Association members and business leaders, to name a few.
Education Specialist Bernie Sorensen was hired as an external consultant to facilitate the virtual platform's rollout.
“Webinars are [typically] snoozers!” Sorensen said. “We sat down and Powernoodle helped us create questions and created a process using webinars as a platform to do the less engaging piece to help people understand the law. Educate, inform, clarify and then engage — that’s how we ran each webinar.”
Committee members were encouraged to anonymously write in questions via a chat mode, and submit feedback, insights and ideas regarding ESSA issues. That information was then collected through Powernoodle and presented back to committee members to “close the loop” and build consensus.
So far, the results point to success: After just five weeks, the Alaska State Board of Education collected more than 3,000 ideas, insights and evaluations with a 95 percent participation rate from the advisory committee.
As a second phase of the project, the state will use another decision-making tool to sort through trends, implement voting, reporting and identifying emerging voices to determine what stakeholders value as it relates to Alaska’s education system and ESSA. From there, statewide priorities will be set based on consensus from stakeholders, and a plan will be submitted to the federal government.
While the virtual process has boosted efficiency levels, Sorenson said it has also resulted in major cost savings for Alaska, yielding a 440 percent return on investment.
“Unique to almost every state, in Alaska a good 90 percent of people have to get on a plane to have a meeting. To bring a 40-member group together, we’re talking about approximately $50,000 just for a meeting,” she said. “When we did the ROI for this, we calculated that and the number of meetings we would need to accomplish this — plus, add the fact that you’re taking people out of the classroom. Now they can do this in the evenings. It’s just good practice in terms of not being out of your building any more than you need to be.”
It’s clear that this approach has worked for Alaska, said Sorensen, who foresees that other states will likely implement similar cloud-based technology to better reach and engage stakeholders in the future.
“Would this be valuable to others? Absolutely," she added. "What you can do in an hour’s time is what usually would take me a three-hour workshop to do. There is efficiency and then you add anonymity and the idea that you’re collecting and analyzing the feedback. The buy-in gets pretty high with this."
In Alaska, education officials want broad stakeholder engagement, Sorensen said, noting that such a thing really is the future of stakeholder engagement.
"I don’t care whether you’re in education or business,” she added. “This plan will have their stamp and voice in it. The only way to do that is to begin to create processes that allow for an organization to reach out in a broad way. A platform like this allows that to happen.”
