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Creative destruction can help keep a parochial school strong and relevant.
Creative destruction is the process of eliminating the current economic order to make room for a new structure. In the case of a parochial school, creative destruction means rewriting the business model periodically in response to changing external conditions. Those changing conditions might be due to economic, competitive, social, demographic, cultural, legal and regulatory, or other shifts.
The phrase, creative destruction, implies a dramatic change. Dramatic change is sometimes necessary when the school begins to struggle or has been struggling for a while. If you periodically make minor adjustments in response to changes in the external environment, adjusting the business model can be a gentle evolutionary process.
The business model breaks the business into logical segments. By analyzing each segment, it is possible to understand how the school creates value, delivers services, and interacts with the community. Every business (nonprofit, for-profit, and government entity) has a business model. Some are very formally defined while others arise informally, are difficult to document, and loosely supported by habits, traditions, and leadership preferences.
Dividing a Christian school’s business model into 12 segments makes the business model easy to understand. Click here for an explanation of the 12 segments.
Before you decide to make changes to your business model, it is best to establish long-term goals (5 or more years into the future). It is easy to plan the changes to a business model. It takes time to implement the changes because of the effect the changes have on the various parts of the business model.
Making only one change at a time in the business model is the wisest decision. The interconnectedness of the elements of the business model means any change will have cascading affects.
Next Step:
Establish a long-term goal for your nonprofit
Determine how to change the business model to facilitate achieving the goal
Determine which segments of the business model must lead the change process
Keep your business model current by surveying the external environment regularly and make minor adjustments in your business model periodically
Fine-tuning your business model is one way to strengthen your school and improve its sustainability. Because the fine-tuning better aligns your school with its external environment, it also helps to improve the appeal of your programming. More appealing programming helps increase enrollment and student retention.
Successfully leading a parochial school is a complex and difficult job. One way to make it easier and simpler is to share leadership.
Shared leadership offers several benefits for you, the mission, and the students. Shared leadership lowers the stress level, broadens ownership, lowers risk, improves decision-making, provides fresh perspectives, and makes the transition to the next leader easier.
Luckily, you have a qualified staff and a board. The board exists to help with the big decisions. The board should help with strategic decisions, mission related issues, and establishing policy.
Joint decision-making is more than asking the board to approve the new financial controls policy. Approval is different than making a decision. Approval is the process of accepting or rejecting decisions someone else made.
Including the board in determining what to include in the financial controls policy is an example of joint decision-making. Instead of making the decision about what to include in the policy, give the board or the finance committee a list of potential items to include. Let the board select from the list what it feels is necessary. The discussion will:
Help the board members to become more aware of the strengths and limitations through its exploration of the options
Open the process to new ideas, deeper thinking, and broader applications
Create a group of individuals who are responsible for the policy’s success rather than leaving success entirely up to you
Lower the risk of overlooking something important
The same process can be used to make operational decisions. It is probably impractical to call a staff meeting before making a decision. However, it is possible to include a select number of staff members in the process.
There is a temptation to include the senior staff members (most mature, experienced, and longest tenure) in the process. The wisdom of age is tempting and valuable. So are the insights of youth.
Young, recent hires have something to offer. They are close in age to many of the Christian school parents. They have fresh ideas from the latest academic thinking. They are unburdened by ‘We always do it this way…’ thinking.
While there is a possibility this collaborative approach to leadership will slow the process down, it is unlikely. It does mean that the decision-making part of the process will take longer. However, with a little foresight and planning it is possible to be collaborative and make timely decisions. The planning and preparation required by the collaborative process will help to improve the quality of the decisions and reduce the number of times a decision must be revisited.
Next Step:
Make a list the important decisions that must be made in 2012
Set a deadline for making each decisions
Decide who to include in decision-making for each item on the list
Ask each group to decide how its decision should be announced and who should announce the decision
Broadening the decision ownership increases sustainability. Besides creating better decisions, it also creates a better informed leadership team. It helps you transform your school so that it becomes more like the ideal place to work.
If you hear about a successful program at one school, how do you successfully adapt it to fit your school?
The desire is to adopt the idea as is. However, it seldom, if ever, works that way. Usually there are adjustments that must be made.
Does it fit your mission? Usually the idea needs a little adjusting to fit the mission. The originator of the idea had a different mission.
Does it fit your students? Think of all of the differences between your students and theirs. Think of all of the differences between their parents and yours. Is there the same level of engagement? Do the parents have the same expectations? Are the parents’ aspirations for their children the same?
Does it fit with your donors? Why do your donors support your parochial school? Will the new idea fit with the donor’s expectations?
Does it fit with your school’s culture? Does the organization who originated the idea make decisions the same way you do? Are their staff members empowered the same way your staff is empowered? Do they define quality the same way you do? Do they have similar expectations of their students? How do their goals compare with yours?
The preceding list of questions is incomplete but provides a starting point for your analysis.
The purpose of the questions is to help you determine how much work it will be to adopt the new idea. Sometimes a few fine adjustments are all it takes. Sometime it takes a redesign of some of the systems (your current systems or some of the systems in the new idea or both).
If possible, try the new idea on a small scale (only the third grade, only the music department, etc.). This offers the opportunity to see how well reality matches your expectations and to make adjustments to improve efficiency and effectiveness before you fully commit. It also demonstrates the success of the idea and helps to win the support of doubters and donors.
