Four Charter School Growth Tips from Experienced Charter School Leaders

We hope the four key strategies here provide useful tips for you and your team to develop a strong charter school culture, empower your staff, individualize instruction, and create operational efficiency—all in support of your growth.

1. Nurture your school’s culture as much as you nurture your students

Ultimately, culture is always a product of the people involved with your school. It can be tough to retain quality leaders and teachers, especially because many charter schools have longer days and academic years than public schools. Teachers have to truly believe in the mission from the outset in order to put in those extra days and hours for years to come. To nurture a rich school culture, it’s essential that the people you hire are aligned with your mission.

2. Prioritize continuous professional development and leadership training

In order to have motivated staff committed to continuous improvement, professional development has to be front and center. This is also an investment in continuity. When people feel like they are getting better at their jobs and have room for growth, they are more likely to stay.

3. Focus on providing individualized instruction to your students and on data analysis

These aren’t contradictory! Every educator knows that one of the best ways to improve the data is to meet each student where they are and provide them with the support necessary to improve and succeed—regardless of your school’s curriculum and goals. Of course, school-wide metrics are the best evidence that individualized instruction is working. Review the metrics frequently, share them widely, and make them everyone’s responsibility.

4. Develop systems to maintain operational consistency and efficiency

Researching, investing in, and mastering new systems is time consuming and expensive. The efficiencies you’ll realize down the road will more than make up for the pain of adoption. If you think you don’t have time to figure out a new software to manage your finances, you really don’t have time to wrangle all the Excel spreadsheets you have been using.
Download the PDF of these four tips here.

The Charter School Growth Manual
Whether you’re just beginning the process of starting up a charter school, looking to expand, or trying to prioritize your next steps, download this guide to get expert tips and pitfalls to avoid as you grow.
For this charter school resource guide, we turned to our wide network of charter school experts for best practices and strategies for success at every stage of maturity. All of the advice in this book comes from experienced charter school leaders who have been where you are now—they understand what you’re facing and the pitfalls to avoid.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Toolkit: How To Prepare Your Charter School For Natural Disasters

Editor’s Note: This post was originally featured here from the National Charter Resource Center at Safal Partners. This comprehensive toolkit and list of resources can help prepare your charter school for natural disasters.
In 2018, the nation saw multiple, unprecedented natural disasters including deadly and devastating hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, winter storms, and wildfires. Preparing your charter school for natural disasters involves assessing risks, readying shelters, setting up effective warning and communication systems, and developing recovery plans — all to get your charter school back to teaching kids as soon as possible after a natural disaster.
We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.

Natural Disaster Preparation and Response: A Toolkit for Charter Schools

More than 25 million Americans—almost eight percent of the population—were affected by natural disasters in 2017. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, supported 59 major disaster declarations, 16 emergency declarations and 62 Fire Management Assistance Grant declarations across more than 35 states, tribes, and territories. Given the catastrophic events of 2017, these natural disasters remind families and communities of the importance of preparing for, responding to, and recovering from natural disasters.
The National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC) presents this toolkit that provides resources and examples to help charter school leaders and administrators (hereafter referred to as “leaders”) prepare for and respond to the effects of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.
DOWNLOAD THE TOOLKIT HERE
You can download the Excel spreadsheet referenced in the toolkit here.

Since the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

LEARN MORE

Enrollment marketing is talking with just the right person at just the right time, via mobile, online, or in person, in a meaningful way. It’s time to up your charter school enrollment marketing game to help your charter school raise community awareness, increase fundraising, and grow your enrollment numbers—while gaining and nurturing support from your community.
We just held our webinar “Charter School Enrollment Marketing 101” and in case you missed it, we wanted to let you know that the on-demand recording is now available! We had a few folks send along some questions after the webinar and thought you may have the same questions, so we’re posting those Q&As here as well. If you have additional questions, please add them in the comments below and we’ll be sure to get them answered for you as well.

Q&As

Q: Do you think they look at the reviews or the school rating? Or both?
A: This is a terrific question! Parents are certainly first looking at ratings, which can be challenging for many schools because a few bad ratings can quickly bring down a score, but the parents seriously considering your school will go beyond ratings and look at individual reviews. Unfortunately, the response of many schools when seeing bad ratings is to avoid ratings altogether or hope they go away. That is not a good response. Much better is to cultivate relationships with your parents and ask them to review your school, regardless of whether the rating is good or bad. Unhappy parents are going to leave a review whether or not you ask them, but your happy parents will be much less aware. If you educate your parents about the importance of ratings and let them know you are trying to create an accurate portrayal of your school on sites that offer ratings, they will be much more likely to share their perspective on these websites.
Q: When does Niche update their school ratings? Is it once a year?
A: Niche should be updating the ratings and reviews as the ratings and reviews come in and have been reviewed by the Niche team. That being said, at times we have seen response times from Niche being much slower than we would like.
Q: If you serve the whole state, how do we write blogs without just listing every county in the state. Or, do we have to somehow list them all?
A: This is a common scenario we encounter and can be very challenging. I would definitely recommend investing some time mapping out a comprehensive content strategy to address this situation.
I wouldn’t recommend listing every county in each blog post.
The first tactic I would consider is thinking beyond the blog in terms of content and developing content that is more resource-oriented, like a page for each county that serves as a guide for those looking to enroll in a charter school by creating specific content that answers common questions parents may have.
For instance content on your website that answers the following questions:

Is there a tuition-free public charter school available in [County Name]?
What are the requirements for students in [County Name] to be able to enroll in a charter school?
What documentation is required for students in [County Name] to enroll in a charter school?

We have created similar guides for a number of schools and they are now generating thousands of impressions for critical search terms.
Hopefully, this answered some of your questions, but again, feel free to send along any others in the comments below.

If you haven’t already, watch this information-packed webinar to learn which strategies and tactics can help you boost your enrollment numbers and positively impact your charter school’s viability. We hope you find the webinar helpful!

WATCH NOW