Branding/Marketing

We really need to refine the message of charter schools. We need to do the research that truly defines the elements of the message and then test that message in different markets.

Maybe we should be doing this in San Francisco or Oakland?

The end goal is to have a waiting list of 50% of our enrollment. After we figure out the message there would be channels to get that message out – like churches, boys and girls clubs, etc.

When we talk about marketing in the Charter School world there are different constituents. Given the teacher shortage there is also a need to market to potential employees. We also have to consider that the more we market the more we create political resistance to our message.

For profit and non-profit industries don’t have the same tension we have in that if we are successful we will wither away (we’ll put ourselves out of a job).

Who is going to do this? Is it the association? Is it a local PR firm? Is it a regional coop of schools?

Here’s our message: It’s free, it’s safe and it’s a high quality place for kids to go to school.

We feel that schools can get together to make that message. We can imagine a group of schools making this message to a church for instance. “Here’s a group of schools that are serving the community well.”

The coop idea resonated well with us.

We didn’t talk about other channels – like getting to the tribune or getting on television.

The pilot is to bring a group of 10 schools together – like in San Francisco and try it. Oakland is a more complex environment to pilot but it might be good to consider it there.

We meet monthly in San Francisco and it would be a natural step for us to take to do this. A regional CCSA person would be a good person to facilitate this.

There will be costs associated with this so a non-profit or foundation would be needed to help us out.

The regional coop idea is timely and you can make decisions quickly. The geographic focus makes sense. It’s cost conscious. That message would resonate with lots of charter schools. Parents are trying to make sense of the difference between schools and this would be helpful. If the message came out in March it would be great to let people know we’re hiring teachers as well.

We have this conversation a lot at the Association about messaging and branding being different.

Deciding what area to start with would be helpful.

The additional resource issue will come up so when we present it to people we should have an idea of what we would do.

San Francisco is ready but Oakland might be more complex however if we did it there we might get better insights. There are more then 20 schools in Oakland.

Doing it in the Bay Area as a whole might be too much to start with. Maybe the study would start at a more specific level like a grade level?

We could do something like, “Your Bay Area Charter Schools”. If you did that  you could access more resources that way. And, this is more of a branding thing.

We would need a logo and some resources and we would need to go back to the association to find out what they have done as far as research goes.

One idea might be to try to brand charters as a whole first – maybe for two years – and then go back and differentiate them.

Why didn’t you have teacher marketing as part of this? The teacher shortage is a whole other aspect.

Charter BTSA

There was model presented yesterday that we liked. We said let’s start with a BTSA network and then build up to a teacher network.

We want to start a BTSA program for Charters exclusively. It probably needs to be larger then one city. After we experiment with this program we would expand through mentors.

There is an organization needed to do this and it’s probably not a coop. It is not CCSA either. We don’t think they would want to be in the business of running a BTSA program. So with the help of CCSA we would want to identify an organization and fund it (CCSA would help us find the funding). We would need to do some research and we would need to understand how to move ahead based on the answers to some of the questions we have. Charter schools do not get any money for BTSA.

The business model for building the BTSA program would be a lot of the up front work.

We need to survey schools to understand their needs. Use some funding up front to understand what makes the most sense. Implementing the program in one area first and then try to replicate it in other places.

We would need to recruit the mentors and try to get mentors that are in the schools already. Maybe the pilot would get funding but the program would be self –sustainable once we started replicating it? We wondered if we should do something like having new teachers paying for it up front and then getting reimbursed after 5 years? Or, should schools be paying for it?

The organization supports the mentors and the mentors support the new teachers. After we piloted for two years we would then build a model for replication and eventually we would have a state-wide program for Charter Schools. If you had one teacher per school that needed BTSA now you would have 600 teachers that needed it and that’s a lot of teachers. So there is surely a need for something like this.

What’s actually happening with these teachers? BTSA is required for clearing your credential. If they don’t do it within 5 years they lose their credentials. What we are going to see is a lot of charter school’s being frantic that they will be losing their teachers if something doesn’t happen soon.

The mentors spend about one or two days per month with the new teachers. They do observations and they expose new teachers to certain things that good teachers do. The mentors work with new teachers to master these skills. Some teachers call their mentors on a weekly basis and some just wait to meet with them once or twice a month.

There is a pre-defined program of workshops in the BTSA program. Then the mentors focus on the topics from the workshops and seeing how you are doing with regards to them.

For the mentors we might do something like the train the trainer model where you have the mentor in the school or very close to where the new teachers are. The time constraints on new teachers is huge and anything you can do to help them would be great.

Usually they recruit mentors within a district and then assign people to work together – possibly by grade level or subject.

