Thinking Outside the Box - Meeting the Needs of Homeschooling Families

Kym Wright
Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer

The first day of school, with nearly 15,000 students enrolled in Pre-K –12, and only a small portion of them arrive before the starting bell. Is the principal worried? With a large number of his school’s pupils tagged as “off-campus students,” many of the students do not show up for all-day classes. Instead, this school serves classes up cafeteria-style letting the students pick and choose which courses to take to meet their unique needs and specific goals. This is the way many Christian schools are choosing to work with homeschooling students in their states. Most view their off-campus courses as “supplementing what the parents are doing at home.”

Why do Christian school administrators choose to work with homeschoolers, when it apparently creates more work and has inherent hassles? In Time magazine the Federal Government statistic was quoted that nearly 1 in 5 homeschool students takes at least one class in a public or private school. With homeschooling growing at an estimated rate of 11% per year, both homeschooling and homeschoolers’ involvement in private schools seem to be trends that are definitely here to stay. According to NHERI President, and education researcher, Brian D. Ray, Ph.D., “this healthy synergy would require both public [and private] school administrators and homeschoolers to stop being so suspicious of one another.”

Click here to read the full post on the Crosswalk site.

Can We Keep Up with Our Competition? Should We Care?

Dr. Barrett Mosbacker
Originally posted on The Christian School Journal
January 31, 2009

We are in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant and non-competitive. If we do, we will lose students.

Historically, our competition has come from free public schools, charter schools, and homeschooling. Our new competition is coming from technology enabled courses offered by public schools, colleges and universities, and virtual schools, including virtual Christian schools. This development is changing the educational landscape and the school market. The current recession is likely to accelerate this change.

Public schools are adopting interactive technology and distance learning (D.L.) at an accelerating pace. Moreover, there is an increasing number of online virtual schools in higher education and in K-12 education. These options make virtually (pun intended) any course available to any student anytime, anywhere. Students and their parents are no longer restricted to brick and mortar traditional schools to have access to high quality fully accredited courses.

Topics discussed in this post include:

• The Explosion in Distance Learning
• Distance Learning Is and Will Disrupt the Traditional Classroom and School
• The Stimulus Plan is to Include $1 Billion for Ed Tech in Public Schools
• Competition from an Unexpected Source-Virtual Christian Schools: The Challenges and The Opportunities

Click here to read the FULL TEXT of the post on The Christian School Journal.

Click here to read the rest of the post on Dr. Mosbacker's blog.

Spread Too Thin: The Peanut Butter Syndrome in Christian Schools!

Are You Spread Too Thin?
How to THRIVE and not merely SURVIVE as a Christian school!
Originally posted by Dr. Barrett L. Mosbacker
The Christian School Journal

I recently read an interesting article by the CEO of Yahoo! titled The Peanut Butter Manifesto. For the purposes of this blog article I want to focus on the following statement from the memo because it is instructive for us as school leaders.

"We [Yahoo!] lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics ...

I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."

The Christian school movement is not particularly healthy. Based on recent statistics that I have seen, the number of Christian school and overall enrollments are stagnant or declining.
Although there are external forces beyond our control that affect our schools, many of our problems are self-inflicted.

One of our self-inflicted wounds is similar to that articulated by the CEO of Yahoo!--we are often not strategic in the allocation of our tangible and intangible resources and as a consequence we are not offering a substantial marginal value to our current and potential clients. I am referring to our parents a clients because notwithstanding our missions as Christian schools, our parents are essentially paying clients who make economic calculations in deciding whether to enroll or re-enroll their children in our schools.

If our schools are to survive, much less thrive, we must stop "spreading the peanut butter too thin." We need to think far more strategically. Where should we place our resources? What is the basis for our decision? What programs should we eliminate? What programs should we add? The the marginal value of our schools been stagnant or declining?

These are important questions that we must answer with ruthless honesty.

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Christian School Journal.