Our New Look

We are moving to replace the frequent Maine Department of Education communications with a streamlined weekly Commissioner’s Update. This online Newsroom is part of our plan. After a short pilot period, we will switch over completely to the system.

The Administrative and Informational letters process at the Department developed years ago out of an effort to prevent the field from being deluged with information and unorganized requests from the Department, and also to ensure that communications with the field are in line with the Department policy. The system worked for a while, but there are now a number of deficiencies, including:

Too many letters are sent (and on no particular schedule)
Writing is sometimes too complex
Letters are too long, and sometimes have too many different ideas in them
There is no way to share information that might be of interest but is “less official” in nature

Commissioner’s Update

In order to address these and other issues, the Department will now issue a weekly Commissioner’s Update which will include both Administrative Letters and “dispatches,” as well as calendar reminders. There will no longer be a category of “Informational Letters.”

Administrative Letters will remain similar to the ones we already issue and will be used to communicate information about policy or law changes or something required of SAUs.

All other items will be referred to as “dispatches” or calendar items and will include many of the kinds of communications sent in the past as Informational Letters as well as some items that were not sent previously due to the restrictions on the letters.

Because some items will come up that require immediate attention, we will from time to time send Priority Notices to superintendents, but our goal is to minimize these. Any item sent in a Priority Notice will be re-included in the next weekly Commissioner’s Update.

The Newsroom

To streamline communications from the Department, we are now posting all Administrative Letters, dispatches, and press releases into the Newsroom. All items in the weekly Commissioner’s Update will also appear on the appropriate page(s) in the Newsroom. For example, a press release with information about standards will appear both on the press releases page and the Standards and Assessments page. Shortly, we will add a search feature that will search only Newsroom items, including archived Administrative Letters and Informational Letters.

What will be different?

The biggest difference is that, as noted above, there will be no more Informational Letters. In their place will be dispatches. These will appear in the weekly Commissioner’s Update and also on the website on the various “Topics” pages or as press releases. The number of Administrative Letters will also drop: we will include calendar items for forms due in a regular section of the Commissioner’s Update; unless there is important new information to share, or a new form, we’ll let the Calendar of Reporting Forms serve as a reminder of all forms due.

What do you I have to do?

Nothing. We have asked a handful of superintendents and others to participate in the pilot program so we can work out any kinks. Once it’s working, we’ll add everyone on the existing listserve to the new Commissioner’s Update distribution list. Don’t worry, we’ll continue to ask for feedback so we can make sure we are providing information in the most useful way possible. If you want, you can take a peak at the pilot issues of the Commissioner’s Update.

Oh, there is one thing: if you have been using the RSS feed feature on the Administrative Letters web page be sure to re-subscribe using the new RSS feed.

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NEWSROOM

COMMISIONER'S UPDATE

TOPICS

Our New Look