How LAist got 7,200 school choice guides into the hands of LA families

Parents have consistently told LAist's education team that they feel confused and overwhelmed by L.A.'s school system — especially when selecting the type of school and navigating the application process.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, there are more than 400 elementary schools to choose from, including magnets, multilingual, multicultural or gifted and talented programs.

To help, K-12 reporter Mariana Dale and Senior Education Editor Ross Brenneman created the School Game Plan, a series of guides designed to help families navigate their child's educational journey.

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From this series, the team produced a printed workbook based on the online guide "How to choose a school in Los Angeles," meant to help caregivers determine the best option for their child within LAUSD.

But producing the guide was only the first step — we needed to figure out how to get it into families' hands.

School Game Plan is available in print from your local library!

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Ross Brenneman

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LAist

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LAist has distributed print materials such as zines and guides before. However, this was the first time we tailored outreach specifically around a printed guide aimed at families raising children five and under.

Our efforts coincided with California's rollout of transitional kindergarten, a new grade level for 4-year-olds. That made it a timely opportunity to connect with parents of young children who may want more information about public schools in L.A.

That meant we had to think creatively and test new ways to reach families. Here's what we learned.

The goal

The goal was to distribute our printed workbook, "How to choose a school in Los Angeles," to parents and caregivers across L.A. from September to early November. With help from a grant, we printed 7,200 copies to give out.

How we did it

The guides were distributed in a variety of ways:

• Tabling at early childhood events 
• Partnering with groups to distribute on our behalf  
• Presenting at education-related meetings 
• Offering copies to organizations through a web and social callout 

Here's how we went about this outreach.

Events

We tabled at several events new to our team, from the L.A. Kids Book Festival — with an estimated attendance of thousands of families — to storytimes at local libraries drawing in about 20-30 caregivers at a time.

Ross Brenneman, LAist's Senior Editor of Education, is speaking with a mother about the team's workbook, "How to Choose a School in L.A.," at the L.A. Kids Book Festival.

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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At the festival, we spoke to hundreds of parents. A large crowd hovered over our table for hours. The reason? Our glorious prize wheel. Who doesn't love free swag? Prizes included crayons, bubbles, and slime — and everyone got a guide. That day alone, we passed out over 300 of them.

The storytimes offered a more intimate setting. We attended three events at L.A. Public Library branches to reach families from varying geographical locations – Los Feliz, Reseda and the Westchester area.

LAPL recommended these particular branches since they had high attendance.

This was the format for each session:

• Introduction. The children's librarian introduced us to the group. 
• Explain. We briefly shared who we are and what the School Game Plan offers. 
• Engage. After storytime, while the kids played, caregivers would come over and talk to us.  

We handed out over 200 guides. Parents were overwhelmingly grateful for the workbook.

LAist's education attended the Los Feliz Branch Library's story time event and passed out workbooks.

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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Presentations and meetings

The Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) invited our team to present at a couple of meetings with early childhood educators and parents.

One focal meeting was LACOE's Head Start Policy Council, made up of parent representatives from all 16 of their delegate agencies serving about 7,000 children across L.A. County. Dale and I presented the School Game Plan, including the printed workbooks.

After the meeting, people stopped by our table where we gave out 600 guides. With LACOE's help, we also provided additional guides to schools and organizations within their network. This meeting led to the highest number of guides passed out in person.

Fountain Day Preschool invited parents of four-year-olds to explore LAist's workbook, "What Is a 'Good School' and How Do You Find One in Los Angeles?"

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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In other cases, our presence at larger events opened up opportunities to have gatherings with smaller groups later on. The team met a preschool administrator at the L.A. Kids Book Festival who invited us to share our print workbook with parents of 4-year-olds. What started as a simple presentation turned into an intimate conversation where parents, a preschool administrator and I reviewed the workbook together. While that gathering was small, the conversation was incredibly invaluable.

Taking the time to sit with parents surfaced so many questions — like how to apply, how long the application actually takes and more. Many of their questions were addressed in the workbook, while others weren't. It offered better insight into how the workbook can help caregivers, highlighting parents' needs, and showed where there's still work to do on our part based on questions that weren't addressed in our resource.

Partnerships

We also partnered directly with several early childhood organizations such as Partners for Children of South L.A., Children's Institute, and The Whole Child, which collectively distributed 900 guides throughout their programs.

