Why every school must speak media

In this episode of Leading the Way, host Scott Gerfen sits down with John Ondo, OSBA’s media consultant, and Josh Gallagan, digital design instructor at Delaware Area Career Center. Together, they explore why media is the language of today — and how schools can use it to connect with their communities, inspire students and tell their unique stories.From using smartphones as powerful storytelling tools to building award-winning student programs, this conversation dives into practical strategies for school boards, superintendents, and educators to effectively engage audiences across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and more.Whether you’re a school leader, teacher, or board member, this episode offers insights on embracing media to lead with transparency, build trust and showcase the amazing things happening in your district.🔔 Don’t forget to subscribe for more conversations shaping public education in Ohio!

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For more resources, training and advocacy updates from the Ohio School Boards Association, visit ohioschoolboards.org.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following program is a presentation of the Ohio School Boards Association.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome to the Leading the Way podcast where we bring you the voices shaping public education across Ohio. A big shout out to our sponsor, Lincoln Learning Solutions. They offer accredited K-12 digital curriculum and support schools with flexible content and expert training for educators in all learning environments. Hey everyone, it's Scott Griffin, and we're kicking off a brand new school year with an episode I think every school board member, superintendent, and educator will want to hear. Today we're talking about something that has completely transformed how we connect with our communities, and that's the media. Not just the news or social media posts, but media as a language. And my guest today is John Ondo, OSBA's media consultant, and he's here to help us think about media in a whole new way. John, welcome to the podcast. Usually you're behind the scenes. Today you're in front of the camera.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

I'm not used to this. It's a little strange because I'm normally in the control room, but yeah, it's great to be with you to talk about this.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

You said before that media just isn't how we communicate, it's the language we speak now. That's a pretty powerful statement. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 1:13

I I think what we're talking about is it's how people are communicating. You don't communicate in Morse code anymore because nobody knows how that language works. We now communicate all the time on our phones through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and that is the language of communication. And if you don't connect in a certain way at a certain time with a concise message, it's gone. We've all we've all been on our phone and just scroll through and like this is not what I want to see or whatever. So how do you get your message across? And I think for it I I've worked with a lot of schools, and uh getting that message across for schools has been challenging because uh it's it's a whole new way of doing things.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Aaron Powell And really you say if you can't speak media, you're mute in modern conversation.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yeah, when I'm talking about being mute, it it's it's being able to quickly respond. Uh I've talked to well, uh you and I have worked with organizations that would take a week to decide what a tweet would be, because they had to run it through a board practically. That's too long. If if there is something that happens in a school system today, you need to have an immediate uh release. If you're trying to get maybe a campaign going within your school system for a new building or tell people how how the academics are improving, you can't wait weeks. It has to be up in you know 24, 48 hours maximum in this new era because people expect it now.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

So one of the things I I often hear too about uh social media content that it's just the young people who are on social media. That's that's not the case.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

I know that's not the case because my dad's on TikTok all the time. Absolutely, because uh I I'm in the consulting role and I'm in some board meetings with people who have more gray hair than I do, and and they're sitting there on their phones, they're checking feeds out. So it we commonly always associate a stereotype of young people are into the tech. Not anymore. My generation and your generation, we built this stuff and and we're just as addicted to it as anyone else. Um we we view it differently. You know, Facebook is more for our generation, TikTok is more for my kids' generation, but they're all viewing it all the time. So you've got two choices. You either continue to do things the way you've done, you know, the the uh Einstein thing of insanity, you just keep doing it the same way, or we start adapting our communication and our language to media Instagram, uh, uh TikTok, Facebook, they all have different reasons. YouTube is for long form, Instagram, short form, quick videos. Um, and and this is where a lot of times I think school boards and teachers who maybe don't quite know how to navigate this, well, get your get the kids in there and say, what are you using? What are you watching? What's good, and how could our school better impact the message? Every school has a story, and I think schools have an amazing opportunity to say, look at the heritage of our school. We we were state champions in football, or we were academic this or that. And that story should be told, especially if you want to draw more people to your district and say, you know what, we we've got something really good here. How are you gonna do it? You're gonna have to do it through social media.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Well, and you had you had told me you produced a documentary for a school district. You didn't think the students would connect with it, but they did.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

