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Hello all, Nathan here, if you're a teacher in a Christian school, if you home school
or if you even own a school or preschool or perhaps teach children at Church there´s
a special announcement coming up late which you don't want to miss.
So, stay tuned, I hope you enjoy the interview and God bless.
Nathan: As usual Jeremy, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what
you do. Jeremy: my name is Rev. Jeremy Walker, I work
for Grace Community Schools in Bonita Springs, Florida. I am currently 33 years old, I work
with my wife at one of our school at the Bonita Springs location we have our 9 children with
us which we home school at the location as well. our school currently has about 250 plus
students a day in our schools and we have school going on Monday through Friday, year
'round. We take one week off at Christmas, other than that we have classes go year 'round.
We are an exclusively Christian School. which focuses on teaching Bible. We also focus on
reading in particular, in academics. So, our school does quite a bit.
Nathan: you're working on a couple of big projects, one of them is an updated Operations
Manual. So, who is your target audience for that and what do you hope it will accomplish?
Jeremy: The Operations Manual comes from the school itself, the Grace Community's model
that we have here. The school's been around since 1986 and since that time the schools
have been successful from the first year. The Operations Manual was originally written
earlier in the 1990's and updated last was 1999. Now we're in the year 2014 so it's been
close to 15 years now since the last edition was updated. And we decided to update this
with all the new information we have, quite a few policies have changed in the last 15
years. You have a lot of other things which you have to change to make yourself 'sales-y'
to people that are out there and keep your school current, and of course just to make
things more fine tuned and better. As you can imagine, in 15 years quite a bit more
experience has been given and so you can take the extra experience that has been given,
the new policies that have been put in place, things that you were able to look in the past
and say "our school didn´t do these things as well as they could have" or "these things
worked better". We were able to take all those different policies and those different procedures
and were able to put 15 extra years of experience into a manual. And then of course we also
went further, step by step with it as well. So the target audience would be those people
that are interested in a private school, specificallly focusing on preschool, like ourselves, and
also those people that are currently already running private schools, private Christian
schools. They might have a school that focuses on the upper grades perhaps and might find
out the benefit of having a preschool may be added to their school. Or of course, those
that might already have a Christian preschool, there's quite a few people that might already
had been inspired by what we've done here, so this can also further help better run their
schools with the extra experience gleaned from us, so that would be the target audience.
Nathan: So, this is the experience of the 15 years since your last manual, all the years
of experience, 20 plus years of experience before that, across several locations and
with the experience with thousands or tens of thousands of children. So this really is
an invaluable tool and it's coming from a preschool that has been there and done that
and is really going well. Can you talk us through it, the main sections of the manual.
Jeremy: Yes, we actually went through a lot of work on this manual, we put a lot of though
into it. It's well formatted and it's easy to go through the different sections, each
section is set down so it's easy to find the information you are looking for. There's different
sections in the manual itself. Starting out with would be PRACTICAL ADVICE.
This would be, this section talks about different things about what a person's mindset would
need to be, things like finding a location, how to go about finding a location for their
preschool if they don't already have one. Another part of this practical advice would
be how to get financing. This is a very important aspect of running a preschool course, is finding
a right location and being able to also get the financing that's required in order to
be able to start your centre, if you don't already have one. And so some of these are
what would be in the practical advice section. The next section would b e SALES, ADVERTISING
AND PUBLIC RELATIONS. This section here is extremely important, not enough focus is placed,
I think in the sales department. Yes, we are Christians and yes we have a very worthy goal
but, just like any other business you have to have proper sales and proper advertising
to bring in your customers. And so this section goes through in great detail about how to
do your sales, specifically, if a new person comes in, a person who has their child and
is looking for a school and they're thinking about which schools to go to, there's many
different options that are out there for people and so, what is it that sets your school apart
from others? And so, this section on sales goes through how to do that. It talks about
actually taking a parent or a person coming in to prospectively going to have a student
in your school and being successful at explaining what you do and being able to talk to them
about it so they make a decision to choose your school vs. someone else's. It also goes
through a guide to talk about referrals, how to get parents you are currently in your school
to refer you to their friends and this is actually one of the most valuable sales tools,
above any of the rest. Because, once a person suggest your schools to their friends, this
person walking through your door is pretty much already sold. Their friends, someone
they trust, someone they rely on has already given you a glowing recommendation. So, getting
these referrals from parents that are currently there is extremely valuable.
Then of course there are basic visitor tips, some sales tips, there´s things about what
to do on the phone, how to make a successful phone call if somebody phones up asking about
your school. Then, of course, there are different forms
of advertising. It's kind of an overview which describes advertising in general and how to
advertise your school. Then there's more specific ones about the pros and cons of different
types of advertising techniques. One being direct mail advertising, some of the reasons
why you might want to think about that. Some of the positives that it has and some of the
limitations that it has. Another one would be phone book advertising. How to set up a
website, and how to properly set up your website so that it´s easy to navigate by prospective
parents, things like that. Also, other things would be like search engines, specifically
in our Internet age, lots of people do their searching not in the phone book sometimes,
most of it is going to be on the Internet. And so, how to go through these successfully
and do these things. And there's also Social Media sites to think
of as well, Facebook, you also have Twitter and other ones that are out there like that.
So how to utilise these as well to get out there with Public Relations and to put yourself
out there. You can have updates and all kinds of things and interact with the parents you
currently have and of course they can share things with their friends as well. And so
there are other things as well which go into the Public Relations. Also it goes with Managers,
how are they going to interact with the parents, how are they going to interact with their
employees? You have other things as well like how to handle complaints and concerns. All
of these are going to be covered in the SALES AND ADVERTISING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS section
which is quite detailed and everything is minutely explained as well.
The next section would be the MANAGERIAL DUTIES. This goes through all the managerial duties
the manager would have it has an overview and a lot more specifics about what a manager
is responsible for. Much like how to manage learning certificates. Inspectors and Inspections
that come up. You're also going to have the manager's resposibility for the classroom
lesson plans, making sure they're prepared, making sure
the assistant teachers, making sure they´re ready. How to handle hiring employees. How to
handle things like scheduling of appointments, opening and closing a school. How to handle
school parties, report cards, attendance.