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 (1) What is the first step
in starting a Christian school?
The first step is clearly
hearing from God -- what He wants to do.
What is God calling you to
do? What will be unique about your Christian school?
Your uniqueness is bigger
than a curriculum, although a curriculum is a part.
Ultimately it has to do with (1) the type of children and
families you are trying to reach, (2) the transformation of
these children and families you desire and (3) the means you use
to go from (1) to (2).
In understanding God's
vision, do not confuse ends and means. A Beka curriculum is
a means. A classical education is a means. Delivering principled, high integrity, young men
or women with a Biblical worldview is a end.
There are many possible ends,
because God is constantly making all things new (Rev. 22:9).
Here are a few possible end goals -- or ultimate visions -- for
your Christian school:
(A) World-changing Christian leaders,
(B) High integrity, high competence Christian professionals,
(C) Productive members of society,
(D) Graduates who often choose full-time church ministry,
(E) Skilled Christians who will make a strong contribution in
science or technology,
(F) Talented Christians who will be salt in the fine arts and/or
(E) Thoughtful leaders who actively work to redeem local
communities.
The end vision of your school
-- the type of person your school will produce -- is a different
decision than the type of person or family your school seeks to
serve.
It could be
stated as simply as "We target families who simply agree with the vision of our
school, regardless of the other circumstances in their life."
We recommend this.
That is, we attract families
who want their children to be world changers. Or, we want families
who hope their children will be highly competent Christian
professionals, etc.
As long as the family is
motivated to help their children accomplish this vision, we
don't care particularly if they are rich or poor, intact
families or divorced families, race, etc.
GraceWorks believes that
ultimately this is the best way to position your school, or
"segment your market" in marketing parlance. You attract
people by your end goal, your vision.
However, some schools will
target their school to a type of family or child ...
... A denominational affiliation (Lutheran, Roman Catholic,
Seventh Day Adventist),
... A life circumstance (at risk, difficult family circumstance),
... A socio-economic standing (well-to-do, middle class, lower
income) or
... A faith status (seekers, solid Christian families, lost).
In theory, if you target a
certain type of family, "we will all be on the same page."
In practice, often this type of targeting will limit you.
Consider, for example, the
noble ideal that "Our Christian school seeks to serve those who
cannot afford a Christian education anywhere else in town."
That's not really a vision. At best, it is an
ill-advised statement of market segmentation.
Both in our
Marketing Christian
Schools guide, and in the
Financial FAQ's we discuss the
real problems of trying to target by income. In short, there are plenty of high-income parents who would like
their children to respect and learn to work with children from a
variety of economic statuses -- and races. Why exclude
them?
The reason why many
denominational schools are struggling today is because they
targeted their school to families of a particular faith,
without discovering their larger vision. Most of
these, to survive, will have to discover that larger vision.
What is holding them back is their own history, their DNA ...
lots of leaders and supporters who think the existing vision is
just fine.
That is one example of why
beginnings are so important, and why we think you should get
school start-up coaching.
Beginnings set in place the DNA that will profoundly impact your
school's entire history.
It is so easy to innocently
make decisions that will doom your school in the long-run ... or
later force you into an arduous change process in order to
survive. Satan will use our high ideals against us if we
are not careful. (That's why renewing of our minds is so
very important -- Romans 12:2.)
In the case of GraceWorks
Ministries, our end is to produce world-changing Christian
leaders like Daniel, Moses and Paul, who will face problems
similar to what they faced.
The best way we know to
accomplish that end is to empower Christian schools, and that is
our means. If God reveals a better way to accomplish our
vision, we will embrace it.
The same should be true of
you. Determine the end goal first, and then means become
much more clear for you.
(2) Be practical. What do we really need to start a Christian school?
The essentials you need are
vision, leaders, followers, students, money and longitudinal
time.
Vision. If you
study the history of vision in the Bible, most of the time God
reveals His big picture vision to a single leader, such as when
Moses received the vision to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Imagine how long that would have taken if God had decided to do
it by committee!
Jerusalem was rebuilt because
God gave specific visions to Ezra and Nehemiah. Christians today
do not have to become Jews first because God gave Peter a
vision.
