Iowa City School District Launches Community Engagement Website

The Iowa City School District has released a new website designed to gather community engagement. It will be interesting to see how well this works as the school board the district administration tried to improve transparency and communications with the diverse Iowa City school community after years of controversial issues.

You can read more about the website below and watch the video of Superintendent Stephen Murley as he describes the website and its purpose. I'm not sure if it's just my computer, but the volume on this video seems very low, so if you don't here it right away you may want to turn it up.

From District Media Release

Iowa City Community School District is pleased to announce the launch of www.EngageIowaCitySchools.org a new comprehensive community engagement website, developed by MindMixer, where parents, teachers, students and community members can collaborate on ways to make Iowa City community schools better learning environments.

Engage Iowa City Schools allows participants a chance to suggest new ideas, second others’ ideas, expand upon existing ideas, give feedback on initiatives and collaborate with the leadership of Iowa City Schools on a variety of topics online anytime, from any computer.

“We want to reach out to as many district stakeholders as possible, and to do so we are expanding the we way gather input on important issues impacting the district,” said Stephen Murley, Superintendent of Schools. “We hope to hear from a larger diverse cross section of people who may not otherwise attend traditional public forums.”
Some of the topics currently being discussed on the site include:

·       Possibility of putting cell phones towers on elementary schools

·       How to motivate students to walk or bike to school

·       What can be done to improve the school lunch experience
Engage Iowa City Schools measures and tracks participation, identifying the most interested community members and most compelling topics. The tool makes it easy for administrators to communicate with participants, thus receiving measurable results and invaluable insights from feedback posted to the site. The website is also multi-lingual allowing for even broader participation.

Nick Bowden, CEO of MindMixer, says,“ Our tools go beyond just technology. Our mission is to build community contributors. Ideas, voices, and perspectives are shared to facilitate deeper and better conversations that yield actionable insights and a stronger community.”

As part of its service, MindMixer consults and collaborates with clients to identify issues that are critical to stakeholders in order to update topics and content for their websites.