Introduction
DURHAM -- You can still see the faintly scribbled words to the Preamble to the Constitution on a chalkboard in what used to be Mr. Infinito's history classroom. But there are no more lessons for his classes at RTP Christian Academy of Technology, a faith-based private school in Durham. Too many parents have lost jobs in the recession. The dwindling student body is forcing the school to shut its doors Tuesday."Everything was going fine. The recession is really to blame," said Shon Allen, principal and cofounder of the school, which combines Christian teachings with advanced science classes. "It has been a really sad experience." (Latifi, 2009)
Every day we hear about another Christian school which is struggling to survive or even closing their doors in the tough economy that the country is currently facing. For many Christian schools there have been many sacrifices made and many difficult decisions loom in the distance. Christian schools are closing everyday; is there no relief in sight? I believe that it is time for some radical actions and shifts in our thinking that will test our faith and refocus our purpose for being in Christian Education. Consider the following not merely as suggestions but as a clarion call to change the way that we think about the business of school. I believe that the following will not only help your school survive these economic times, but it will propel your school into even greater success in the future:
Lower tuition
It sounds like a crazy idea, but calculate it in your mind. Every chair that is empty in any classroom right now on any campus of any Christian school is not making that school money. Every day that empty chair has an earning potential but if it remains empty, that earning potential is not realized. By lowering tuition there are two things that now occur. First, you are making a statement to the community on your campus now and also in your community that you care about them and you recognize their need. Everyone is struggling. Right now in your school and community, people are losing their homes and cars and other possessions are being repossessed, money is being stretched so thin that every sacrifice is making a difference and yet many are making almost impossible sacrifices to continue to educate their children in a Christian School because they believe in it, but the decision looms every day, month and certainly from school year to school year whether they will be able to continue. By lowering tuition you are recognizing that these decisions are difficult and you are offering relief and a reason to stay. Likewise, in a community that is desperate for answers to the ills of the public school system, lowering tuition will encourage those who may think that a Christian School education is financially unattainable. You are positioning yourself to begin to fill the empty chairs in every classroom. Second, you are creating a school environment with more parent buy-in and student involvement which will act like an epidemic of good-will and help to spread the news of your actions to the surrounding community (Gladwell, 2000/2002).
Consider this scenario -A Christian School does some simple demographic research of its current student body and the surrounding community and based on that research, decides to cut its tuition by 30%. They announce it to their families and immediately they see that people are signing up for next year. Soon others start to come and by the grace of God your enrollment doubles. Now the school may still be facing an issue of not making their budget, but the gap is lessened and now there are more students to help in fundraising efforts, more parent buy-in for the school as far as help around campus and more of a community feel for those who are attending. Not everything is financial. The reality is that your school feels successful and that is going to help in the long run for you to create a more financially secure environment. Realize that if you can survive that year, the next year will only add more profit to the bottom line because if tuition remains low, people will stay, more will come, and the bottom line becomes more secure.
Think about the airline industry, on any airline, there is a set price per seat for any given flight, but not everyone pays that price for their particular seat. Factors of when the ticket is bought, purchasing online, no additions or changes, all can add to the value or expense to the customer in the end. The internet is filled with travel site like Orbitz, and Priceline that offer competitive pricing and packaging for those who can plan their trip according to a relatively small numbers of factors. So when you fly on a plane and you are paying full price, you were not able to meet those parameters. When you couple this kind of reality with the idea that everyday that a seat in a classroom, (like an empty seat on an airplane) is empty is taking money from your bottom line, you can now see the benefit and the power of utilizing a pricing model that accounts for different sets of parameters, packaging, financial sliding scales, etc. Remember, the monies that are spent on education are discretionary and so there is a greater pressure added to those funds in light of a worsening economy.
Redefine Financial Aid
Financial aid has become such a difficult subject to broach for most Christian Schools. Many times a scholarship fund has been established and there is never enough money for the school to really make that big of a difference to their bottom line. However, what if financial aid could be redefined and understood in a different light? Building on the concept of "filling the chairs," what if our goal was to redefine financial aid to mean that tuition could be based on other mitigating factors for each individual family. For instance, what if Christ the King Christian School lowered its tuition by 20% and retooled its financial aid policies so that a sliding scale for tuition was enacted so that families could take advantage of their current position financially. What if you simply negotiated with each individual family for that they could pay? In the state of Florida, there are vouchers that are offered for low income families, what if the Christian school accepted those monies as the tuition for those students? I realize that not every state will have such a program, but what is available for the families in your community? How can you leverage these opportunities for more students to attend your school? Let's go back to our illustration above. A school has cut their tuition in half and doubled the enrollment, but there are chairs left. Why not fill those chairs with whatever monies you can make available to your budget? Think of a rack rate on a hotel room, a price is out there that could be charged fro that room, but few are ever charged that amount. Likewise, tuition needs to be redefined in a broader combination of terms than simply a budget amount divided by number of students.