I was this is one of my favorite stories. It was actually from my own high school, and I ended up doing four or five other documentaries since then. But uh we did they they tore down the old classic building they had from the 1900s, built a new building, and I did a documentary on it, and um a lot of people thought, well, the older folks who are gonna miss the old building will really be into this. So they ended up doing a media test in the big cafeteria hall with the TVs, and they ran the documentary, and they said the entire cafeteria with all the students, the high school students went silent. They were watching it, they were they were engulfed in this because it was it was their story. It was a story about their legacy. So never underestimate the power that media has with the young people. Don't think, well, they're not gonna be interested. This this generation is craving connection, relationship, and and legacy. And uh and school board uh members, I'm telling you, get up there and lead that, and and the students will follow.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Let's shift to what's happening uh inside the classroom. You've worked with many uh school districts across Ohio. Uh what's your assessment uh of how we're teaching media, uh not just as a technical skill, but as as part of writing, arts, even athletics?

SPEAKER_00 5:44

It's uh to quote somebody else, it's the best of times, it's the worst of times. Uh there are some schools that are doing amazing jobs. I've consulted with uh Dublin City Schools, uh amazing news department they've got, as well as Gehana City Schools. Uh we I've been a part of the uh student Emmy process, and they're always there. And then a little later today, we're gonna talk with Josh at DACC. His department that he has there is one of the leading uh factories, if you will, of students who are going out into the film industry, into sports broadcasting. Um so a lot of schools are doing that part of the job really well. The thing that I really think we have to think about is uh if you're gonna open up an auto garage, you still have to know social media. You have to be able to advertise what you're doing on social media. If you're a baker, my wife does baking on the site, she has to put those pictures up on Instagram. So there is a language that we have to learn about marketing and communicating. The the stories have to be concise, they have to be very, very relevant, and they have to be very real. We've talked about being transparent and being relevant, uh, because this generation uh expects things to be real. They don't they don't when they have to start fact-checking things, they're just gonna unfollow you.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

So when you know, obviously our our districts across the state are very diverse. We have uh urban districts, we have rural districts, suburban districts, and uh budgeting and staffing and how how do how do you what would you say to a district, a rural district, let's say, that that doesn't have the staff? They might think, oh, I can't we can't do this. Uh we don't have anybody to shoot the video, or we don't what what would you say to a school district?

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Everybody in this day and age now has one of these with a smartphone. Right. Um I have shot and I've shot cinema quality documentaries and I've shot parts of them on my cell phone. Uh you have a studio in your pocket, and uh there's no excuse, I'm quite honestly, that a that a school cannot go out with cell phones and shoot stories. Whether you're doing sports, you want to talk about the kid who scored the touchdown that they never thought maybe was going to be able to play sports, or maybe the academic program, or how the band is doing something cool, or how the board leadership is looking at taking the school district into the next uh the next decade. You can do all that on a cell phone and then many times edit it on the same phone or on a very simple computer. So the technology is no longer a hurdle. So you can just grab a cell phone and get the stories right now. And and that's really that's my title I give myself with Hondo Media is I'm the chief storyteller. Every school has a story, every student has a story, every board member has a story, and those stories are really what needs to drive done through the media.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Yeah. Let's bring it to the school board level. Um how should school boards be using social media, YouTube, other these platforms uh to connect with their community and to keep people informed?

SPEAKER_00 8:44

I think the first thing the school board can do is first of all lead in the sense of saying to the principals and to the district, media needs to be a priority. It's something we need to do. I think that that helps tremendously. Um but school boards, you know, everybody has something they're trying to say. I realize school boards do have some limitations legally of things they can and cannot do. But, you know, one of the things we discuss is people always want to support a winner. It's very often I've talked with some school boards, and they're like, well, we've got a big levy, it's gonna be a big ask. We want to show the crumbling walls and the deteriorating ball and why we want to build a new school and bore people with a bunch of square footage and and like that's not the story we want to tell. We want to tell the story of how your school is succeeding, and it's limited because we need more facilities. So when you show that you're a winner, that you have a great band and you need a better band room, you've got a great sports team and you want to improve your facilities. Uh go at it from that perspective. And that's where I think boards can help lead that and say, listen, we want to tell the good things about our school district, which again attracts people to your school district. You want to you want to support a winner. And again, people aren't gonna go looking through your um your minutes on your board meeting on your website. They're gonna look at your instant your Instagram, your TikTok if you've got it, and say, Oh wow, these guys were number five in the state for academics or whatever the case may be. Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Uh OSBA itself, we have made a commitment to improve our media voice, and you've been a big help in that.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

Well, so have you. You've led a lot of that charge.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah, so that's why we're doing this podcast. Uh, and we provide a lot of things now with our legal ledger sidebar, um, our OSBA forum, uh ways that we connect with our members through these resources. Uh can you tell us a little bit about the content and technology, how how OSBA is now using this to help districts communicate more effectively?

