Schools advertise to stem losses

Jim Vieira can tell each year when the TV ads for Northwest Pennsylvania Collegiate Academy start airing.
That’s when people start calling for information, said Vieira, the interim dean.
If you get Time Warner Cable, you might have seen commercials this fall advertising Collegiate Academy and McDowell High School.
In the Erie area, McDowell and Collegiate Academy are at the forefront of public school self-promotion. Each high school has been using television ads for several years to attract and keep students as well as the money that would go with them if they chose to attend charter schools.
“The reality of education today is that, even as a public school, we have to promote ourselves,” said Michael Golde, superintendent of the Millcreek Township School District, where McDowell is the only high school. “Education is much more competitive than in the past. We need to self-promote and tell people what we have.”
Rich Bagin, executive director of the National School Public Relations Association, said public school advertising is “more prevalent than it’s ever been in the last seven or eight years.”
He said schools usually advertise because they’re trying to bring in students, and money can be tied to enrollment.
Bagin also said that more specialty types of schools have arisen in the past decade and they want to get the word out about what they offer.
At Collegiate, it’s a four-year college-preparatory magnet school that was ranked second in Pennsylvania by Newsweek, has a motto of “pride, honor, respect” and a vision statement of “always reaching higher,” and had a senior class that received $16 million in scholarship offers.
Conveyed in a 30-second spot, those messages cost about $2,000 to air about 280 times on a variety of Time Warner channels for 10 to 14 days leading up to the school’s Dec. 6 open house, Vieira said.
McDowell spent $3,000 for 536 spots, also on a variety of Time Warner channels, around the school’s Nov. 9 open house, said Erika Howland, spokeswoman for the Millcreek district. The district’s own cable access channel also is used to run promotional programs.
In the 30-second ad that ran on multiple channels, students said they chose McDowell because of the performing arts, the variety of people, the academics, the activities and athletics, and the “small learning communities and big opportunities.”
The 2,400-student Millcreek high school consists of two buildings: McDowell for grades 11 and 12 and McDowell Intermediate for grades nine and 10.
Golde said the advertisement dispels misconceptions that arise because of McDowell’s size. He said people might feel such a big school could be impersonal.
“And that really isn’t the case,” he said. “We have opportunities for students to connect in much smaller groups and activities, really school-within-a-school opportunities.”
Countering negative impressions is one reason schools advertise, said Claus von Zastrow, executive director of Learning First Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based partnership of national education associations dedicated to improving learning in America’s public schools.
“The issue is more that the perception is out there that public schools are worse,” von Zastrow said.
Worse than the private, charter and cyber schools that Millcreek and Erie officials said they’re competing with.
“Our advertising targets students that might otherwise go to other schools or cyber schools,” Golde said. “We want to make sure they are aware of the programs that McDowell has, and its advantages.
“And obviously, it’s an advantage for the district if students stay here, or come here,” he added.
The advantage can be financial.
Not only do Erie and Millcreek have to pay when their students attend nondistrict charter schools, but the districts also face the possibility of not getting as much extra reimbursement from the state.
The Erie School District is spending $9 million this school year in tuition for Erie students in all grades who choose to attend charter schools, including cyber schools, business manager Rick D’Andrea said. That translates to 4.5 mills of tax, with each mill costing the typical property owner about $70, and includes about $1.2 million for cyber charter schools competing with Collegiate, he said.
“It’s a huge expense,” D’Andrea said.
He said calculations for state reimbursements take into account a district’s average daily membership, or ADM, and weighted average daily membership, or WADM, which are averages taken over a whole school year to give a picture of how many students were enrolled.
“We don’t lose money if we lose a lot of kids to parochial schools or charter or cyber charter schools,” he said. “But we can get more money over our baseline if we increase our ADM or WADM.”
Districts also receive tuition money when their schools are chosen by outside students.
Non-Erie students pay $3,100 a year to attend Collegiate Academy, D’Andrea said.
Non-Millcreek students pay about $7,500 in tuition to go to McDowell, Howland said.
The majority of Collegiate’s nearly 870 freshmen through seniors are from Erie, Vieira said. However, students are accepted based on their academics rather than their address, he said.
Admission requirements include a minimum grade-point average of 3.0 and national standardized test scores at the 75th or higher percentile.
Vieira said the school usually has a waiting list of about 40 for the freshman class. Collegiate receives nearly 500 applications a year and accepts between 200 and 235 students, he said.
Collegiate Academy runs its recruitment ad before its open house to let parents and students hear about the school.
Vieira said the ad’s target audience is middle school students and their parents.
“I think parents are becoming more and more discerning,” he said. “They’re looking for the best educational setting for their son or daughter.”
Parents want to make well-informed decisions about their children’s education and are already looking for information when students are still in sixth or seventh grade, Vieira said.
In some areas, parents who traditionally paid to send children to private schools are considering public ones because of the economy, von Zastrow said. TV ads can be a way of letting people know what’s available.
“It may be public schools are seeing an opportunity to remind people of the original public option here,” von Zastrow said.
At Collegiate Academy, that option includes 22 advanced placement courses, such as AP physics, literature and composition, and U.S. history. Classes are either AP or honors level. Dual enrollment courses at local colleges and universities are offered. The school has an Academic Sports League team that’s won at the state and national levels and more than 25 extracurricular activities.
At McDowell, students can take Mandarin, Spanish, French and German languages. The performing arts curriculum features music, dance, theater and production classes. A “concurrent college program” allows students to earn a year of college credit by the time they graduate. Junior ROTC, AP courses and sports, including ice hockey, also are available, officials said.
“There are taxpayers in the community who are not entirely aware of what their tax dollars go to support,” Golde said. “Our advertising really is to promote what we have in this school district when we ask people to pay their tax bills.”
Letting the public know what goes on in classrooms is a reason another Erie school advertised in the past.
Central Career and Technical School ran commercials before its January open house for three years on Time Warner, said Dave Kranking, director of career and technical education for the Erie district.
“The public doesn’t really know what this school offers,” Kranking said. “Programs have changed over the years. Some are unique and very specialized.”
They include intelligence studies and horticulture.
The school only stopped the commercials when Time Warner expanded and the ads were running all over Erie and Crawford counties, Kranking said.
“We decided the cost could be put into other advertising that we do that targets city households,” he said.
This year, the school sent out a letter to all students — public, private and parochial — in grades six through eight in Erie before a November open house, Kranking said. Another letter, about how to register, will go out to parents of public and private school eighth-graders in January, he said.
Von Zastrow said schools around the country are getting the notion that they have to reach out to communities, sometimes in new ways like TV ads.
He said it’s important to remember that “the public schools are the public’s schools,” and districts should let people know what their buildings have to offer.
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