--> Psst.
Did you hear that Shen is drug-testing all its winter athletes?
Yeah?
Well, it's not.
That's just another one of the rumors that have become an increasingly large part of Kelly DeFeciani's life over the past nine months.
DeFeciani is the public information officer and de facto blog master for Shenendehowa Central Schools, the region's largest suburban district, which despite its vast geographic reach across southern Saratoga County transmits scuttlebutt across the Great Plain in nanoseconds.
'The size of the district does not hinder the speed of the grapevine at all,' DeFeciani said.
In fact, the advent of online social networking utilities such as Facebook actually may have speeded it up.
And so it was with an eye toward setting the record straight that Shenendehowa launched its Grapevine blog Feb. 1 and watched as it become the second-most-visited part of the district's Web site other than the home page.
Former Guilderland school board member Peter Golden ruffled feathers last year by filing detailed accounts of his insider's perspective on a personal blog, 'Boardside: Dispatches from the Education Wars.'
But far from subversive, the Grapevine is a district-sanctioned venture.
And in addition to showing how school districts are seeking new ways to communicate with residents, it also may further signal the transformation of the blog from rebel media to mainstream.
'I think it is pretty rare,' said David Albert, a spokesman for the New York State School Boards Association, which featured the Grapevine in one of its newsletters. 'It's a great way to communicate, and one of the critical aspects of the Web is to not just communicate one way but to communicate two ways, and, certainly, the district is leveraging that capability with Grapevine.'
The blog page was designed by Web designers from BOCES. And in the months since its inception, it has morphed into more than just an anti-rumor mill.
DeFeciani fields hundreds of e-mail questions (427 and counting since Oct. 1) submitted through the site, researching the answers and mcdonalds southwest salad calories posting them or directing people via links to the answers.
The queries range from the mundane ('When is the Koda Middle School Dance?') to the muckraking (What's up with charging 30 cents for salad dressing in the Gowana Cafeteria?'). They come from students, faculty and salad crisper staff and pistachio jello salad the most frequent criticism, DeFeciani said, is that she's not answering them fast enough.
DeFeciani says she gets to most of them weeding out only the 'not nice'those that have been answered already. She said the system really is anonymous, though she is able to tell when a question is sent from a district computer but not by whom.
Some of the questioners have an ax to grind, which school board President Janet Grey said may be her only regret about the blog.
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