Further Reflection and Continuing Questions about
Our Action Research Journey
In reflecting on this Action Research, we discovered that we were not able to determine the one best practice for school districts to utilize to market to their communities and prospective parents. The data reveals that parents seem to believe it is all important. With that in mind, our recommendation would be that school districts pick from the wide variety of communication tools out there, including a mix of traditional and web and social application based, ands find four to five of them to focus their efforts on. This number is manageable and would allow a school district to ensure that they were using these tools well to reach parents and prospective parents in as many ways as possible.
Continuing questions that came from this action research that may be of use to future researchers are:
- Is it possible to tie a specific marketing effort to enrollment?
- What limitations existed because who we targeted in this study? Parents at transition points in their child’s education (entering kindergarten, elementary to middle, and middle to high) were targeted. Would results change it different grade levels were examined?
- The impact of socio--economics has on the effectiveness of marketing strategies for schools.
- What differences exist in the efforts to market between districts that are K-12 school of choice, limited enrollment school of choice, and no school of choice. Do these results change for districts that are school of choice across county borders (so-called 105c districts)?