Getting the Staten Island Advance to Publish Good Stories About IS 49 June 17, 2008

Earlier this year, our school endured some bad press about a boy who was injured and a comment our principal made about the incident. While this event could have happened in any school, the SI Advance published stories that put our school in a bad light. The stories were newsworthy and the paper had every right to publish them.

However, six months later, that boy is back and is a productive student in our school community and our school has seen a number of positive events that have gone unpublished, despite many e-mails and phone calls to the Staten Island Advance.

Since our bad press, our school has:

Won first place in the MOUSE Squad of the Year competition
Took first place in the Time Warner Cranial Crunch trivia competition
Won 8th place in the FIRST Lego robotics tournament for NYC
Improved our math and ELA scores
Has been removed from the city’s persistently most dangerous list
Opened a new media center

A colleague and I have tried to get a reporter to come to our school and write about some of these “positive” events, but they have not returned our e-mails or phone calls.

However, if you really want to get some good press about your school in the Advance, you can announce it during a PTA meeting and send the notes to the paper.

Below is a scan of the Staten Island Advance “meetings” section from Wednesday, June 11, 2008: