Interviewing the Over-prepared Teacher Applicant

How sustainable is your school? This article is written with small to medium-sized schools in mind. Larger schools can plan and use professional resources of all kinds to ensure their sustainability for the future. On the other hand, small schools typically have limited resources, to begin with. So with this in mind, I want to look at three aspects of how your school runs and offer some suggestions as to how we can ensure it will run for many years to come. In other words, let's ensure that your school is sustainable and will continue to be sustainable for many more years.

We are going to look at two types of day schools: for-profit schools and not-for-profit schools. A large number of primary schools are what we would describe as for-profit schools. These are the kinds of schools that a well-intentioned, visionary educator has established because she believes in a certain teaching style and wants to reach a certain clientele in her local area. I use the description of well-intentioned advisedly because many of these wonderful people have great pedagogical ideas but lack the business experience to make their school an ongoing reality. Here are some practical steps that the owner of a small primary school should take to ensure that her school stays viable.

Develop a business plan.

When you started your school, you knew that it was not enough to think that you could budget for, say, 50 students and charge tuition at the market rate,

This article originally started out as an overview of the top private school Facebook pages. However, as I began my research, I discovered that the Facebook private school landscape was in worse shape than I had first thought. What am I getting at? Simply that apparently many private schools are not implementing the measures necessary to create an effective Facebook presence. That is a shame because creating an effective Facebook presence is something which can scale to match your resources of both time and money. Put another way I literally cannot think of one good reason why even the smallest private school shouldn't be taking advantage of all that Facebook can do to help market your school.

Build brand awareness

Am I beginning to sound like a marketing professor? If so, I will plead guilty on the one count: my thrust is very definitely marketing. But, no, I am not a professor nor have I ever been. The closest I ever got to that august title in academia was Adjunct Instructor. But I digress. This short video gives you an idea of what is involved.

Marketing is critical for any small business. Every school has to pay attention to marketing. Marketing comes in many forms. Which ones you use depends largely on your and your budget. Marketing informs current and future parents of your existence.

Marketing drives your future intake of students. For many private

I think that any young person who pursues excellence in anything is probably going to come away from that experience with very healthy doses of discipline, structure and purpose. Whether your child wants to be a really good hockey player or the best app writer ever, he will have to decide on his goals and figure out how to get there. That's what military schools are also very good at doing. They offer the kind of rigorous discipline and structure which is every bit as demanding as the kind of athletic preparation a top-ranked runner gets, every bit as focused on teamwork as the members of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra are, for example.

Discipline

We know that discipline produces good results. It is never enough to be a genius and have a myriad of wonderful ideas and projects nobody else has thought of unless you possess the attribute of discipline. All those wonderful ideas and projects will come to naught without discipline. Fortunately discipline can be taught. Military schools have discipline figured out. They know how to teach discipline. And, no, I am not talking about the popular image of kids in a military school somewhere being yelled at every minute by some nasty drill sergeant. Those days are gone. Military schools these days are filled with students who want to get ahead academically and make something of themselves. Military schools allow that to happen.

The kind of discipline which you will find at military

Getting into a private school is a time-consuming process. There are many details to keep your eyes on. In particular, you need to keep your eyes on the calendar and all the deadlines set by the various admissions departments of the schools you are applying to. Most of the time you will apply to two or three schools depending on the grade level your child will be entering. This further complicates the process because you will most likely end up watching three or more sets of deadlines. The best advice I can offer as you apply to schools is to begin the process as early as possible. Do not put things off until the last minute.

To help you prioritize all those deadlines, let's look at the most important ones.

The admissions fixed deadline

What I mean by a fixed admissions deadline is that your child's application must be submitted and completed by a certain date. Most private schools have their fixed admissions deadlines occurring on January 31. Some schools position their admissions deadlines a week or two earlier. The issue with fixed admissions deadlines is that you do not want to miss them. This is particularly true when you are applying to a selective school, which has far more applications than it has places for. If your application is submitted after the fixed deadline, it will more than likely be placed in a pile with the other late applications. These might surface if the yield or number