Next Step:
Determine what adjustments are necessary before committing to implementing the idea
Determine how to do a limited scale implementation
Make the anticipated changes necessary for the limited implementation
Determine how to adjust the process to make the full-scale implementation more effective and efficient
Gather donor support for the full-scale implementation
Successfully implementing new ideas keeps your Christian school relevant and increases its sustainability. Using a carefully structured process helps to increase your level of success. In addition, a structured process makes it more comfortable for all of those affected to accept the change. Each success also makes it easier for your school to embrace the next change.
What is the new idea your school will be adopting in 2012?
Alumni can be great sources of funds, referrals, volunteers, and advocates. However, many small parochial schools have a hard time engaging and keeping track of alumni. It is time consuming to engage and track alumni. For a small school it also taxes their skills, time, and money.
It is usually between 10 and 15 years before an alumnus achieves sufficient success for them to comfortably donate. By that time, many of the school staff members have moved on and the alumni has a decreasing emotional connection. In addition, many of the alumni move out of the area.
For those and other reasons, small schools seldom track alumni.
Obviously, if the alumni would track themselves the problem would solve itself. If the alumni had a reason to stay in touch with the Christian school, they would track themselves.
Each parochial school tries to ensure each alumnus will reach his or her full potential. When that happens and the alumnus believes the school played a formative role in the his or her life, the alumnus will stay in touch with the school. Those alumni return to the school to reconnect with their source of strength.
It is much easier for a student to reach his or her potential with mentors helping them. Through the school’s alumni, faculty, staff, and parents, the school has many potential mentors for each student during each stage of the student’s life.
Connecting the student to a mentor benefits the student and the school:
Mentors enhances the probability the student will succeed and shortens the time required for the student to achieve his or her potential before and after graduation
Mentors strengthen the student – school relationship
Successful students increases the reputation of the school
Families will see the added value of the mentor as their student’s success grows (additional tuition justification)
Withdrawing a child is less likely when a mentor is helping the student achieve success (student retention is higher)
The success of the student and the presence of the mentor provides a meaningful competitive advantage when families are looking for a place to enroll their students
The success of the student and the presence of the mentor provides meaningful and durable evidence that the school is committed to the success of each of its students
The success of the student and the strong connection with the student increases the probability the student will be a generous alumnus, an active referral source, and advocate on behalf of the school
All of that is possible with minimal effort and expense. The primary effort is to find appropriate mentors (proper motivation, right skills, and willing to commit the time).
Next Step:
Start small by recruiting mentors for the bottom 10% of your 2013 graduating class
Refine the process over the summer including a feedback loop so that the mentors keep you informed about the students and their needs
Recruit mentors for your 2014 graduating class (fall of 2012)
Recruit mentors for the entire school during the summer of 2013
Student success and alumni engagement are important to sustainability. If your alumni receive valuable mentoring, they will be more willing to provide mentoring to the next generation. One-on-one face-to-face mentoring is best. However, our current technology sometimes achieves a high level of personal connection when thousands of miles separate the two people.
Providing mentoring for each child takes a long time to produce meaningful, measurable, and durable results. Everyone would prefer a quick solution but quality takes time, commitment, and patience as well as a little coaching from the right person.
You care deeply about your students. Providing each one with a mentor is one more way to show how much your care.
One of the ways to end a struggle is to reinvent the game. If you were going to reinvent education, what would it look like?
One way to reinvent a Christian school is to change it from a place where students receive an education to a place that enriches children’s lives. Education obviously has to take place. However, education becomes the activity that occupies the children’s time while the school is enriching their lives.
Many parochial schools are enriching lives. However, those same schools have empty chairs. The families who feel the enrichment, quality of education, safety, etc. provided by the school represent good value for the money have enrolled their children. The empty chairs imply that other families are looking for more value.
Finding a way to add depth or breadth to the enrichment you already offer is easier than it sounds. Imagine in your town that teen pregnancy is above the national average, but among your alumni, teen pregnancy is below the national average. Obviously, your students are enjoying richer lives after graduation because they are able to avoid the responsibilities of child raising until after they have laid a solid foundation for their own life.
If reducing teen pregnancy fits with you mission, you would want to take the next five steps:
Determine how to improve your programming to reduce the pregnancy rate further among your alumni
Determine which families in the community are likely to find your low pregnancy rate a compelling reason to enroll their children in your school
Determine the level of financial support the interested families are likely to need
Recruit donors who are willing to provide the necessary financial support to ensure the children will have richer lives
Begin reaching out to the families who are interested in enriching the lives of their children
If you are unable to identify how your current enrichment process make a measurable difference in the lives of your students, the first step is to determine the life changing enrichment that fits best with your mission. The second step is to adjust the programming to enhance the enrichment process. The third step is to begin tracking the effect the change is having on your alumni. Now your school is ready to begin the five-step process outlined above.
Next Step:
Determine or create the life-enriching outcome your school offers
Take the five steps offered in this article to promote the enrichment to the families who will value it
Review annually your process with a goal of making your programming more enriching
Whatever your school does to enrich the lives of the students brings value to your community. As your value to the community increases, the community will do more to help increase the sustainability of your school. Every community wants to ensure the longevity of organizations that enrich the community.
What is the most enriching part of your programming and which families in the community are most interested in the enrichment you can bring to the lives of their children?
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?
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