How do you evaluate and hold accountable bus drivers, janitors, IT specialists, cafeteria servers, maintenance workers and other school staff when you’ve never done their job?
On any given day – even as schools teach students to read, build their character, and prepare them for careers and college – these institutions are undertaking the monumental task of keeping their operations running smoothly.
They are providing transportation to many of their students to and from school (not to mention field trips, athletics, and special events). And if it’s a charter school they may be transporting students from all different parts of town.
They’re feeding these students two meals, following strict guidelines to ensure that they meals qualify for federal reimbursement, and doing their best to make them as delicious and nutritious as possible. For some students, these are the only meals they're receiving that day.
They’re maintaining a facility that is typically tens of thousands of square feet. And I can promise that you can’t even imagine all the creative ways students will find to put that facility to the test.
They’re supporting staff and student technology, ensuring that hundreds of laptops are working properly safely able to access the internet, and every classroom has functioning projectors, document cameras, speakers, etc.
They’re cleaning up any messes that students haven’t taken care of themselves, and making sure that no matter how hectic the day before was, students come to a clean palace of learning the next day.
For my friends who can’t quite wrap their mind around it, I say that running the operations of a school is like throwing a 500-person wedding every day of the week for 9 months.
And typically, the person who supervises all of these functions – A Director of Operations, other Operational Leader, or sometimes just the Principal – is also responsible for overseeing finance, budgeting, staff recruitment, student enrollment, procurement, inventory, events management, HR, daily logistics, attendance, scheduling, staff coverage, and standardized testing logistics.
Thanks to Daniel Casselli and the BuyQ team for having me on their podcast to talk through strategies for leading a million different workstreams when you can’t be an expert on all of them.
We discuss how to manage staff and vendors with responsibilities that we don’t have experience with, and maintain operational excellence across the board with the limited time we can dedicate to each workstream.
Get in touch with me and SchoolOps if you want to think through how to train your team on these skills, and listen to all the episodes of Charter School Insider that you possibly can – it’s like free Professional Development for your ops team!
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