Our largest partnership was with the Los Angeles Public Library, which dispersed 3,650 guides to 72 library branches across the city.

Digital

During distribution, Dale and Brenneman penned a story about the print workbook, including instructions on how organizations can request copies. (Once distribution ended, the instructions were removed from the article.)

We paired the story with a social post to promote the print workbook.

A variety of groups and individuals reached out to us for copies, which they picked up from our office. This included:

• The LA Kindergarten Class 
• Parent board of Cal-Tot 
• Sherman Oaks Presbyterian Nursery School 
• Eagle Rock Montessori 
• Board of the Friends of Hancock Park Elementary 

Through this approach, we passed out nearly 450 workbooks.

Impact

Reach

In total, we distributed the guides to:

• 72 libraries 
• 12 organizations and schools (that we know of) 
• 9 events across Los Angeles 

In the community

LACOE's Head Start and Early Learning Division (HSEL) passed out the guides on our behalf at the Taste of Soul Family Festival, one of the largest free food festivals in the state.

A family attending the Taste of Soul Family Festival.

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Sherrell Jackson

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Distributing workbooks across LAPL branches helped spread the work in parent communities. A parent shared in "The Atwater Village Moms' Group" on Facebook about how "awesome" the guide was after discovering it at a local library. This showed our engagement was spreading through word of mouth, which is a major way parents find support. The post provided organic reach to a parent group that has over 6,000 members.

Metrics

A member of Atwater Village Mom's Group on Facebook posted about LAist's workbook.

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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Within the print workbook are QR codes directing readers to resources by LAist and elsewhere. During distribution, we tracked scans to LAist-linked QR codes to gauge whether outreach drove traffic.

In September, the QR codes in the workbook were scanned by 148 different people. The most scans occurred in early and late September and corresponded with our community events at library branches.

The numbers show that community events drove engagement with the print workbook's online resources.

What did we learn?

You can't do this work alone. Look for events or groups who see the value in the work and go there.

The education spaces we visited accounted for the largest in-person distribution. Educators and parents were highly engaged and interested in the guides. We learned that people want to print out the online guide, "How to choose a school in Los Angeles," but the reprints had issues. To troubleshoot the problem, we created a printable version of the workbook in both English and Spanish, which we added at the beginning of the article.

There's no one way to go about distribution. Conducting a multi-pronged outreach approach worked best – this included tabling events, presenting the workbook at educator meetings, sharing the guide online and through social media, and having organizations and groups distributing the workbook on our behalf. Each of these strategies played an essential role in our outreach efforts.

Here are some other takeaways:

• Parents really like to hear from other parents. That's part of why we included a ton of parent voices in the guide itself. We also saw this in practice at one event, where parents asked each other many questions about their school preferences. 
• Strategic partnerships amplify reach faster and more effectively than through direct outreach alone. 
• When outreach occurs in trusted, familiar spaces, families are more likely to engage. 
• Establishing partnerships and distributing guides takes real time and effort. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work — forming relationships, building trust, organizing the guides, driving across L.A. to drop off guides and hauling heavy boxes. 
• Social and web callouts fueled pick-ups! 
• Going forward, be clear on your purpose for showing up in person. Is it for connection, distribution, awareness, or all the above? 

What could we do better next time?

The education team created the workbook to help level the playing field for every child. We distributed the workbook across various communities in the Los Angeles Unified School District. However, next time we aim to expand our presence in more diverse communities by participating in additional cultural and community events.

That means we may need to offer more resources in multiple languages, depending on the need.

As we learned, it's helpful to identify and work in spaces where families are already showing up. Next time, we'll connect with more daycare and childcare providers — especially those who didn't engage during this cycle.

Several groups, including preschool and early childhood organizations, invited us to present the workbook directly to the parents they serve. Although we could only do this once, it went very well, and we're interested in participating in more gatherings like this, as well as possibly hosting larger events, such as "cram sessions," to help parents navigate the school process in L.A.

How can you help make sure there's a next time?

• Does your organization want to financially support work like the School Game Plan, which helps parents choose the right school for their child? Email: grants@scpr.org. 
• Community-focused reporting is made possible by generous supporters like you! Become an LAist member today at LAist.com/give.  

If your organization or group is doing similar work, I love chatting about all things engagement! Or, if you want to invite us to your next community event, here’s how to get in touch. Email: ssanchez@laist.com.