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The cheapest hire is often the candidate with the least experience. So when is the cheapest the best choice?
The ideal candidate is someone with 40 years of experience, increasing responsibility, the energy of a 20-year-old, and a great attitude. The attributes that make a great attitude are enjoys learning, lives service to others, innovative, constantly exploring new ideas, wants to excel, is passionate about the mission and loves children.
Since the ideal candidate is harder to find than hen’s teeth, it might be a good idea to prioritize the wish list. Attitude and loves children are the only “must haves” on the list.
With a great attitude, everything else is possible. The passion that comes with the attitude will ensure the energy is always present. The world is changing rapidly, everyone needs to be an innovator, continuous learner, and curious explorer (no organization can evolve faster than its slowest member). Service to others is a cornerstone of a parochial school’s existence.
Almost everyone learns what the job requires after they start. Someone with a great attitude learns faster and costs less to educate. They find new uses for old information and they explore the depth of the subject beyond what is required. Inexperience is cheap and a good attitude makes inexperience good value for money.
With the rapid changes in education and the highly competitive atmosphere that surrounds parochial schools, do you want someone who likes the way things were done in the past? Can you afford to have someone who is adverse to change? “I remember when …”, is fun to listen to in a retirement home or at a family reunion. Do you want it in a staff meeting?
Next Step:
Make attitude the most important criteria when hiring a new person
Circulate the news of your job opening only in the areas where you are likely to find the people with the best attitude
Limit your interviewing to the candidates with the best attitude
The attributes of a great attitude are also the attributes that increase a Christian school’s sustainability. The best way to create a culture committed to having a sustainable organization is to hire for the attitude. It is much easier to teach the skills than it is to modify someone’s attitude.
Continuing high unemployment means many job applicants for every opening. Only interviewing the candidates with the best attitude is the most efficient way to find the best candidate for your opening.
Sustainability starts with the people we hire.
Challenging the norm is the best way to keep a parochial school relevant. There are many norms. Which one should you challenge?
Selecting the right norm to challenge is difficult. Most norms are relevant. In addition, challenging more than one norm at a time is usually over committing to change. The internal norms are easier to change. The external norms have a significant impact when they change.
As the senior leader, you also know that you see the organization from a unique perspective. When you challenge a norm, it sends cascading changes down through the organization. Changes are sometimes uncomfortable for the staff and sometimes the staff welcomes the challenge. It depends on the challenge and its presentation. Remember, one challenge to the norm but with many cascading ripples in your pond (changes).
Picking the right challenge is the key to success. Here are a few questions to ask of your stakeholders (staff, volunteers, students, families, donors, referral sources, and advocates):
What is the most important goal that is proving to be the most difficult to reach?
What are the barriers to success?
How is the lack of success affecting the various stakeholders?
When the goal is reached what are the benefits to the students and other stakeholders?
What are the new processes that will enable success?
What processes must evolve or be abandon to enable success?
What must the organization do more of to enable success?
Who is most interested in your success and how can they help you achieve success?
There are two possible strategies for selecting a norm to challenge once you have answers to the preceding questions. If you are new to this process, pick an easy challenge and use it as a training opportunity for yourself, your board, and the staff. Otherwise, pick the challenge that offers the greatest benefit to the greatest number of stakeholders.
Regardless of the strategy, you will notice that the questions help you prioritize your decisions, focus your planning, and provide you with the information necessary to motivate your stakeholders to support the step forward.
Next Step:
Solicit your stakeholders’ input before selecting the top challenge
Decide which of the many challenges facing your Christian school is most important
Create a plan to eliminate the challenge
Engage the stakeholders to help you execute the plan
The stakeholders are stakeholders because they believe in the mission and want the mission to succeed. Therefore, they will willingly lend a hand with success as long as they understand what their role is and how it will help to achieve success.
Relevance is part of sustainability. Challenging the norm keeps a school relevant. The process of continuously challenging relevance becomes a process of continually increasing sustainability.
How much better than normal will your school be by the end of the school year?
The better you are at talking about the intangible value of your school, the more positive information people will have about your school. Talking to families and donors about the intangible value, gives them more to talk about. Your school benefits from the word of mouth when the families have something to say.
The things we are unable to touch, smell, or taste are the tangibles. Many of the intangible can still be seen (acts of kindness) and felt (love for example). It is easy to measure tangibles. It is harder but necessary to measure intangibles.
