Working in education has it’s risks and rewards. As the father of four kids, I know there are a lot of great teachers and in my own experience I have come across many. The problem is that those teachers and administrations just like everyone else in the world are human. It’s really easy for people to let bad judgement over take them and make a career ending mistake and do something inappropriate. Whether that is with a student, or another teacher or something that in someway associates the school with something negative. It’s doesn’t end there, it lives on in Google for years to come.
“How do you keep these things out of the news?” I was once asked by someone at a private school we were working with in a large city that had a scandal. You don’t and you can’t. You can push them down for a time but they will rear their head up depending on the popularity of the source. They will also be harder to put down if major media outlets write about the scandal.
Then what do you do. You do proactive reputation management and SEO. A client ( a very smart lawyer) once told me the time to ask for credit was not when you needed it but when you didn’t. The same is true for relevance. We create a strategic plan that builds multiple properties connected to a school’s site that when updated, keeps the results full of things we want and not scandals that make parents think your school is not safe. It’s much better to do this before a scandal breaks so that you have built up the relevance before you need it!