Daily Progress, Monday, February 28, 2000

"Father uses e-mail, Web site to help keep parents informed"

By ERIC SWENSEN

Daily Progress staff writer

Last fall, Brian Wheeler was looking for a way to lower the size of his daughter's class at Murray Elementary School in Albemarle County, where she sat in a second-grade classroom of 27 students.

Encouraged by fellow Murray parent Kathy Verell and Sen. Emily Couric, D-Charlottesville--a former Charlottesville School Board member who encouraged Wheeler to attend county School Board meetings--Wheeler looked for ways to get involved. "There was an information vacuum that needed to be filled," he said.

After attending a Murray Parent-Teacher Organization meeting and finding "a lot of resistance to doing anything political," Wheeler took matters into his own hands. While his children gathered candy trick-or-treating in the Langford Farms subdivision on Halloween, Wheeler collected e-mail addresses from 10 fellow Murray parents.

On Nov. 2, they became the inaugural subscribers to Wheeler's e-mail newsletter, dubbed "MurrayMatters." According to that first issue, its purpose was to keep parents "informed about happenings in the community, at the school board and in the school system that impact our children."

Less than four months later, that newsletter has spawned "SchoolMatters"--a second newsletter with a county wide focus and more than 220 subscribers--and a web site (www.albemarlematters.com).

Wheeler's efforts to better inform himself and other parents have already paid off. He has helped secure additional teaching assistant time at Murray, and an initiative to provide emergency class size relief--based at least in part on a proposal by Wheeler--was included in the 2000-2001 school budget adopted by the School Board on Feb. 14.

Not part of the budget originally proposed by school Superintendent Kevin C. Castner, the class size relief initiative would spend $129,456 for three teachers to reduce some of the county's larger classes. Board member Susan Gallion said that although the board had discussed similar proposals in previous years, e-mail advocacy by Wheeler and others helped tip the scale.

"It certainly helped us to let us know that the public wanted it as well as us," she said. For Wheeler, who oversees the computer networks, databases and software development as chief information officer for SNL Securities in Charlottesville, e-mail and the Internet seemed to be a logical medium for his newsletter.

"As a computer professional, it was a logical extension for me," he said, stressing that he doesn't use any of SNL's resources for the newsletter.

Sent out five to 10 times a month, "SchoolMatters"--"MurrayMatters" is now used largely for announcements of events at Murray--mix Wheeler's opinions, meeting summaries, a calendar of upcoming events and information on items like the budget and staffing formulas, along with feedback from subscribers and county officials.

Launched Jan. 23, the web site contains the back issues of both newsletters as well as a library which includes a budget summary, proposed staffing allocations and copies of public testimony and letters written by Wheeler. The web site also contains links to the web site's for county government and schools as well as the e-mail addresses for school administrators and members of the Board of Supervisors and the School Board.

So far, the newsletter has dealt mainly with the budget process and the effect of the county's differentiated staffing formula. Under the formula, schools with higher percentages of students eligible for free and reduced price lunches--a commonly used poverty indicator--receive additional staff, which has led to larger average class sizes at schools like Murray with a relatively low number of eligible students.

The newsletter has received praise from school administrators, school board members and parents. "What I like about it is that it's a great way to get information out to the parents and get them involved and connect them to the school without having to put the time and energy in from the school's respect," said Tim Frazier, the principal at Murray Elementary School.

Frank Morgan, the county's assistant superintendent for support services, said he's received numerous phone calls from parents with questions sparked by Wheeler's newsletters. "They were good questions," he said. "My take is that any way you can get parents involved in schools and the budget process, it's a positive--and Brian has found an innovative way to do it."

Pam Starling, a newsletter subscriber and teaching assistant at Woodbrook who has followed the budget process for years, said Wheeler's newsletter has helped improve the discourse during this year's budget deliberations. "This group of parents seems to be speaking with more information and less emotion," she said. "I've seen them use that data [from the newsletter] in their presentations instead of just saying, 'This is what's happening in my child's class.'"

In the future, Wheeler's goal is to have a separate newsletter for each of the county's schools linked to the SchoolMatters newsletter. That's a far cry from November, when Wheeler said he didn't vote in the School Board elections because he didn't know who to vote for.

"I didn't want to be in that situation again," he said. "[Next time] we'll know where all the board members stand on these issues."