The reality here is that there is no risk in accepting more money, there is a great risk in not receiving any more money. I have presented this scenario before to close friends of mine who are in struggling schools and many of them are concerned that they will fill a chair for less tuition and miss out on an opportunity to fill that same chair will full tuition. Airlines don't worry about these discounted seats, and why should Christian Schools. If a seat is empty fill it and make the money. Here is my challenge to you - count your chairs. Right now, today, walk around to every classroom and count the chairs that are empty in each classroom and then do a simple tally on what kind of income would be realized by having allowed the students that interviewed for your school but did not come due to finances to have been paying you even the smallest of amounts (like $200 a month).Friends, we are not in a time of financial fancy anymore, the world has changed and our survival will come from doing something different not from remaining the same.
Redefine Fundraising
Fundraising campaigns have become anathema for Christian schools. So many times to make up the difference economically, there are fundraisers that ping the same families over and over again trying to make up the difference in a failing budget. One woman whose children attend a prominent Christian school in the area recently made a comment to me. She said, "If I could afford to spend more money, then I could afford a greater tuition." Wow, well said. So we have to redefine fundraising and I believe that this is done in two crucial ways. First, we need to understand that our greatest fundraiser will come by filling the seats that are empty. I know that this sounds like the last section, but it cannot be over emphasized that every empty seat is costing your school a critical amount of money that can be recouped and it is not necessarily the amount of the tuition. Say that I work for a school that currently has 100 enrolled with the possibility of taking in an additional 50 students without adding any additional personnel or critical overhead. Think of it, again like an airline, it costs the same to fly from Miami to Los Angeles regardless of the plane is full or only half-full. By filling those empty chairs with just $2000 a student we stand to GAIN $100,000 not only to the top line but to the BOTTOM LINE of the budget - -it is all profit because our expenses will not significantly change. Now which of us could raise $100,000 in fundraising, especially with 100 students? It just makes sense to utilize the resources that you have available in this manner.
Second, if you decide to do fundraising then you need to focus on doing fewer campaigns that will make a large margin of income for a specific purpose. Gumball fundraisers for general expenses will not be as effective as a walk-a-thon for a gym. Your events need to be highly purposed well organized, well executed and lean. Then, there is a need to produce immediate results for those who gave. Send pictures of new mulch and swing-sets in the next month's newsletters. You have to establish your credibility in these kinds of campaigns if you are going to be successful year after year and expand your programming.
Increase Image Building, not Advertising
What is your market role? - are you the technological leader (for a school you would be the academic leader but you do not adapt to those that are not able to perform at that academic level), or are you the service king (for a school you would be the school that is not academically the leader but your school meets the needs of the individual student with excellence and caters significantly to the students needs), or are you the operational excellence leader (the cheapest school, nickels and dimes for extras, and you give only basic service and is not the academic leader). Deciding upon one of these roles is how you begin to build your image in the community because the image building components are already built into the fabric of who you are as an institution.Consider your educational facility like a consulting firm and consider it from a marketing standpoint - We are consultants for those families that have students that would be lost in a hopeless educational system that teaches them to think in ways that are contrary to our beliefs. It is a system where students are herded through and unsafe. It is a system that cares more about their bottom line than the spirit of the child. It is a system that ______ (you fill in the blank.) What are we doing to market these shortcomings and how we are really the experts in remediating against a broken system? We need to build an image in our community that includes excellence, stability, safety, and awareness of what is needed for the success of young people that will be transitioning into the work force. These are your news sales strategies. Use these strategies even if you put an ad in the paper or a commercial on television. You have to market your expertise, not how you are like everyone else.
How is this kind of image building accomplished? Great news - it is not expensive, but it takes time dedicated to it for success to be realized. Consider the following as phase one of any good image building campaign:
· Create or revise your website to be THE calling card for not only the excellence of your institution, but as the best reference for your expertise and knowledge. Take a look at some really well developed websites for great consulting companies (http://www.libertybuilding.com is a great one as a start) and notice how they are well organized and FULL of information that is pertinent to their area of expertise. Model your school website after these. You must start to think differently. · Use social networking to connect with your families and their network of friends. Set up a page for your school on all the various networks and use Ping.fm to post on all of them at the same time. Use them to talk about why Christian schooling is a good decision. Point out issues in the news about the public school system (Headline - 5 children injured in school shooting - this is a great opportunity for you to image build towards the families that are worried about the safety of their children - and they should be). Use it as a platform to talk about what the school is doing and post artwork, flyers and events to keep connected to the network. It works, but it takes being dedicated to it. · Publish articles in your local newspapers and tabloids about issues surrounding schooling. If you can publish in educational journals, then blast your publishing successes all over the social networks. You are going to have to "toot" your own horn a little, but people are going to pay attention to expertise especially when something goes wrong in the public setting.
