Public schools as interactive organizations: Developing a model of media and public relations strategies for engaging external constituencies

A case study of the Shelby County Tennessee School Systems was conducted to investigate the current communication practices of 9 White, male public high school principals in the Memphis City and Shelby County schools to determine the constituencies they communicated with and the way information was shared with those constituencies. The findings of this study revealed that principals primarily communicated with the school's internal constituencies via journalistic practices with an absence of dialogue and discussion between the principals and the school's various constituencies. The majority of principals failed to include the school's external constituencies in their communication efforts and did not interact successfully with the media. The principals did not have a systematic way of communicating with school stakeholders, and consequently, experienced difficulty regarding constituency identification, message construction, and stakeholder interaction. A preliminary model of media and public relations practices for public school principals was developed based on participants' experiences and perceptions of media and public relations communication practices with regard to the various school constituencies.