You must articulate the intangible value of your school and be willing to do it often. In addition, you must share the value in ways that resonates with young parents who have very little time to think about what you are saying. You must periodically provide the parents with the thoughts that they would think if they had time to reflect on the value of your school.
Even when parents think about the value of your school and mission, they seldom think deeply about it. Most of the parents of Christian school students are younger than the principal, many of the teachers, and the board members. As a result, their lack of experience with life makes it hard for them to see all of the value the school provides.
If you are unable to express the intangible value of your school, there is a risk you will lose families to the parochial school down the street. You may have a better school, but if the other school makes it easier for the parents to understand its value, the other school will have the opportunity to enroll the students.
The preceding is also true for donors. It is harder for donors to see the intangible value. The family has an opportunity to notice changes in their student. Donors only have what you tell them and what they hear.
Next Step:
Make a list of the things that give intangible value to your school
Determine how to express your intangible value so that it resonates with the parents
Determine how to express your intangible value so that it resonates with the donors
Develop a way of listening to determine if your expression of the intangible value is shared with others
Make adjustments in the message to ensure it is accurately shared
Sustainability depends more on intangible value than tangible value. It is very difficult to have compelling tangible value. Other schools can and are copying the tangible values or working hard to eclipse them. When the tangible value of two schools is similar, it is the intangible value that determines where the children enroll and who the donors support.
One example of tangible value is academic performance. When the public schools have similar achievement test scores, only your intangible value justifies your tuition and makes your school the compelling choice for the students.
One of the best ways to communicate the intangible value of your school is to relate it to the parent’s aspirations for his or her student. The parents will fully appreciate the value of your school when they understand how your school’s intangible value helps fulfill their aspirations for their child.
A compelling presentation of your school’s intangible value is the best way to increase enrollment and student retention as well as donor generosity.
The economic recovery we all want still seems to be on the distant horizon. What can parochial schools do until the recovery arrives?
Don’t wait!
There is only one reason why you should act now rather than wait:
You have empty chairs in your classrooms and the school exists to educate as many children as possible.
Sure, there is risk associated with taking action in a weak economy, but consider:
The waiting will increase the risk your school will close. The only way to fill the empty seats is to do something different.
Founding your Christian school was a risk. If your founders could find the support needed to start something, you can find support to increase enrollment.
Increasing enrollment is the best way to keep your school open. If the economy slips, you will probably have more students leave. How many more can you lose before you have to close?
What you do to increase enrollment may be ineffective. So what? No students will be lost because of it. At worst, enrollment remains unchanged.
There are schools with waiting lists. The formula for success exists. The only way to find the formula that works for your school is to change what you are doing. The two ways to discover what will work for your school are to experiment (a fresh idea or copy someone else) or engage a consultant to guide you.
What area should you think about changing?
It is doubtful your marketing program should be on the list. Another small tweak is unlikely to provide a significant increase in enrollment.
Your tuition is competitive with other schools in the area. Cutting tuition is more likely to hurt the financial strength of your school than increase enrollment. The same is true of offering more scholarships.
Your students’ academic performance is as good or better than the other schools in the area. Improving achievement test scores a few points is something every school should do but it is unlikely to increase enrollment.
Look at your programming. What is the unmet or under-met need of the youth in your community? The answer to that question will increase enrollment and bring your school to capacity as well as increase student retention.
Next Step:
Determine which of the unmet or under-met needs of the youth fits best with your mission
Create a plan to meet the need or engage a consultant to help you create a plan
Recruit donors to help you reach out to the underserved youth
It is impossible to increase sustainability by waiting. Sustainability is an ever-changing goal that becomes more demanding with each passing second. You must be proactive to keep your current level of sustainability and aggressive if you want to improve the sustainability of your school.
What are the needs of the youth in your area that fit with your mission and will create a meaningful change in the lives of the youth?
Does your parochial school need better marketing or is something else holding back enrollment?
In Indiana, there are vouchers now. Only about 4,000 students are using the vouchers. As you would expect, some areas have embraced the vouchers more enthusiastically than others.
Some of the Christian schools in areas where the vouchers are being embraced have yet to see enrollment change. School leaders (principals and board members) are tempted to tell you that it is a marketing problem.
The purpose of marketing is to ensure the prospective customer knows you exist, have a product for sale, and that the product meets an important need.
It is important to note that the following analysis is valid whether or not vouchers are available.
Think about the school in partnership with a church. Everyone with school age children at that church knows the school exists and what it offers. If the school has open seats, something other than marketing is the problem.