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Yeah, and really this is a microcosm of what schools can do because a podcast, an audio podcast, is very easy and fairly inexpensive to do, and it's a great resource that you can put out because people have time when they're driving a car to listen to a podcast. So, again, what we're doing with OSBA is you know, we're doing these video podcasts. Some people want to see our faces, I don't know why, uh, but other people want to listen to them in the car, and uh they can listen to it and it it gives us a resource. Um, so uh the thing I'm excited about is we kind of came in, uh we've had this great studio here for some time, um, but we modernized it a little bit, updated some equipment, and we can do much more more efficiently with the new digital technology that we have here. So it's exciting. We we we're talking about maybe more programs. We just did a live uh webinar just recently. We're we're looking at doing more is to be interactive. So uh we realize that you know there's a place for magazines, there's a place for good old-fashioned mail. Right, right. But most people, when something happens and at at broad and high and they decide something at the state legislative level, again, we have to have a program up the next day to say funding just changed, this law was just changed. So we've set our facility up now to turn around quickly. So we've added new cameras, we've added uh some set improvements, and uh really excited about some of the things you're gonna see here on OSBA, both uh see and here.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

So, John, as you talked about, some school districts are investing in this. We're gonna have Delaware Area Career Center, uh Josh, the director of their program, there on this podcast uh here in a minute. Um this is a pretty exciting resource we have here, and uh other districts can can get this too, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:22

When I consult a lot of nonprofits and schools and so forth, I typically say it's a $10,000 to $20,000 investment to put together a studio that's pretty reliable. And if you want to do remotes and so forth. Um so for some schools, that's out of their budget range and good at others are building it and doing a lot of amazing things. One of the things we can do at OSBA is this studio and this facility is available to our members and anybody who's interested in so if you don't have that money, you could come in here with maybe students or with your board and and produce something. One of the things we try to do as much as possible with not only content production, but consulting and trying to help people tell their stories. And uh so I've been very pleased to work with you and OSBA as we continue to improve the facilities here, and I hope we can help other school districts that are looking for this kind of drink, because this is a great organization that we can help people with.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Well, coming up as promised, we're gonna talk with Josh Gallaghan. He is the digital design instructor at the Delaware Area Career Center. Uh, we're gonna talk about his program, uh nationally recognized program, so stick around.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Let's start by telling us about you and how long you've been at the Career Center and just how has it changed since those early days?

SPEAKER_02 14:46

Absolutely. This is actually my 20th year here at DACC. Um, and I I gotta be honest, um, I I also tell my students if you find a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And I can't believe how fast that 20 years has gone. Um, I also can't believe they paid me to do this. I love what I do. When I first started at DACC, um DACC was kind of emerging from that mold that all career centers and CTE, uh career technical education centers have, that it's a place where kids that were the undesirables went to. And we were still kind of in that um that mold at the time. My first class had eight students in it, eight seniors and maybe 15 juniors. And so I've had to build this up over the years, um, over time. And the way we did it, obviously, this is a very, you know, it's a very interesting subject matter. I teach digital design. I'm teaching video, audio, animation, photography, websites. And our IT floor has five different programs. There's an app development program and programming. There is a cybersecurity program, and then we have, I'm in the digital design program. We have three classes of digital design. In the digital design, we have six different areas we focus on. We focus on graphic design, photography, audio production, video production, animation, and website design and UX design to an extent. Um, those are the six areas we focus on. And students love and are drawn to that. I mean, they, you know, they basically are born with a device in their hand and they're doing these creative things. So it's just an outlet for students to do that's not math or science or their traditional subject, if you will. Um, so it's easy to build that up. We're to the point now, we started with eight seniors and 15 juniors. 20 years later, we have three different classrooms that are full with 28 students each and a waiting list every year to get in. So it's just been um a real amazing journey. Um, and I and I couldn't have done it by myself. I have amazing support uh from administrators, and I have two other uh co-teachers, um Will Roland and Jeff Fuller, that have come alongside and helped really catapult this thing to where it's at now. And and I believe we have a really amazing program here, and it's because of the support and the students that we have.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Yeah, and you've uh you talked about successes. Students uh have been in competition, right? And you've had some uh success at the national level.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

