When it comes to getting accredited, the little foxes often spoil the vine, and quickly your school can become the Sleeping Snow White in this arena rather than the Prince Charming.
In all of the overwhelming efforts that it takes to put together your school's self-study and curriculum guides, the following "dwarves" can be the hard workers that make you the "hi-ho" success of your accreditation efforts: 1.
Sneezy - Make sure your emergency management plans are robust.
Schools often have plans for large cataclysmic events like fire, flood, earthquake, hurricanes and many others that allow for evacuation, parent notification and other realities that surround the types of emergencies that most people worry about, but what about an outbreak of lice or a serious flu strain? How would your school handle the measles or the SARS virus? What happens when you have a chemical spill? These are all critical components to a complete emergency management plan that will help to push you past the cataclysmic events and move towards handling events that could really occur on campus in a common year.
How do you promote wellness on campus with your students and staff? Documentation of training sessions on blood borne pathogens and other areas of health risk are also important for the accreditation to see so that it is not just merely a plan on paper but one that could be used today if necessary no matter how large or small the emergency.
2.
Sleepy - Often the sleeping giant of a Christian school is it core values and mission statement.
Most schools have these documents and most school boards have worked through them at the onset of the school, but for many schools, accreditation proves that these philosophical creeds have not been reviewed in many years and they are not being translated well to the staff, students and parents.
This philosophy is what makes your school unique among all other schools and they need to be a driver of your staff in-services, chapels, marketing, and other programming so that your school uniquely forms around these definitive factors.
Ask yourself the question, "How are the core values and mission statement being transmitted to the staff, students and parents of our school?" 3.
Dopey - The Christian Worldview is at great risk and our Christian Schools often are helping to create a gap in our proliferation of the Christian Worldview by adopting the idea that Biblical integration is the same thing as building curriculum on a Christian Worldview and it is not.
Biblical integration is adding scriptural principles into curricula that already exist, even if that curriculum is not built on the framework of a Christian Worldview.
The danger here is that we can memorialize humanism or Darwinism or transcendentalism in our students' culture by adding the Bible as the good housekeeping seal of approval and that is not what building a Christian Worldview is all about.
Building a Christian Worldview means taking the steps necessary to ensure that everything that we do and everything that we learn is in the context of what we believe about God and how we want those beliefs to be translated through our staff members to our students and families.
Many Christian Schools advertise that they teach from a Christian Worldview, and so by what metric is that being corroborated or proven, and what impact is that having on your students? One such metric is in the PEERS® exam that the Nehemiah Institute can deliver.
Like the SAT, the PEERS® exam helps to establish a worldview baseline for your students (6-12 grades) and faculty and this allows for real measured growth in the area of developing the Christian Worldview.
This is THE area that will be THE discriminator for your Christian School in the next five years, be sure that you know how to evaluate this and train your staff to execute it for your Christian School.
4.
Doc - Your staff is the lifeblood of your school.
They are the very best advertising, the very best customer service agents, and the very best quality assurance engineers for your institution.
They have the greatest influence on the students and the parents and they have the greatest role in proliferating the core values, mission statement and educational philosophy of the school.
It is imperative for the sustainability of your school that you have a purpose-driven set of tools to seek out, find and hire the best staff members.
Consider your compensation packages, benefits plans, bonus structures and all other areas that would allow for the very best people to be a part of your team.
It is hard to win the war with a non-cohesive team, however, strong players can also have a mind of their own and so when going through the accreditation process, evaluate your hiring procedures, exit interviews, staff evaluations and staff development programming to be sure that they line up with your mission and core values.
5.
Happy - When the accreditation team walks on to your campus, what is the general feeling that they get? Is it a peaceful place where the children and faculty seem happy? Are the parents pleased with the school and what do they find appealing about it? These are questions that you must ask yourself and have others help you with so that the impression of your school reflects its core values and mission statement.
Your schools structure and discipline, programming and classroom life will all be reflected in the overall feeling of the campus.
Are the support staff interesting people who are great to talk to? Are your office staff members geared towards service with a smile? Is your campus a place that people love to come and visit? Are you having to turn away volunteers because everyone is so happy to be a part of your great school? These are all questions that can be answered in the area of campus life and are a big part of the accreditation process.
Have some of your friends who do not know the school walk the halls, talk to the students and parents, look at the classrooms, and tell you what they see.
This will really help when the ACSI "strangers" come to town.
6.
Bashful - For most administrators, marketing is the bane of their existence.
They were not trained to do marketing and as the social media and website world has expanded, it can be overwhelming at best to try to understand it all.
So many schools use "cookie cutter" marketing and template based websites to try to compete in a world where these are the drivers for marketing goods and services to the world.
This unfortunately means that a lot of money is wasted on advertising that does not get the right people in the door for your school.
