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Sharing Success - Diana Maliszewski, Toronto District School Board          

 Newsletters:

Newsletters are usually seen as vehicles for communicating evidence. My newsletters shared the success stories but also acted as a tool for collecting evidence as well. I joined my current school in September 2004. My predecessor in the library (the fantastic Lorna Embrey) had been at Agnes Macphail P.S. for twelve years. She supported and encouraged me to mold the library program in whatever ways I wanted. I needed to inform the students and parents about some of these upcoming changes and I thought a newsletter would be a useful way of introducing these changes and myself. I published my first newsletter early in the year. Parents and students began to approach me to discuss things they had read in the newsletter. I kept a rough tally of the parents and students that asked me about the newsletter. Newsletters were not a regular feature of our school’s communication plan but the positive reaction received caused usto work hard on publishing regular newsletters. I published one per season. This coming year (September 2005), I plan on tightening my collection of evidence via the newsletter by creating a ballot in the newsletter. Ballots will ask a question about some aspect of the newsletter. These ballots will be entered in a draw for a book prize, and it will hopefully give me a more concrete idea of how many families are reading the newsletter, rather than mere “word of mouth”.