That is correct. We compete in uh Business Professionals of America. Um that's a career technical student organization. Education is full of acronyms, that's a CTSO, we call it. And our students, it'd be kind of similar to their sports at their homeschool. And it's done in school, though, and all students are required to participate in a project. And our students start out with a local competition that's rooted in something we teach them. So they can compete in audio or video or podcasting or animation or 3D modeling. They do a local project. From that local project, we'll have a local competition, and those students will then advance to a regional competition. From there, students advance to state, which usually takes place sometimes in sometime in March in Columbus at the convention center. Um, if students advance from state, they go on to the national competition, and that's usually held in some kind of cool place. Like last year, we ended up taking almost 50 students to Orlando, Florida, to Disney World, and they got to compete and had a couple teams last year. We had a video production team that won the national championship and a computer animation team that won the national championship. And we've had several national championships throughout the years in different areas, and multiple state champions throughout those 20 years as well, as well as regional champions too.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

So, one of the themes of this episode is how school districts tell their story. Um from your perspective, how do your digital design students contribute to DACC's story?

SPEAKER_02 18:33

Absolutely. Um at DACC, we strive for four things. We want to empower, prepare, inspire, and connect our students with the careers that they would like to have. And so basically, I think every day, our superintendent, Jay Perota, he challenges us to take those four principles, empower, prepare, inspire, and connect, and apply those to our lessons as a learning organization. So I feel like if we can empower and prepare our students and inspire them and connect them, um, they're going to have a much greater opportunity to be successful after they leave here. Um, but that becomes our story with the students while they're here as well. I think one of the main things is, one of the main things is the students love to be here. They come to class every day and it's three hours long. And you're like, oh my goodness, you're in a class for three hours. You think kids would get bored and want to leave. No, our students at the end of the day, a lot of times, are not ready to go. They want to hang out more. They we have an esports program that students will stick around for. Um, our students love to be part of what we're doing here. Um, and I think that lends itself to career and technical education in general as a whole, um, because it does uh focus on the interest of the student versus like we want you to learn this. Well, we do, but which it aligns with their interests as well. And I think that that story that the student is doing what they love to do, and they're never working a day in their life, really ties in well to what we're doing over here.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Could you share an example of a project where students and creativity you know really made a difference in how people view the career center?

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Absolutely. Um so I believe that we have a lot of projects, and we all of our projects are real, we try to make a real world. That's real world examples of projects that a student might do if they were an employee of a company or um if you know that wasn't their career. Um so, for example, every year we have a logo design competition, and our we'll teach our students logo design, we teach them Illustrator and Photoshop, we teach them how to concept and go from pillar to post basically and how to design a logo. Um, and we'll bring industry in, we'll bring industry professionals in. They will actually judge our students and provide feedback to the students based on the logos that they're creating, and they will pick a set of logos that they would move on if they were actually purchasing a logo for their company uh to use. Um I think that's one example of what we do. We like to also have every year a mock interview process where we bring real uh employers in, teach students how to mock interview and how to how to conduct an interview as a professional. Um, and at the end of the year of their senior year, kind of the body of work for their two years here, we culminate with something we call the gallery. And the gallery is an event where every one of our students presents in our large group room their body of work for the past two years, their portfolio. And we have industry professionals as well as uh educational leaders throughout the college and high school settings come and they present uh to those individuals, and our students then get a real life opportunity to present their body of work to uh someone that they're gonna present it to. Potentially, some of these people come and can can employ our students too. We've had examples where um these folks have come in and uh taken our students and employed them here locally based on what they saw at those gallery um events.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Well, that's that's phenomenal. I know we have a story coming up in our OSBA Journal magazine here this month in August. Uh with Ohio High Point Career Center. And they were they were mentioning that you know some companies they're not finding uh employees who have these creativity type skill sets. Are you seeing that too at the career at your career center?