So consider doing what marketers do when they are faced with a local business advertising campaign.
First - you must determine what your ideal student and family looks like.
Second, where are they, what are they doing, what are they reading, what are they watching, what are they buying online, and what is their presence on the social networks? What is keeping those families from considering your school? Location? Price? Offerings? Misconceptions about Christian Schooling? Ignorance? I worked with a school that had been established for more than 50 years and most people in the community didn't even know they existed! When you design your marketing plan use these answers as your guide.
Don't run newspaper ads if your perfect family is not reading that newspaper.
Be involved in community events, sponsor a soccer team event, do anything you can to get the name of your school in front of your target audience.
And then do it over and over again.
Remember advertising is a marathon not a sprint.
You can get results in one short campaign in February for enrollment; it is establishing your brand in your community among those who you are looking to advertise to.
Be creative.
Finally, your website is the currency that will make your advertising dollars mean feet in the office.
Make sure that your website tells the story in pictures, stories and interactive content, not millions of words on a page.
Make sure that everything is updated regularly.
Make sure that all of the links work (a student could do this with a checklist in hand) and make sure that your website is connected to Facebook and Twitter and that you are generating content for your website each week that keeps it fresh and allows Google to find you more often.
This will translate into more feet in the door and more phones ringing when they see your advertising.
7.
Grumpy - What is being said about your school that is negative? About a year ago, I was working with a school that was experiencing a slump in enrollment and when I Googled them on the web I found several sites where people were asked to recommend their school and they wrote some disparaging remarks about the school and its faculty, many of whom were no longer there.
I also found an article from a local high school newspaper that talked about how the grounds of the school were haunted.
These are the kinds of issues that are competing against you and are often overlooked by the administration because they simply don't know that they could exist, but believe me they do.
Google your school, see what people are saying and then deal with those comments.
The ACSI team will Google you and if there is something out there they will ask you about it, so don't be blind-sided.
Know and act on anything negative.
By the way, we were able to have the local high school retract the story and write a great review of the school's work program which became a great marketing tool for the school in the community.
ASCI accreditation is overwhelming but you will get through it.
Remember that the details matter and teams of people are always better than trying to go solo as an administrator.
The more you get involved the more buy-in you have from your school's community but be careful not to trust sensitive information to the wrong people just because their competent or willing.
The payoff for a completed accreditation is the badge of honor knowing that your school meets the criteria that will help it to best minister to your community through the medium of Kingdom Education.
In all of the overwhelming efforts that it takes to put together your school's self-study and curriculum guides, the following "dwarves" can be the hard workers that make you the "hi-ho" success of your accreditation efforts: 1.
Sneezy - Make sure your emergency management plans are robust.
Schools often have plans for large cataclysmic events like fire, flood, earthquake, hurricanes and many others that allow for evacuation, parent notification and other realities that surround the types of emergencies that most people worry about, but what about an outbreak of lice or a serious flu strain? How would your school handle the measles or the SARS virus? What happens when you have a chemical spill? These are all critical components to a complete emergency management plan that will help to push you past the cataclysmic events and move towards handling events that could really occur on campus in a common year.
How do you promote wellness on campus with your students and staff? Documentation of training sessions on blood borne pathogens and other areas of health risk are also important for the accreditation to see so that it is not just merely a plan on paper but one that could be used today if necessary no matter how large or small the emergency.
2.
Sleepy - Often the sleeping giant of a Christian school is it core values and mission statement.
Most schools have these documents and most school boards have worked through them at the onset of the school, but for many schools, accreditation proves that these philosophical creeds have not been reviewed in many years and they are not being translated well to the staff, students and parents.
This philosophy is what makes your school unique among all other schools and they need to be a driver of your staff in-services, chapels, marketing, and other programming so that your school uniquely forms around these definitive factors.
Ask yourself the question, "How are the core values and mission statement being transmitted to the staff, students and parents of our school?" 3.
Dopey - The Christian Worldview is at great risk and our Christian Schools often are helping to create a gap in our proliferation of the Christian Worldview by adopting the idea that Biblical integration is the same thing as building curriculum on a Christian Worldview and it is not.
Biblical integration is adding scriptural principles into curricula that already exist, even if that curriculum is not built on the framework of a Christian Worldview.
The danger here is that we can memorialize humanism or Darwinism or transcendentalism in our students' culture by adding the Bible as the good housekeeping seal of approval and that is not what building a Christian Worldview is all about.
Building a Christian Worldview means taking the steps necessary to ensure that everything that we do and everything that we learn is in the context of what we believe about God and how we want those beliefs to be translated through our staff members to our students and families.
Many Christian Schools advertise that they teach from a Christian Worldview, and so by what metric is that being corroborated or proven, and what impact is that having on your students? One such metric is in the PEERS® exam that the Nehemiah Institute can deliver.