Logic suggests the problem is that the families have unmet needs. There are two ways to determine if this is the case:
No new students enrolled
Some new students enrolled but there are still empty seats in the classrooms
The same analysis is valid when thinking about the prospective families in the larger community.
In either case, the empty seats tell us there are families with unmet needs because there are plenty of students in the public schools and plenty of unhappy public school parents. The dissatisfied families would leave the public system if they could find someone to meet their needs.
The school leaders would like you to believe that the public fails to recognize the value of the school (“The best kept secret in our town!”). The counterpoint is that the public is telling the school that they know the secret, have evaluated the secret, and think the free public schools are more valuable. With the declining reputation of public education, it is easy to understand why a school leader would be reluctant to accept the alternate explanation.
The choices are to deal with the reality or deal with the school closing at some time. It is never a good time to be unemployed. With 9% unemployment, now is a bad time to be unemployed. Being an educator (staff or administration) who is unemployed because their school failed to meet expectations adds to the difficulties.
Next Step:
Analyze your programming or hire someone to help you determine what changes are necessary to fill every seat (remember it is not a marketing problem)
Develop a plan to make the changes the evaluation identified or hire someone to help you
Measure and document the change in your students’ lives that result from the programming changes
It is expensive and time consuming to do the objective analysis. Missing the opportunity to touch a child’s life is more expensive and leaves your mission only partially fulfilled.
The organizations with the highest sustainability are making meaningful and durable changes in the lives of the people they serve. They have high capacity utilization because they deliver highly valued services.
Where would you rather send your child: to a school with a one open seat or one with many empty seats?
Do the parents of your parochial school and your donors understand value the way you want them to?
One principal expresses the value of her school in part:
“Our faith is our anti-bullying program”
It is easy to agree that instilling faith in her students reduces or eliminates bullying. Ending or preventing bullying is certainly valuable and important. However, is it worth $4,700 per year for tuition? Smaller class sizes and better than public school achievement test scores (other values of her school) are also excellent. Is the whole package really worth the tuition?
The school has a capacity of about 200 students. It has declined from 180 to about 155 over the past 3 years. Apparently, several families decided that the tuition is unjustified. While it is very rare for a family to say, “Your tuition is too high for the value you provide,” it is common to hear, “We can no longer afford the tuition.” This is often the case even when the family’s economic picture remains unchanged.
Let us think about small class sizes for a moment. If that is a compelling argument for registering a child, the Christian school will soon be at capacity. If the school reaches capacity, it will have classes about the same size as the public schools.
Offering small class sizes as a value is counterproductive if you want to reach capacity. Increasing the number of students in the school lowers the value. Before the school reaches capacity, some families will withdraw their students because they are disappointed with the value they receive.
Let us take a moment and think about the quote.
“Our faith is our anti-bullying program”
For most parents this quote implies, if you pay $4,700 we will teach the other students to be kind to your child. Very few parents think their child is likely to be a bully. Whether it is true or not is unimportant for the purpose of this article.
What is the real value of faith development to every family?
Inward Condition – Does it create a child who is confident, poised, caring, kind, humble, obedient, positive, optimistic, calm, at peace with the world, hopeful, diligent, disciplined or some combination?
Outward Indicators – Does that translate into greater success, durable relationships, higher achievement, other things, or a combination?
Long-Term Benefits (Outcomes) – What are the benefits at the next level of education, in his or her career, to his or her marriage and family live, personal fulfillment, joy and happiness, etc.?
Next Step:
Look at how your school expresses its value verbally, in writing, and on the website
Determine if the value is clear and compelling for the families and the donors
Re-express the value in terms of the change in inward condition, outward indications, and the long-term benefits from the change
Tell your donors what you are achieving and how the changes are going to reshape the world
Remember that since the donors underwrite some of your tuition, they need to see and understand your value. Their generosity is directly related to their understanding of your value.
Your donors, and the value your school creates for its students, are important to long-term sustainability. A decline in enrollment is an indication of declining value and sustainability.
For your parents, the most valuable output from your school is the long-term benefits. Faith provides eternal value. Your school provides a lifetime of value. Do your parents and donors know what the lifetime value of your school is?
When parents understand the lifetime value of your school, student retention becomes easier. Why would a parent withdraw their child before your formative process was complete?
Everyone intuitively feels that parent engagement is important. Let us take a moment and list some of the ways it is important.
When we talk with parochial school leaders about parent engagement, we often find them talking about parent involvement. They talk about how they wish the parents would show up at school events, parent teacher conferences, fundraisers, and other activities. They talk about how parents reluctantly provide the necessary volunteer hours.