· Become a blogger - set one up and use it in conjunction with your website. You have to become a student of how to drive traffic to your website (this is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO). Set up e-mail lists by determining who in your community needs to know about what you offer but do not know that you exist, or that it is affordable and send out high quality e-mail newsletters. Blanket the media and other area outlets with the news of your successes and expertise, not just upcoming events. The community will care more about what you have succeeded in and they are the people you want to come across your door because they are not currently enrolled. · Hire an outside consultant to help you establish this kind of initiative. It is not very expensive and there are many who would be glad to help out a local school with their expertise. You can go it alone and find success, but with a small amount of money and little expertise, you can really see the results more quickly.
Think Creatively About Everything
I work with a local Christian school that has entered a partnership with several local businesses that write grants for work and research performed in a professional setting for its high school students. The students research and produce deliverables for the businesses and train as a part of their education and in return for these research and development efforts, the companies give the school a grant to fund the program. This has virtually eliminated the need for tuition at the high school level. This is an example of some highly creative thinking that has created an environment where finances are no longer an issue. I have known of schools that accepted international students coming to the United States to study particular subjects or participate in sports training and have a need to continue their schooling and the school entered into a relationship with these students and accepted them as students with tuition that reflect their international status (in some cases it is double the regular tuition) and then used the extra tuition costs to scholarship students who could not afford to come; very creative. It is time for us to wake up and use our creativity as an asset that will help set us apart (Marx, 2006).
Final Thoughts So let's get this down to earth about all of this. These theories will seem to be "pie in the sky" for some and possibly earth changing for others. However, there are those who are reading this article and are still on the fence. So to conclude, let me offer you these points to ponder. Why did your church start a Christian School? Think it through thoroughly. For most, the idea for a Christian school was birthed from a love of your community and a desire to offer a biblically based education and ultimately the hope was to win families for Christ and follow the Great Commission of creating disciples. At the very heart of your school is a desire to love and minister to others, and I am exhorting you to go back to that place as you consider the future. It simply is not right to allow the lack of finances to class people out who are passionate about Christian Education. Yet this is the very scenario that we are facing. Remember, 2 Timothy 1:7 tells us that God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power, of love and of a sound mind. Do not allow the financial crisis we are facing to stifle your creativity - it is at the very heart of how we were created; in the image of a fully creative God who has given us the ability to hear from Him and step out of the boat and walk on the water. We just have to be willing to face the fear of getting wet in the face and put faith in the God that called us to start the school in the first place. Thinking differently will be the key that will make the difference between suffocating and surviving, surviving and thriving, thriving and innovating. It will be the innovators that will always survive every difficult moment, for they will determine what direction to travel regardless of what has defined the successes of the past. The successes of the future will always be full of risk and reward for those who are willing to hold on to the truths that never change and change the methods that have been used to get the truth to those that are in desperate need of the gift that only God offers. This needs to be our motivation and then God can truly bless us and in the end say to us, "Well done."
(c) 2010 Oak Brook Productions, Eustis, Florida - All Rights Reserved References
Cashman, K. (1998). Leadership from the inside out: Becoming a leader for life. Minneapolis, MN: TCLC, LLC LeaderSource.
Gladwell, M. (2002). Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference. New York: Back Bay Books. (Original work published 2000)
Latifi, S. (2009, November 21). RTP Christian school closing. The News & Observer Publishing Company. Retrieved December 12, 2009, from http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/203319.html
Marx, G. (2006). Future-focused leadership: preparing schools, students, and communities for tomorrow's realities. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Timothy Michael Stafford has an earned Masters Degree in Instructional Design for Online Learning and is currently a doctoral learner at Capella University He also holds an earned Masters Degree in Religious Studies. He currently serves as the Director of Media, Instructional Design and Image Building for Liberty Building Forensics Group and cooperative companies which include Hampden-Dubose Academy and Legacy High School in Zellwood Florida. Mr. Stafford is also spearheading a soon to be launched coalition for virtual education. Mr. Stafford has over twenty years of experience in classroom teaching and school administration and has given over two hundred presentations for groups such as the Association of Christian Schools International (ASCI), Association of Christian Teachers and Schools (ACTS), Florida Education Technology Conference (FETC), International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE), Revolutionary University, and many others. His innovative image building, marketing and fundraising campaigns for fine arts and other programs in Christian Schools have raised over $250,000 in programming capital. For more information about the programs mentioned in this article, please email your request to t.stafford@libertybuilding.com or call 352 552 0939.
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