School public relations in crisis situations: The perceptions of newspaper education writers and school PR directors

The purpose of the study was to compare the differences in perceptions between public school PR directors and newspaper education writers of how the PR directors actually and ideally use selected criteria for fostering strong press relations in crisis situations.;More specifically, the objectives of the study were to determine whether significant perceptual differences exist among and between public school PR directors and education writers with regard to the actual and ideal use of selected criteria for establishing good press relations in a crisis. Additional objectives were to determine whether significant perceptual differences exist with regard to the actual and ideal use of selected criteria among school PR directors and newspaper education writers with various years of experience in their jobs; among school PR directors representing school districts of various sizes and newspaper education writers working in cities with various levels of population; and among school PR directors and newspaper education writers having various educational levels.;Data were received from 71% of the 250 school public relations directors and education writers (125 from each group), who constituted the nationwide sample. Analysis of variance was used to test four null hypotheses, which were formulated from the objectives established for the study. Scheffe tests were performed to determine if significant differences existed between groups.;Major Findings. Public relations directors have room for improvement, by their own admission. Their answers show that they think they should be doing a better job of meeting the criteria for promoting good press relations in a crisis. The ideal means on the 25 descriptors were all greater than the actual means, indicating that the public relations directors are not adhering to the criteria as closely as the criteria merit. Significant differences were reported between the actual and ideal means on 20 of the 25 descriptors. The fact that all of the ideal means were greater than the actual means also shows that the public relations directors considered the criteria to be generally worthy. While public relations directors were not necessarily satisfied with their management of media relations in school crises, the education writers were even more critical. Major differences occurred in the responses of the two groups. The actual means of the education writers were lower than the actual means of the public relations directors on all 25 descriptors, indicating that the education writers were not as satisfied with the performance of the public relations directors in crisis situations as the public relations directors were. Furthermore, all 25 comparisons were significantly different. Also, the ideal means of the education writers on all 25 descriptors were greater than their actual means, and 22 of the 25 comparisons of actual and ideal means revealed significant differences, indicating that the education writers generally rate the public relations directors' performance on the selected criteria as less than ideal.;Based on these results, it was recommended that regular meetings be conducted between representatives of educational public relations associations and education writers associations at the chapter level to help each group understand the attitudes, problems and needs of the other.