Data systems are great at making our schools run more efficiently… right up until a grade is missing on a report card or a student can’t log in on test day. As the web of interconnected systems grows in size and complexity, keeping your data clean and orderly is just as important as any software upgrade.
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When thinking about financial compensation, most employees only consider salary. As an employer, however, you know that your financial contribution to staff is much greater than that. If you can better communicate the full value of staff compensation, you can improve both employee engagement and retention.
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The benefits offered by your school can directly affect employee retention. In an earlier post, we covered flexibility benefit options, which account for four of the top valued benefits according research from Harvard Business Review. Today, we are moving down the list to student loan assistance and tuition assistance.
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Effectively analyzing school financial statements across multiple years can be challenging. Changes in facilities, organizational structure, fundraising strategies, or student population (including opening or closing campuses, adding new grade levels, or experiencing demographic shifts) complicate the comparability of financials.
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Lenders want to know if you will pay them back. Whether you are considering traditional bank loans, taxable or tax-exempt bonds, or even special forms of financing created by state or federal government programs, the underlying question is the same. To find the answer, lenders look for assurances that your project and school will generate enough cash flow to service the debt (and that your school will stay open long enough to pay).
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A well-conceived budget will serve as a “map” when making financial decisions throughout the year. It will reflect what you value as an organization, communicate your priorities to key stakeholders (board, staff, authorizer, families, funders), and highlight any new or changed priorities. Before the more technical work of the budgeting process begins, there are a number of broad concepts that we recommend every school focus on. READ MORE >>
Can you imagine a world where school districts are able to make data-driven decisions to allocate scarce resources to students who are in most need? Or skillfully aggregate and analyze data to improve metrics like attendance, graduation rates, and test results? With increasing access to data and advancements in analytics, this isn’t a pipe dream. In fact, schools and districts across the country are cultivating rich data and using it to advance academic achievement. READ MORE >>
Assessment data comes in fast throughout the year and provides multiple opportunities for all stakeholders to learn about the performance of a school. With so many ways to slice the data, it can be difficult to identify the most important stories.
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We have conducted several compensation studies helping schools develop a compensation philosophy and strategy that is best for staff and financially sustainable. Compensation, after all, is the most important factor candidates consider when evaluating multiple offers. However, we always push school leadership to remember that salary is just one factor and should be considered alongside many others.
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We often begin our school budget training for charter applicants by asking the group to identify the major levers that impact total teacher salary expenses. Almost without fail, the two answers given are 1) teacher salary levels and 2) average class size. What most people overlook is that there is a third, equally important lever: 3) schedule configuration.
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