A school can win over the families inside its classrooms and remain a mystery to the people outside them. Citizens of the World faced a version of that problem. Parents embraced its schools, but the network wanted its work better understood in existing neighborhoods and support for a new campus in Kansas City. Good intentions needed an explanation that could travel beyond the school gate.
Larson Communications helped the network make its account of itself consistent, bring community members into the telling, and prepare leaders for public attention. Speeches, talking points, presentations and media training followed. In Larson’s telling of the project, the work began with a problem of understanding. The agency’s most interesting territory is right there: between what an education organization does and what its neighbors think it does.
01 / The school gate is a communications problem
Founded in 2007, Larson serves education organizations with a particular commitment to public education reform. Its customers include school networks, nonprofits, researchers and advocacy groups. This is a business built around a subject with unusually overlapping audiences. A parent wants to understand a school. A reporter wants something worth investigating. A public official has decisions to make. A teacher wants to know whether to apply.
Those audiences may encounter the same organization through entirely different doors. Larson’s services connect those entrances: press relations, public advocacy, crisis planning, branding and recruitment advertising. Its stated purpose is to help education organizations explain their work and expand their impact. The practical challenge is to make a message useful to someone who has other things to do.
Gary Larson arrived at that challenge through a fight. His company biography describes volunteering in 2000 to help parents resist the revocation of a local charter school. He subsequently worked in communications at the California Charter Schools Association before starting his firm. A threatened school supplies a fairly unforgiving introduction to public relations: the audience’s judgment can affect whether the organization gets to keep operating.
His biography also supplies a smaller detail: his mother taught second grade. There is a pleasing scale to the career that followed. Classroom experience in the family; school disputes in the early professional story; then an agency helping organizations explain themselves across the country. Its specialty is familiarity with the subject and the people arguing about it.
02 / Sometimes the useful deliverable is a map
Consider Larson’s work with Education Trust-West. The organization was preparing research on Latino students’ educational outcomes in California. Larson helped frame a wider story about the distance between the state’s political influence and the opportunities available to those students. It also advised the organization to create a county-level map of achievement gaps.
The map and the organization’s Majority Report appeared in The New York Times, according to the agency’s case study. The important editorial decision was to give a statewide problem a visible geography. A reader could locate a county. An abstract disparity acquired an address.
That suggests something other organizations can copy: find the smallest useful form of the evidence. A report may contain the argument, but its public entrance could be a map, a comparison or one well-chosen example. The test is whether the smaller form preserves what the research actually says. A memorable graphic that loses the evidence is an expensive distraction.
“it doesn’t feel like you are working with outsiders”
Joe Williams, former executive director, Democrats for Education Reform, in a client testimonial
This is also a way to understand the firm’s position in the market. A buyer could employ an internal communications director, hire a generalist agency or commission an education marketing specialist. Larson’s published work combines sector knowledge with execution across press, policy and recruitment. The useful buying question is whether those tasks need to be coordinated by people who already understand the education argument.
03 / Remember the people who make lunch
The California Center on Teaching Careers offers another revealing example. Larson says their partnership began in 2017. The work included a customizable recruitment toolkit, promotion of virtual job fairs, and advertising on Meta and LinkedIn. Over time, the recruitment effort widened to the adults who keep schools running.
The Be Their Joy campaign included instructional aides, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and custodians. That is a concrete change in the subject of the appeal. The school staffing story became larger than the teaching vacancy. In its October 2024 case study, Larson reports 3,880,119 impressions and 56,602 landing-page clicks for the campaign. Separately, it reports more than 6,000 signups for We Want You!, the teaching recruitment effort.
The distinction matters to a school deciding what to buy. Someone has to answer the inquiry, explain the role and help the applicant take another step. Advertising can create an opening for that conversation. Its value depends partly on what the organization does with the opening.
04 / A price tag, with an hours column
A publicly posted Navigator Schools agreement makes the business model unusually tangible. For a term beginning in August 2025, it specifies a $10,000 monthly retainer covering 55 hours of professional services, with additional hours billed at $225. Twelve scheduled monthly payments total $120,000, before extra work and approved expenses. These are the terms of one engagement.
55 hoursincluded monthly
$225per additional hour
The hours column is worth lingering over. It makes prioritization visible. Leadership preparation, writing and reporter outreach all require someone’s time; a retainer gives that work a defined capacity. A school considering similar support should arrive with decisions to support and audiences to reach, then agree on what gets done first.
Navigator’s August 2023 board minutes provide an earlier glimpse of those needs. Discussion of Larson’s proposal covered website optimization, internal and parent communications, staff recruitment and fundraising. The board approved the proposal and directed the CEO to execute a contract. The work described sits close to everyday school operations, where a confusing website or a poorly explained decision can create its own queue of problems.
05 / Give the audience a next step
Larson’s digital services include ad creative, landing pages, email sequences and lead-management support. Read together, those deliverables describe a route: reach someone, explain the offer, make responding straightforward, then follow up. The same discipline can help a nonprofit promoting research or a school inviting families to an open house.
- 01Choose the audienceWhose decision matters?
- 02Make the caseWhat evidence will help?
- 03Provide a next stepWhere does interest go?
This approach asks something of the client. Evidence must survive scrutiny, and the invitation must lead somewhere useful. Better publicity cannot supply missing school capacity or resolve a substantive disagreement by itself. For an organization whose immediate need is a small design assignment, the broader agency service mix may be more than the task requires.
The people delivering that work are distributed. Larson’s careers page describes a fully remote team across five regions, with travel for clients, conferences and team gatherings. It emphasizes sustained media work, ownership of accounts and professional development. In a small but rather apt test of reading comprehension, the Account Executive application instructions ask for the word “pineapple” in the cover letter.
The underlying demand is less whimsical: pay attention. To the report’s actual finding. To the neighborhood’s question. To the person considering a school job who needs an answer. Larson’s public portfolio suggests that its most useful work happens when the organization’s story becomes specific enough for someone else to act on it.