$100,000 for a Leon County Schools logo? When truth is lost in the insanity | Gary Yordon

I know a good bandwagon when I see one. Slide over and hand me the reins. I’ll whip those horses and gallop down the social media expressway. Yee Haw!

$100,000 for a new Leon County Schools logo? I mean c’mon! I don’t even need to recruit allies for this fight. They were all over Facebook, Instagram, and X. Instant Army! One person after the other sharing their outrage.

There is zero justification for our local school system spending $100,000 for a logo. Heck, less than zero. If that money had been used for a math teacher, we could figure out how much less than zero is, but that won’t happen now.

And why, because when you spend $100,000 for a logo, there’s just no room to help anywhere else in the system. Yep, totally outrageous and all the justification we need to throw the bums out.

And I can only imagine how relevant my outrage would be if they had actually spent $100,000 on a logo.

But they didn’t.

That’s right, Superintendent Rocky Hanna didn’t. Members of the school board didn’t. The staff at the Leon County Schools system didn’t. Nobody did.

That simple truth got lost in all the insanity. Moms, dads, government critics, angry taxpayers, bag boys, golfers, Realtors, my friend Larry and even public relations professionals, who seriously should have known better, all drank the $100,000 logo Kool-Aid and jumped on social media like it was a new mattress.

And when rumors start on social media, it takes a millisecond for the misinformation to start rolling downhill. Wanna-be logo designers grabbing internet art and throwing their logos out there. “See”, they said. “See what I could do in an hour for free”. Uh, yep. We sure did. Keep your day job.

There were actual professional graphic designers using the opportunity to promote their brand by throwing out their logo concepts. No communication with the client, no vetting through focus groups, no discussions with staff, no meetings to discuss the campaign goals and objectives. All the things a competent professional graphic artist knows should happen, all ignored because they smelled blood in the water, so they sharkened their pencils.

So, here’s what actually happened. The school district looked forward. They saw that an ill-conceived voucher system was costing our schools around $8,500 every time a student was lost to a private school. Do the math. It takes about a dozen of those students to cover the $100,000 that was spent to try and keep them.

Most estimates are about 400 who didn’t come back to public schools after COVID or left with a voucher. No math teacher needed. 400 X $8,500 = $3,400,000. And that’s the tip of the bookberg.

Now here’s the math that should concern us all. If you lose that student in the second grade, you’ve lost them for 10 years. Now do the math. Let me save you the trouble. It’s a big number, real big. Share that on Facebook.

Now spending $100,000 to try and address what is a multi-million-dollar problem that affects us all, doesn’t seem like such a bad investment of time and resources. In fact, it looks smart.

The budget for this school board initiative covered much more than the logo. Actually, the entire logo design process, which also was vetted through diverse groups, was around $9,500. That’s it. Not nearly as interesting on social media as sharing pictures of the amazing sub you got from Jimmy John’s.

So, what did $100,000 buy?

A 10-month engagement with two local marketing firms, picked after a competitive process. Also, nice that the lead firm, BowStern, is woman-owned. Here’s what they did for the better part of a year:

• Developed a brand marketing strategy

• Worked directly with multiple diverse focus groups made up of parents and teachers

• Conducted market research of parents of school children in our community, both those

in and out of public schools

• Designed multiple iterations of brand concepts

• Development of a brand rollout plan including video, communication to teachers, staff, parents and community stakeholders

• Developed a media relations and social media plan for the brand rollout.

• Development of creative assets for post-brand launch marketing campaign.

The logo was the least expensive task.

I don’t have kids in our public school system. But when you consider the ripple effect of our public school system not being competitive in the education marketplace, especially given the direct relationship between education and career success, then you see why school leaders felt this was an important process to undertake.

Look, we can have an informed debate about whether our school system should spend tax dollars to get their message out. And for sure, we can debate all day long, if we like the logo they chose.

But I’m glad our public-school leaders took the time to consider the larger issues, study them and take steps to change the educational paradigm. Our community will never answer the important questions if we’re all a bunch of kitties chasing shiny social media posts. We’ve got to be smarter than that.

Or, you can take out your frustrations on a $9,500 logo. At least you’d be upset about something that actually happened.

Gary Yordon is a host of the political WCTV program "The Usual Suspects" and president of The Zachary Group. You can find his podcast, "Banana Peel Boulevard" at thepeelpodcast.com or on the Apple, Amazon Music and Spotify platforms.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Send letters to the editor (up to 200 words) or Your Turn columns (about 500 words) to letters@tallahassee.com. Please include your address for verification purposes only, and if you send a Your Turn, also include a photo and 1-2 line bio of yourself. You can also submit anonymous Zing!s at Tallahassee.com/Zing. Submissions are published on a space-available basis. All submissions may be edited for content, clarity and length, and may also be published by any part of the USA TODAY NETWORK.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: $100,000 for a Leon County Schools logo? Truth lost in insanity