Who God chooses to reveal His
vision to is not necessarily positional. It is, rather,
relational, based on who in the situation of a new Christian school is
seeking God with all their heart. So, to discover God's
vision for your school, pray and fast. Seek God!
It ultimately doesn't matter
what your leadership position is with the school ... what
matters is your relational position with the Lord.
Leaders.
You
need leaders and followers because there is no possible way you
will accomplish everything God has called you to do if you have
to pay for it.
If the vision for your school
is crystal clear, then leadership recruitment is easy.
Strong leaders will either jump on board enthusiastically --
because they know exactly where this is all going. Or they
will demur, because your vision does not match up with their
own.
With a clear vision, what you
avoid is the leadership debate about what your vision should be.
Certainly you will debate the particulars, but the big picture
stays constant.
John Kenneth Galbraith once
said, "The best men [or women] can be had for nothing." If your
vision is of God, and clear (Hab. 2:2), this will be true of your
Christian school as well.
We know of a
school in Colorado Springs that had a volunteer, full-time principal. A former
professor of education, he had an earned doctorate in education. Rather than playing golf in his retirement, he decided to
continue serving God by leading a small Lutheran school.
What kind of leadership
will God provide for you?
Followers. Starting a Christian school is a lot like conducting a symphony
... except you often must teach the musicians how to play their
instrument as well! The conductor's goal is beautiful music.
Imagine if the conductor gets
impatient to accomplish the goal, and to get some sort of music,
picks up an instrument ... or even two, and starts playing.
He even instructs the assistant to do the same.
Through extraordinary
multi-tasking, we now have music. Four instruments to be
exact. It doesn't sound much like much of an orchestra,
but we have music.
What the conductor should
have done is obvious -- recruit musicians. Recruit people
to train the musicians. Teach the musicians to work
together, to play well together.
What's not so obvious is that
Christian schools make this same exact mistake, over and over
again.
If you are the conductor, you
can go to a workshop or pick up a book on all the mechanics to
start a Christian school ... and wrongly assume you are the one
who has to get it all done.
It's the same question:
Who are the followers that God is going to provide to help
you accomplish His vision?
Do you have to determine the
curriculum, for example? In one of our
School Start-up Studies we
ran into a Ph. D. in curriculum design who freely offered to
help a Lutheran high school start-up with curriculum design.
The principal was an experienced man, and refused her offer,
doing it himself.
How would have you responded,
dear reader? If the vision for your Christian school is clear, why
not utilize the curriculum expert? The boundaries are well
defined, and she very likely will come up with a better solution
than the principal.
(Again, ask yourself, is an A
Beka curriculum, or a Concordia curriculum, an end ... or a
means to end?)
It is only because we don't
really know what type of beautiful music we want in the end,
that we quit being the conductor and become musicians. By yourself, you cannot possibly play all the instruments in the
orchestra.
There are all kinds of
specifics like this. For example, who sets up the homework
policy or the discipline policy for your school. Should you give up that control?
Ironically,
the for-profit Edison Schools reform project does precisely
that. Local parent committees, in conjunction with local
staff, determine the appropriate levels of homework for their
schools as well as
appropriate discipline policies.
In the example above, the
Lutheran High School opened with all of ten students. By
himself, the experienced administrator had developed great
policies, a solid handbook, and hired good teachers.
However, other key areas had been badly neglected, including
marketing, fundraising and visioning.
Sadly, many had offered to
help, but the principal choose to be a musician, not a
conductor.
As a key leader in your
Christian school start-up, you will make the same choice, consciously or
not. Your choice will directly impact the quality of music
of your new school plays.
To be clear, God may very
well provide people who will help you with a business plan,
budgets or even help you hire great teachers. But the
vision part is up to you. GraceWorks can help you
determine God's vision for your
school.
Students. Not
having a history is a great gift that a school start-up receives
only once. Use this gift, well, as we discuss in
Ten Common Mistakes in
School Start-Ups.
If your vision is reasonable,
parents will tend to believe it. Leaders, followers and
staff strive for it.