Involvement is good but engagement is better. Engaged parents:
Have plans or aspirations for their student beyond the current school
Talk to their student about the day and monitor the student’s experience
Encourage their student to achieve
Encourage their student to be involved in more than academics
Think about the educational experience of their student and provide feedback to improve the experience (criticize the school)
Talk with other parents about the educational experience their student is having (always alert for a better experience for their student)
Pay attention to the evolving education market and evaluate how the changes might help their student
May also do some of the things that involved parents do
As you can see, engaged parents are a source of market intelligence. They know what is happening in the educational market, they have thought about it, and they have an opinion. Their views can provide valuable insights and help you identify trends early.
The parents who are engaged in their student’s education expect to be engaged in the life of the school. However, they rarely want to limit their engagement to simple involvement. They are as particular about how they participate as they are about their student’s experience. They want a voice and they want their voice to influence the direction of the school.
Most of the engaged parents have very little interest in managing the school. Bringing them on the board will reduce their engagement, frustrate other board members, and potentially result in the family’s withdrawal from the school.
When engaged parents are properly utilized, they become great advocates, advisors, referral sources, and success stories.
Next Step:
Identify your engaged parents
Meet with them individually and listen to them as well as discover how they wish to be engaged
Use their input to strengthen your mission
Meet with the engaged parents frequently to determine their level of satisfaction
Satisfaction is defined differently for engaged parents. They are focused on the outcomes from your programming based upon their expectations. As you know, sustainability depends in part on the satisfaction of the most engaged families.
Engaged parents are an important asset for Christian school. Are you using this valuable asset to your school’s greatest advantage?
In our highly competitive world, a parochial school must be very good to survive. Is there such a thing as being too good and too specialized?
Specialization and diversification are interesting challenges. Specialization tells the clients why they need you. For example, “We provide a Lutheran education.”
Open seats in the classroom, indicates an insufficient number of people need a Lutheran education. You may feel that everyone needs a Lutheran education but the families are telling you that they have other needs.
In this case, how well you provide the Lutheran education is unimportant. The Lutheran education is good but insufficient. Continuing to offer the Lutheran education is fine but how do you fill the empty seats?
1. Diversify – Possibly the parochial school is over specialized. If so, it is time to diversify. Should the diversification be in breadth or depth?
Breadth – Offer a broader academic, sports, arts, or religious experience for the students. However, because specialization is important, it is necessary to limit the diversification to only one area and only one activity in that area. Whatever you do, do it extremely well.
Depth – One of the common applications of this concept is to create a high school for the performing arts. Focusing only on arts provides great depth of experience for the student.
Regardless of your choice (breadth or depth), it is important to choose an area of under developed strength. As an example, an arts program that periodically wins awards is a good candidate for adding breadth or depth. However, a passionate and accomplished artist leading an arts program with limited program recognition is unlikely to be sufficiently successful to make an increase in depth or breadth appealing to families.
2. Value – Possibly the specialization lacks purpose in the family’s opinion. In this case, religious education might become a tool used for character building. The purpose of the religious education is to produce students with the best character as well as a solid academic foundation.
3. Revisit Relevance – Possibly the area of specialization has lost its relevance in today’s society. In that case, it is time to rewrite the mission statement. What is the community need that fits with the strengths of the Christian school?
Next Step:
Decide which of the three options is the one that will fill your classrooms
Discuss your decision with the current families to determine how the decision is likely to affect them
Discuss your decision with prospective families, donors, referral sources, and other supporters
Develop an implementation plan
Sustainability depends on being relevant. Every organization drifts toward irrelevance periodically. In a slow moving industry like transportation, relevance spans decades. In a fast moving industry like technology, relevance is short lived. At this time, education is like technology. Outside forces are driving change and causing it to happen quickly. One must expect relevance to be hard to maintain.
When there is a multi-year trend of declining enrollment and marketing and scholarships have been unable to reverse the trend, it is time to consider whether your school is suffering from declining relevance. If so, which option is going to increase enrollment and retention?
Helping schools with declining enrollment is our area of specialization. We will happily help you increase your enrollment and student retention.
In theory, collaboration is a great idea. How do you collaborate to maximize the value of your parochial school’s mission?
Many times have we heard the adage, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know that matters.” That is certainly true when one collaborates. If you know the right person with whom to collaborate, it is a marriage made in heaven.
