It is understandable that most people are afraid to speak in front of an audience. This fear can often be rooted in the widespread belief that people must be natural-born speakers to be effective. This fear is often amplified by the fact that they expect that their audience might not agree with them. This is especially true in the case of a school district superintendent who is bound to present his budget to people with various interests, like parents, senior citizens, and community business owners.
What the school superintendent should prioritize first in doing his presentation is to know the purpose of what he is going to do (Lesikar, Flatley & Rentz, 2006). It is clear that he would want to inform his audience about the school superintendent’s priorities in allocating the funds for the coming school year. Aside from the purpose of informing, the school district supervisor has to persuade his audience to support his priorities. In a way, he might be seeking to change his listeners’ beliefs or attitudes to agree on what he deems to be beneficial for the school district.
The next step would be analyzing the audience. The listeners are composed of parents, senior citizens, and community business owners. If he would want every one of these people to agree with him, the school district supervisor might have problems in gaining everyone’s nod. This is why the school district supervisor might be more effective if he changed each presentation to these three types of audience. For example, senior citizens might find it easier to understand the supervisor’s presentation if he prepared visual aids that have bigger letters. He should communicate with them in layman’s terms, without the business jargon. Also, he should speak loud and clear for the senior citizens who might have difficulty in hearing. For parents, the school district supervisor should explain well what’s in his budget that would benefit their children. The district supervisor could make the presentation succinct enough to be informative because some parents can be impatient because they might have other better things to do than to listen to him. Finally, the school district supervisor can create a business presentation to community business owners. In this audience, he can delve into details about the numbers and the allocation of the funds. He can even consult the community business owners to see if his budget plans are sound enough.
For the part of the senior citizens, they would be interested to know about continuing education classes where they can participate. Some of the senior citizens would want to avail of continuing or vocational education that will provide the knowledge to be able to pursue advanced training for specific occupations. The school district should be able to provide educational opportunities for older adults. The district supervisor should value the function of education as filling the needs of older people. He should also hire some aging specialists that could teach and deal directly with older adults. Like practicing educators, these specialists know how to approach older adult education depends on their professional orientation, training, and bias. While regular educators tend to focus on curricula and methods, aging specialists usually focus on life-course stages and tasks.
For parents, they should be interested to know how the budget would advance the quality of education in their district. They should know if they’re what are the academic performance of their children and what improvements are being done to remedy the problem areas. They should also know what assessments are being done to evaluate the appropriateness and quality of education received by a child experiencing difficulties. Some parents with special children would also want to know what the school district’s planned programs that would help out children with autism, blindness, and other children with handicaps. Most parents consider education as an investment in the future of their children and perpetuating or enhancing the social capital of the family. They would be interested to know if the school district is planning to hire better teachers, plans to build more classrooms, and other development programs that they deem beneficial for their children.
Lastly, community business owners would be interested to know more about the tax rates. Different school districts widely vary in the amounts of property wealth per pupil. Districts that were rich in terms of property value per pupil are given higher tax rates. This will help to raise more money per pupil for districts that were poor. Property poor districts could attempt to match the money raised by property-rich districts by adopting much higher tax rates, but this is politically and economically infeasible in most places. Thus, given that neither state nor federal aid compensated for differences in local property tax revenues, poor districts had significantly less to spend per pupil than wealthy districts. In this regard, community business owners would want to know if they will pay higher property taxes because everything will reflect on the school district budget. So there’s a possibility that they will try to scrutinize if the school district budget is justifiable and would benefit for the good of the many. Business owners would want to pay lower taxes. If they were forced to pay higher taxes, they would definitely want to know where their taxes are allocated in the school district budget.
Since these are disparate groups of people, the most effective forum for each stakeholder would be a small group discussion. With lesser people, all questions and clarifications will be addressed effectively. However, this type of forum might not be feasible for everyone, and it will take a longer time. This is why a community meeting will be the second-best option. What the school district supervisor could do initially is to divide the 3 groups to have a caucus. Each group should have a facilitator to explain everything about the school district budget. The facilitator can collate all the questions and clarifications raised in his caucus and submit them to the school district supervisor. Then, the school supervisor will convene the 3 groups and try to answer all the questions that were raised. In this case, the supervisor is more assured that the budget proposal was fully understood by specific stakeholders, and this will save him much time for the meeting. Also, confusion/commotion/vehement reactions will be insulated by the facilitators during their caucuses. Thus, the school district supervisor can address all questions at a single time when he convenes all groups at the last part of the meeting.
Works Cited
Lesikar, Raymond; Flatley, Marie; and Rentz, Kathryn. Business Communication, 11th edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2006.