Once history happens, parents
will see the inevitable disconnects between your vision and the
reality. If the disconnects are large, student recruitment
gets hard.
So use the
newness and excitement of your school start, and a clear outcome-based
vision, to generate
positive word of mouth referrals.
GraceWorks' Pre-Campaign
Studies can likewise help you identify probable
students.
Money. Many leaders in school start-ups idealistically assume that
local or national foundations will be available to fund their
school start-up. This is unlikely for three reasons:
(A) Most foundations want to support established concerns, not
new entities.
(B) Most local foundations will not fund a local school because
"if we fund one, we have to fund them all."
(C) Many foundations will simply not fund any Christian cause,
simply because it's Christian. This is particularly true
of large corporations, that have non-Christian employees who would
be sensitive to gifts to Christian causes.
Instead, the money you need
for start-up will come largely from individuals who are close to
your Christian school, and involved with it.
That is why GraceWorks
advocates a volunteer intensive approach to school start-ups ...
all those volunteers are potential donors.
In fact, one of the best ways
to cultivate people who give sacrificial gifts is to involve
them in the life of your school. If you try to do all the
work yourself, you lose that opportunity.
Much of this website is
dedicated to helping Christian
school raise more money. If you are interested in how your
Christian school
start-up can receive large major
gifts, call (719) 278-9600, and request GraceWorks'
65-page monograph Succeeding at Major Gifts.
Longitudinal Time.
To
be practical, plan on a year of advance time to start your
school. In our Christian
School Marketing Seminars, we explain how the marketing
calendar for a Christian school starts in November or December.
If you are reading this in
the spring, and want to open in the fall, consider the reality
that most parents have already decided what they are going with
their child next fall. You will be asking them to
re-decide to enroll in your school.
And that's just one example.
How will you recruit quality teachers? Fundraising happens
over time as well. Major donors need time to make
sacrificial gifts.
And keep in mind, as you get
into the process, it will become much, much more complicated as
you realize fully everything that is involved to start well.
You will be glad for a plan that allowed you more time to get it
right.
Conclusion. Keep
the big picture in sight at all times. It is very easy to
get bogged down in the details ... and neglect whole essential
areas. Continually ask: What is God providing to
accomplish this part of His vision.
(3) GraceWorks advocates
starting as large as possible, rather than starting small.
What's wrong with the small approach, starting with a few early
grades, and adding one grade per year?
The small approach can make
sense if your Christian school will be largely self-contained, and does
not need much community support. Lots of church-based
denominational schools are successfully started this way.
The ultimate question is
to what extent your school needs the support of the community to
be successful. A bigger initial vision will attract
more support: leaders, followers, students and money.
It is harder to attract high
caliber leaders, or special talent followers, or students, if
you are a Kindergarten and 1st grade only, and it will be 7
years before you have a "regular" Christian school. The same
is true in major gift work.
Will yours ultimately be a
large school? How you start will determine your growth
rate ... it is all part of your school's DNA. Starting small may very well mean that you remain small, with
all the issues that entails.
Because parents have such
high expectations for the school quality, GraceWorks believes
the ultimate problem to be solved is
maximizing support for
your Christian school start-up.
That is also the philosophy
behind GraceWorks Christian
School Start-Up Studies.
Most school start-ups simply
cannot afford to provide everything parents expect from a
school, Christian or not. You will need help, either
volunteers or money, to get it all done.
We've also seen the situation
where one school starts small, a grade at a time, and across
town, a competing school opens a couple of years later with all
eight grades. It's hard to position a K - 3 to compete
effectively against a K - 8 school.
Many parents will simply pull
their children to the larger school for the convenience of it. The practical concern many parents have is the need to put all
their children in one school. To work, the grade at
a time plan largely attracts new, young families. Nothing
wrong with that per se, except that the marketing is harder.
Keep in mind
that the decisions made early on will set a course for the
history of your
school. You can change course later, but as your school
develops a history, changes are harder to make.
Right now, these are just
decisions. Later on, they will be difficult change
processes.
GraceWorks can help
your Christian school start well and healthy. Call (719)
278-9600 to get expert help determining and implementing God's
vision for your school start-up.
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