Bulletin beef.
By Zoie Calora ‘23 and Bradley Edington ‘23
Courtesy of Angie Nguyen ‘24
At 8:00 p.m. students and faculty are left with two choices when receiving the US Daily Bulletin: to read or not to read.
Catlin Gabel School’s (CGS) Upper School students and faculty receive an email in their inbox six days a week which details information that pertains to events in the upcoming school days and announcements from different student and faculty-run organizations.
The Bulletin regularly covers a wide variety of topics; the next day's schedule, opportunities for community engagement, announcements from CGS faculty apprehending the student body for their behavior, and more.
However, the CGS community has seen many reports from the faculty about how the students don’t read the Bulletin and, as a result, are missing out on important information.
15 years ago, the information that is now communicated through the Bulletin was posted up on a physical bulletin board in Dant. There, students and faculty could post announcements and information. However, as the school transitioned into relying more on email for communication, the CGS faculty transitioned the bulletin board into a daily email from the Upper School Administrative Assistant.
Since this transition to email, the formatting of the Bulletin has had many changes. In its early days, the Bulletin was just a plain white document with black text. Now, after many refinements, the Bulletin takes a more formulaic approach.
The current Bulletin formatting has a set order: it starts with the Daily Schedule and Details, then the Announcements, Reminders, Community Engagement Opportunities, Extracurricular Opportunities, and, finally, Campus Resources.
Alexis Doling, the current Upper School Administrative Assistant, says she creates the Bulletin each day. “Usually people will send me emails saying ‘Hey. Can I put this announcement in the Bulletin and any information that goes along with that?’ I usually take the Bulletin from the previous day, copy it, and then change anything that isn’t up to date or add new information.”
Despite all of the work and information put into the Bulletin each day, many members of the CGS community do not take the time to read it.
CGS senior Harrison Bell said, “I can’t remember the last time I read the bulletin.”
An anonymous CGS sophomore added on, saying “I’ve never read a full bulletin… I think if it was shorter I would be more incentivized to read it.”
Another student expressed that they think that the Bulletin is “very boring and the information never pertains to me.”
The lack of attention to the Bulletin is shared by faculty, as well. An anonymous Upper School teacher admitted to only reading the bulletin twice this school year.
To determine the effectiveness of the Bulletin, two forms were sent out: one in the bulletin and one in a separate all-school email. The statistics were clear, it was substantially more effective sending an all-school email to the students than trying to reach out through the bulletin.
In the Google Form placed in the bulletin, there were 29 responses, whereas in the Google Form sent out by all-school email, there were 99 responses.
Results from all-school email survey
Only 10.1% of students that responded read the bulletin every day, with about 50% of students reading the bulletin two or fewer times a week. The most common complaints were three things: the bulletin is either too long, boring, repetitive, or all of the above. One student who read the bulletin sometimes explained how they “skim the top page or so every day, but not the full document because it's often the same information every day for a week”
Data given by Doling shows that over the last two years, an average of 59.75% of people who receive the Daily Bulletin open it.
Although no one clear picture of how to completely fix the Bulletin was offered in the forms, many respondents gave suggestions about how it could be changed. Google Form respondents suggest including “more fun colors,” “make it shorter,” and “make it less repetitive and boring.”
One idea both CGS Dean of Students John Harnetiaux and Google Form respondents suggested was adding a table of contents and fixing the structure.
Harnetiaux says “we could improve the way we structure it. Something like a table of contents with hyperlinks at the beginning would be interesting to play with. I’ve heard some feedback that it's sometimes confusing about what is new information and what is recurring.”
There is still no obvious solution in making a Bulletin that everyone reads. But with these suggestions, there is hope that adjustments will be made in the future.