SPEAKER_02 22:16

Yeah, so we we really focus on two different pieces. We obviously want our students to have technical skills. What we hear employers tell us often is that students don't have the soft skills. Communication, negotiation, some of those things that you you you just maybe, you know, because of lack of brain development of the age group, right, and lack of prefrontal cortex development, students aren't going to naturally have executive functioning skills. So we really try hard to implement those soft skills right in like critical thinking, right in with the other skills, the technical skills that our students need and have to be successful in their careers.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

So not every student comes into this program knowing their path. How do you see students discover their own voices and passions while they're in digital design?

SPEAKER_02 23:05

Yeah, we really try to expose our students to a lot of different things in terms of the different career areas. We start at a foundational level and get them all to like a, if you say like level there's 10 levels, we get them to a level three or four in every one of those areas so that they're competent, then they kind of figure out in their junior year, I really like to, I'm really good at doing this thing. And then their senior year, our projects are all based on they can take the one that they love to do and within our parameters of our projects they can expand their knowledge base on that one that they really love based on um you know some of the projects that we give them. So they have a lot of they have a lot of ownership in what they're learning and the areas of interest that they want to learn in their senior year. And we start everyone out so at the foundational level, they're all getting those base skills that they need in terms of the technical skills.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

So Josh, real quick, uh tell me one of your success stories from DACC.

SPEAKER_02 23:57

So I I love when I see a student you know go on and really succeed um and connect themselves to industry based on some of the connections they made here, being inspired here and we've empowered them to do those things. One of those examples is Hannah Hannah I'll just say Hannah Hannah was a uh 2013 or 14 grad and she um just turned 30 here recently and she was in our program as a uh she came in here and she would say I don't even know how to turn a computer on Mr. G and we got her to the point where she's really smart she was very engaged and um she gave everything she had right by the time she left here she'd been to two national competitions she was a state champion she went to the Modern College of Design and was the Valivictorian at the Modern College of Design then she became one of the youngest if not the youngest creative director at the history of IBM and she works for IBM Resource now as a creative director. And I you know really feel like if she had not come through this this pathway she may not have found that that passion discovered her abilities and skills Josh uh before we let you go I one thing about this podcast we're talking about the media being the language of today's culture uh what are some of your thoughts on that absolutely I mean I I always say this that you know the younger generation they're born with an iPad in their hand they really are um communication hyperconnectivity collaboration um I always ask my students when we when we start recruiting them I'll ask them to raise their hand I'm like how many of you have done audio video animation photography and they all their hands go up and it's because they have a device of some type right so really what we're doing the devices a lot of times that allows them to explore those creative areas but then what we hope to do is when we bring them in here we expand that language that you talked about and we provide them with a process to supplement their creativity out you know areas that they're in. So for example, you know if you use your phone to make a video well we're gonna bring you in here we're gonna show you how to use this professional equipment and we're gonna give you a process our process we call it the 4D process it's discover, define, design and deliver. It's something we've gathered from design professionals throughout our time here and it helps our students kind of slow everything down and look at things in the different areas. And by the time they leave here they've done that process with every project they do so many times that their creativity is just it's enhanced because now like a Steve Jobs you're thinking about the end user the end result. An iPhone changed the world but why? Because they made it simple they made it more accessible and it's sleek it looks great and it always works for the most part you know what I mean and so we're we're challenging our students to think on that 40 process to be process focused um so that their craft they're great at their craft when they leave here and they've done that process so many times that it becomes second nature and they're just making amazing end results and end products because of that process. We would say the process is the product. One final question before I let you go uh looking to the future what excites you most about where digital design at Delaware area career center is headed yeah absolutely it's funny because I know there's people talk about AI all the time and there's different thoughts there's you know uh some people are pro AI some people are not you know necessarily liking it we actually I brought my juniors in on the first day and I said let's talk about AI and I expected to get all kinds of different things and there were a lot of opinions but what I will say I was most impressed with was this group of juniors that I brought in their intelligence the way they communicated how they have done research they have a lot of knowledge and it's it's because like you said the media is the language of this generation I'm very excited about not the AI so much the AI is fine but I'm excited about the folks that are going to be engineering and creating the solutions around AI and around the other technologies that are coming out now. And I'm excited about who's going to be engineering those things and running those things and helping us all to adapt our culture to those different technologies.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Josh thanks so much for uh spending some time here on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Thank you so much for having me and have a great day.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

And thank you to our listeners for watching be sure to hit the subscribe button and we'll see you on the next episode. Big shout out to our sponsor Lincoln Learning Solutions they offer accredited K 12 digital curriculum and support schools with flexible content and expert training for educators in all learning environments