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The Education Foundation of Collier County wants to invite the community to talk.

In the process, it hopes to learn how public education can be better.

The Education Foundation has contracted with Collaborative Communications Group to conduct a study about the community and how the community can improve public education.

The goal is that once Collier County residents articulate what they want out of their community, they will be able to discern what they want from the community’s public education system.

“We’re very excited about this project,” said Susan McManus, president of The Education Foundation of Collier County. “This is a natural, logical partnership. It will tell us what we want and what we believe in as a community.”

Similar studies have been launched in Orange County (Orlando) and in Mobile, Ala. The purpose is to reconnect the community to the schools and to remind community members that everyone has a role in making the community and schools thrive.

The Education Foundation has chosen a steering committee, which will be comprised of 12 to 18 members and will be responsible for reaching out to the community to gather and share the community’s vision for education.

“The steering committee is representative of all the constituencies of the county,” said Lisa Church, vice president of the Education Foundation.

The steering committee will be responsible for leading facilitated conversations around aspirations for the community and schools. Those conversations fall into one of two categories: Neighborhood conversations and educator conversations.

The neighborhood conversations will be 30 to 50 discussions involving a variety of interests in the county.

“We are going to bring it to the community in a way that encourages more discussion,” Church said.

The Education Foundation also stressed that all segments of the community must have a say. That means hearing from people without children in school, from parents who might be intimidated by their child’s school and from people who live in all geographic regions of the county.

The Foundation also will host seven or eight conversations with teachers in various geographic clusters.

Some of the participants from the neighborhood discussions and the steering committee then will take the comments collected from the community discussions and develop a document that articulates the community’s priorities around education.

“A neighborhood conversation might stress the importance of available transportation in the community. That could lead to a discussion about transportation for after-school programs,” Church said. “And there might be a group like a church with a bus that could provide that transportation.”

McManus said The Education Foundation hopes to have a report completed by February 2009. The report will include what the community wants for its public schools, why the district faces the issues it does, and how the community plans to address its aspirations.

But that doesn’t mean that the issues facing the community or the public schools will be fixed immediately, she said.

“Once the report is issued, it has a shelf life,” she said. “It is a set of beliefs and values the community can build upon. We hope everyone gets behind it.”

Church said the report will help people see how they can contribute.

“It is an opportunity to build a vehicle to encourage more communication,” she said.

The Education Foundation is contributing $50,000 a year for several years to facilitate the project, McManus said.

“It takes an organization to pick up and fund it. Our board has made the commitment to sustain it,” she said. “We are being proactive. We need to work together to know what we want for our kids and our community.”

McManus said that while Collier schools Superintendent Dennis Thompson and School Board Vice Chairwoman Pat Carroll are a part of the Education Foundation’s board, the study being conducted shouldn’t be confused with the district’s job to set its own vision and goals.

Thompson gave kudos to The Education Foundation for facilitating the survey. Thompson said he hopes the community meetings will produce feedback that the district is unable to get at its board meetings.