Like the SAT, the PEERS® exam helps to establish a worldview baseline for your students (6-12 grades) and faculty and this allows for real measured growth in the area of developing the Christian Worldview.
This is THE area that will be THE discriminator for your Christian School in the next five years, be sure that you know how to evaluate this and train your staff to execute it for your Christian School.
4.
Doc - Your staff is the lifeblood of your school.
They are the very best advertising, the very best customer service agents, and the very best quality assurance engineers for your institution.
They have the greatest influence on the students and the parents and they have the greatest role in proliferating the core values, mission statement and educational philosophy of the school.
It is imperative for the sustainability of your school that you have a purpose-driven set of tools to seek out, find and hire the best staff members.
Consider your compensation packages, benefits plans, bonus structures and all other areas that would allow for the very best people to be a part of your team.
It is hard to win the war with a non-cohesive team, however, strong players can also have a mind of their own and so when going through the accreditation process, evaluate your hiring procedures, exit interviews, staff evaluations and staff development programming to be sure that they line up with your mission and core values.
5.
Happy - When the accreditation team walks on to your campus, what is the general feeling that they get? Is it a peaceful place where the children and faculty seem happy? Are the parents pleased with the school and what do they find appealing about it? These are questions that you must ask yourself and have others help you with so that the impression of your school reflects its core values and mission statement.
Your schools structure and discipline, programming and classroom life will all be reflected in the overall feeling of the campus.
Are the support staff interesting people who are great to talk to? Are your office staff members geared towards service with a smile? Is your campus a place that people love to come and visit? Are you having to turn away volunteers because everyone is so happy to be a part of your great school? These are all questions that can be answered in the area of campus life and are a big part of the accreditation process.
Have some of your friends who do not know the school walk the halls, talk to the students and parents, look at the classrooms, and tell you what they see.
This will really help when the ACSI "strangers" come to town.
6.
Bashful - For most administrators, marketing is the bane of their existence.
They were not trained to do marketing and as the social media and website world has expanded, it can be overwhelming at best to try to understand it all.
So many schools use "cookie cutter" marketing and template based websites to try to compete in a world where these are the drivers for marketing goods and services to the world.
This unfortunately means that a lot of money is wasted on advertising that does not get the right people in the door for your school.
So consider doing what marketers do when they are faced with a local business advertising campaign.
First - you must determine what your ideal student and family looks like.
Second, where are they, what are they doing, what are they reading, what are they watching, what are they buying online, and what is their presence on the social networks? What is keeping those families from considering your school? Location? Price? Offerings? Misconceptions about Christian Schooling? Ignorance? I worked with a school that had been established for more than 50 years and most people in the community didn't even know they existed! When you design your marketing plan use these answers as your guide.
Don't run newspaper ads if your perfect family is not reading that newspaper.
Be involved in community events, sponsor a soccer team event, do anything you can to get the name of your school in front of your target audience.
And then do it over and over again.
Remember advertising is a marathon not a sprint.
You can get results in one short campaign in February for enrollment; it is establishing your brand in your community among those who you are looking to advertise to.
Be creative.
Finally, your website is the currency that will make your advertising dollars mean feet in the office.
Make sure that your website tells the story in pictures, stories and interactive content, not millions of words on a page.
Make sure that everything is updated regularly.
Make sure that all of the links work (a student could do this with a checklist in hand) and make sure that your website is connected to Facebook and Twitter and that you are generating content for your website each week that keeps it fresh and allows Google to find you more often.
This will translate into more feet in the door and more phones ringing when they see your advertising.
7.
Grumpy - What is being said about your school that is negative? About a year ago, I was working with a school that was experiencing a slump in enrollment and when I Googled them on the web I found several sites where people were asked to recommend their school and they wrote some disparaging remarks about the school and its faculty, many of whom were no longer there.
I also found an article from a local high school newspaper that talked about how the grounds of the school were haunted.
These are the kinds of issues that are competing against you and are often overlooked by the administration because they simply don't know that they could exist, but believe me they do.
Google your school, see what people are saying and then deal with those comments.
The ACSI team will Google you and if there is something out there they will ask you about it, so don't be blind-sided.
Know and act on anything negative.
By the way, we were able to have the local high school retract the story and write a great review of the school's work program which became a great marketing tool for the school in the community.
ASCI accreditation is overwhelming but you will get through it.
Remember that the details matter and teams of people are always better than trying to go solo as an administrator.
The more you get involved the more buy-in you have from your school's community but be careful not to trust sensitive information to the wrong people just because their competent or willing.
The payoff for a completed accreditation is the badge of honor knowing that your school meets the criteria that will help it to best minister to your community through the medium of Kingdom Education.
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