New teachers shouldn’t pay for it. BTSA costs $3500 per year for new teachers. The county runs our program. It’s expensive. You will have people leaving to go to districts to pay for it (the districts do pay for it).

I support the idea of a vested involvement. That might be something that is counter intuitive but the mortality rate of new teachers is about 50%. It’s possible they are leaving because they are not getting support in the beginning? This is an unfunded mandate for Charter Schools. We’re taking the money out of our professional development funds. Trying to figure out the way to do this at a scale that doesn’t take money away from us is exciting.

We’re excited about this vesting idea.

Mentoring is a more substantial time commitment then we thought about. Do teachers in Charter Schools have the time to be mentors? Maybe there needs to be full-time mentors? Maybe there needs to be extra pay for mentors?

It’s different for us. We don’t lose teachers.

Aren’t there people that do credentialing?

There is a significant investment to develop a Charter BTSA. The upfront homework could take a large investment. You could possibly fund it through a foundation or a grant. Why is it rolled into our block grant and why aren’t we getting extra money for funding it?

We do know that individual site BTSA programs are inefficient. Perhaps we hire a person for a year that is a BTSA trainer?

The amount of paperwork you have to complete is what they look at to decide how many teachers one mentor can handle.

If you are paying a person a stipend that’s not the right way to go. To do it as a portion of release time is also inefficient.

Maybe there is a coop model for schools to come together and hire a BTSA trainer?

One of the first steps is getting the interested parties to sit down to figure out who is going to do what? Does the association want to do anything here? We don’t know so that has to be figured out.

This is interesting because San Francisco State called the other day and asked if we wanted to expand our BTSA program. Getting involved with a partner is not something we could do in a pilot if we wanted to replicate it. We still need to look at those partnerships. Maybe we could pilot both options and figure out the benefits of each?

Back Office

We talked about the back office. We talked about procurement. CCSA has something called Charter Buy but that doesn’t work.

The office products guy has a good model. We like to have control and we can go online and order things and have them the next day (and pay the price that CCSA negotiated).

We’ve got challenges with maintenance, janitors, copiers, food service and transportation. Maybe we could negotiate for these services for many schools together? We would need to do this regionally so you can find a vendor that is nearby.

We don’t know how to email each other. Maybe CCSA needs to build a forum? There could be different areas there and we could just access that to find out what we need.

The challenge of Charter Buy is that it’s not regionally organized. I would like to see that people use a specific organization and they are good. That would be helpful to me.

It’s almost like a block where you can share information about what you are buying so that people could get into it if they wanted to.

The hotel industry has a lot of people that are really good at fixing things. We’ve hired people from the hotel industry. We’ve hired full time people after we got to a capacity.

For janitorial and maintenance we have our own full time people. We figure out other things until we are at capacity and then when we are at capacity we hire people.

The back office has some interesting opportunities.

The accounting, bookkeeping and payroll are all things that are generic (you don’t need to know about schools specifically). Budgeting, compliance and reporting are things you need to know about schools in order to do well.

Our pilot is a coop that has like-minded governance and is focused on quality and cost. The current providers don’t need to do what we need because they have plenty of clients and plenty of business.

The coop would have the ability to customize what we need and there would be the added benefit that we would create some jobs.

There are some schools that are in-house and will stay in-house but there are other schools that aren’t and won’t ever do these things in-house. There are also some schools that want to contract services from other providers and not go through the coop.

Training is a huge issue for us.

NCB can provide training to charter schools that is more in-depth. That might be provided by CCSA? The cost is huge.

The next steps are creating the coop and increasing training. The gap in existing services doesn’t have someone that can come to your school and train you (we need someone that could come and train you about budgeting for instance).

We talked about setting up some standards – standards for cost comparison and for measuring quality.

Something like an industry group with standards for third party providers and something that could standardize the services (like accounting systems) so schools can change easily. One of the things that ran through our conversation is that Charter Schools aren’t good customers. We don’t have a way of measuring that and that’s something that CCSA can do is give schools the knowledge to evaluate.

Schools can come together and enhance one school’s business office and then that school could support other charter schools. They can charge for that. The only problem is capacity. We’ve talked about doing something like that further north. It could be half the price.

The dollar amounts are something like $140,000 for the whole bit – HR, accounting, payroll, attendance reporting, etc.

EX-ED is doing it cheaper then $80,000 or maybe even less then $40,000. Maybe they could come to Northern California?

ED-TEC does it for Southern California.

The conversation yesterday was about the quality of the work they are doing and our ability to see it (that transparency thing). I can get the price down but that doesn’t address the quality of the services. Having the training and some third party educating Charter Schools to be able to understand how it all works would be great.