AUBURN - As the Auburn Enlarged City School District tackles big issues to improve its schools and student performance, its leaders want to make sure people don't forgot all the positive aspects of education going on in the district.

“You know you have to increase the graduation rate, you know all the negatives, but the community needs to hear the positive parts as well,” board of education member Karol Soules said. “They need to hear that students are making a difference and faculty and staff and administrators are working so hard to make a difference.”

To embed this idea in the minds and attitudes of the community, the board of education this year is engaging in a campaign, “We can make a difference,” to remind people of all the good the school district is doing.

A banner with the slogan and a new Auburn logo designed by high school engineering students that built a battery-operated race car is now hanging across the board table during board meetings, a sight televised to homes across the area. They are also hanging across the high school on Lake Avenue, Herman Avenue Elementary School on East Genesee Street, and West Middle School on the opposite end of the street to hit major entrances into Auburn.

Board members, students and teachers are also donning buttons that spread the same message.

“For us it's a common goal,” Soules said of the slogan. “It's a common goal of everyone who works in the district. It's also a goal of the community. They just don't want to know the numbers; they want to know where their taxes are going.”

Soules said the idea for a positive slogan came in last year in wake of taxpayers twice rejecting the proposed 2008-09 budget.

“Everybody on the board felt they had lost the trust of the community, they had lost their confidence,” she said. “So the idea was, how are we going to get the confidence back, how are we going to gain their trust back.”

During a board workshop in August, one month after Soules began her three-year term, members were talking about how they needed a slogan to focus on the positives.

Superintendent J.D. Pabis said the district already had a slogan, “We can make a difference,” Soules said.

“We were trying to find something that was a one-liner that dealt with everybody: the administration, the faculty, the board, the children, the community,” she said. “We started saying it over and over again, and that was the one line that really everyone could tie into.”

The board banner made its debut in November, and Soules spent hours in the Cayuga-Onondaga Teachers Center making buttons. Last winter, board member Susan Scheuerman approached the Auburn Education Foundation for a grant for additional banners, and the AEF's support led to the three additional banners over the schools.

Soules expects the campaign to continue to spread into the future.

“Hopefully, next year we can have more banners so every school has one,” she said.

Staff writer Alyssa Sunkin can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 239 or alyssa.sunkin@lee.net