There is a difference between a service provider and a collaborator. A service provider is someone who has a transactional relationship with your parochial school. They do something and they receive compensation. Service providers are necessary and we all need them and sometimes need to be service providers.
A collaborator also receives compensation but not typically from your Christian school. From your school, they receive intangible benefits. However, in most cases, the intangible benefits are more important than financial compensation.
What should one look for when selecting a collaborator?
Support – An organization (nonprofit, government agency, or corporation) that provides nonfinancial support to your school. Examples of support are advice, advocacy, referrals, or volunteers.
Purpose – An organization whose purpose aligns in some way with your school’s purpose. For example, they touch your clients’ lives in a way that enables or facilitates your mission. They might provide pre-services, post services, or parallel services.
Accountability – An organization that is more than coincidentally involved (They do more than donate yesterday’s unsold newspapers to your literacy program.). They have goals and expectations of themselves and your school when providing services and they are willing to be held to goals and expectation your school has (mutual accountability).
In other words, there is a symbiotic relationship. Both organizations care about the other’s sustainability and well-being. The loss of the other organization would matter. There is an incentive for the two organizations to help each other succeed.
Until the partnership meets the three preceding criteria it is a relationship with the potential to become collaborative. One of the reasons collaboration is seen as more work than it is worth is because people mislabel their relationship. They refer to something less than collaboration as collaboration.
Next Step:
Make a list of organizations (nonprofits, government agencies, and corporations) where a synergistic relationship might be possible
Prioritize the list based upon the greatest benefit to your clients and mission
Develop a process for qualifying and selecting potential collaborations
Rigorously evaluate each prospective relationship before beginning to work together
Collaborations are more work to create than service relationships. The collaboration usually lasts longer, is more beneficial, and harder to dissolve than a service relationship.
Collaborations provide the community with a more robust solution. The community benefits from the increased breadth and depth of the collaboration. This encourages broad and generous community support.
Collaborations provide mutual sustainability. Which of your current synergistic relationships would be easiest to transform into a collaboration?
It is obvious that government support of charitable activities is declining. How do you respond to the decline?
Before deciding how to respond, one should decide if a response is necessary. If the decline in support is temporary then the best response is do nothing and wait for the problems to pass.
It is Mission Enablers’ opinion, the trend will continue and accelerate. Even when the economy improves, we expect the trend to continue. In addition, we expect government to increase its willingness to charge nonprofits fees for services (taxes).
The decrease in support (funding) and increase in demand (new fees and taxes) will affect the financial strength of some nonprofits. Now is the time to insulate your parochial school from damage.
The first step is to list the ways your school receives government support in all forms. Vouchers, busing, and free or reduced lunches are probably the tip of the iceberg.
The next step is to decide which is the biggest threat to your financial strength. This might be based upon the size of the support, number of students who receive support, likelihood of a group of donors adopting the need, probability of the support being removed, or a combination of criteria.
Now is the time to begin recruiting donors to augment the government support. Some of the threats are ones the donors might embrace directly. One example is free or reduced lunches. Donors are likely to understand why a child needs a quality meal. However, some of the government support covers items that have very little emotional appeal for donors. In that case, donors need to be encouraged to increase their support for the overall mission.
In addition, it is unlikely the government will lower tax rates for individuals or corporations. There is a possibility that the tax benefit for making a charitable contribution will decrease. As a result, individuals and corporations will have the same or less to give while the demand for their generosity increases.
The final step in the process is to increase the value of what you do for your students. In some cases, this is as simple as expressing the value in terms the community understands and values. In other cases, it means adding value to the process. The new value must be something the community understands and appreciates.
It is unlikely that your current donor base has the capacity to offset the government support. The non-givers in your community are your best hope for offsetting your loss of government support. In every community, there are hundreds of individuals who give very little to charity. Their primary reason is that they fail to see the value their gift will produce. Because of their minimal history of generosity, few, if any, of the other Christian schools or nonprofits are paying attention to them. They are unlikely to be an easy source of funds but they are probably the best new source.
Next Step:
Determine all of the ways your school is vulnerable to a reduction is government support or an increase in fees (taxes)
Determine which threat is the most serious
Begin gathering donor support to offset the loss of government support
Attract the support of the non-givers in your community by re-expressing your school’s value to the community
Sustainability depends on preparing for a crisis before it happens. It is the way to ensure the crisis never happens. The “Year 2000 Computer Glitch” is a great example. It may be the largest non-event in the history of the world. That is because the world took the warning of potential trouble seriously.
Is your school ready to face the decline in government support with a yawn?
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