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You are the Principal / Head of School. Who reports to you? Who reports to them? That’s management structure! But how do you know whether you have the right positions or structure for the size of school you have, or where you are in your life-cycle? Here are some clues that an Analysis would be very helpful to you:
- You’ve never actually thought about it too much – there were always more important things to do!
- You are working 10 hour+ days on a regular basis
- There is not enough time to supervise / support / evaluate everyone
- Things are falling through the cracks
- The school has grown and everyone just got new titles
- We’ve added a lot of staff and the finances are really stretched
This online service provides you an analytical report describing where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there. Taking place over the course of a week including three in depth conversations with the Principal, this is an efficient investment to know that you are or will be appropriately staffed and thus being fiscally responsible. The Analysis is part of the Strategic Health Check. It is sometimes used on its own to prepare for Strategic Planning / Strategic Financial Management.
Scheduling
Your schedule is the way in which your mission is delivered in time. It determines your ability to deliver the mission with excellence, teachers’ pedagogy, the quality of the children’s daily experience, individual and community stress, efficient use of space, and fiscal stewardship.
It is the cheapest way to create transformational change in the child’s life. CSM takes a Scriptural approach to schedule because, in the beginning, God created circadian rhythms.
“Then God said: “Let there be light”, and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night.
So the evening and the morning were the first day.”
Genesis 1: 4-5
Scheduling is the stewardship of sacred Time, with all the dimensions that Time affords us: (1) the temporale, or the time marked by the liturgical calendar and its celebrations of the life of Christ, which is cyclical; (2) the sanctorale, or the time marked by the succession of the lives of saints, which is linear and historical; and (3) eschatological time, which in Christian belief represents the progress of time toward Judgment Day.
The Christian school schedule must pay attention to (1) the cyclical/repetitive nature of the schedule as it is repeated year to year which is cyclical; (2) the linear nature of time as each individual child progresses from year to year and through graduation which is linear; (3) the context of all of that in Christian eschatological time, the child’s development and movement towards the day when God comes in glory to renew the heavens and the earth.
We have worked in evangelical schools, Catholic schools, Episcopal schools, Christian Reformed schools and many others. In all of them, there are the same concerns:
- How do children experience time in their daily and annual schedules?
- Why does the day feel so rushed?
- Is there a way to reduce the stress?
- What does it mean to teach for 21st century colleges, careers, and life?
- Is there a Christian schedule?
- How can I increase enrollment and will a different schedule produce different results?
- Where is joy in learning?
- Is my schedule efficient and cost-effective?
Partnering with CSM gives you the space to really interrogate your schedule, consider options for moving forward, and all within a Christian worldview and based on the latest research about children’s learning.
The Book
SCHEDULING in Christian schools is not just about the technicalities of slicing the day into bits of time. It is really about the way in which we think about children, their relationship to each other and the teachers who care for them, and their relationship to God, who created day and night.
Reading this book will teach you about how the school should steward time so that its children can participate in, experience, and benefit from the school’s mission. And time is about light and dark. These are God-given gifts that have deep spiritual significance and we should treat them with great seriousness.
The first creative act of God was to say: “Let there be light!” This light was a contrast to the “darkness that was on the face of the deep.” Light thus becomes, at the beginning of time, both a physical and metaphorical manifestation of God’s grace as the “light of the world” (John 1:4-5, 8:12, 9:5). Jesus is the light of the world and we are members of Christ’s Body (1 Corinthians 6:15). Jesus declares as part of the Beatitudes that we are the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), an echo of Isaiah’s prophecy that we are to be a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 42:6): “I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles.” Being a light to the Gentiles is, of course, soteriological, but it also calls us to an ethical life of “goodness, righteousness, and truth” (Ephesians 5:8-9).
The job of scheduling is as holy as any other kind of task. You might have thought of it as merely technical, maybe even bureaucratic. We think of scheduling as a foundation block of excellent education. Together with your budget, the schedule is the outward sign of your mission in practice. This book explores how to do that very well.