By Rachel Scott, The Finance Project

Launching an independent charter school can be very much like walking a tightrope without a net. Charter school operators are often easily pulled from side to side as they navigate the school year to meet the needs of kids, manage the expectations of parents, balance complex financial and human resources issues, and, perhaps just as likely, unplugging sinks in their spare time!

Whether chaos brings out your best or your worst, as the leader of an independent charter school you have the responsibility to hold the unique pedagogical vision of your school and ensure the organization learns from its wobbles across the tightrope. At the heart of every charter school is an idea so exciting it kept someone awake at night to bring it into fruition. How does a charter school operator keep that vision vibrant and moving forward in the face of innumerable crises and competing demands on time that might pull you off balance?

Rarely can an independent charter school be successful without at least some form or combination of three types of planning:

• Strategic planning
• Governance planning
• Sustainability planning

Strategic planning focuses on where you are as an organization and spells out the overarching strategies and primary action steps that get you where you want to be within a certain planning period, such as three years. A strategic plan is not the same thing as an action plan or a workplan; it’s a high-level, goal-oriented plan that includes meaningful progress measures or milestones and is most successfully undertaken by a diverse group of people (even students and family members!) dedicated to the success of the school. For instance, adding grade levels to your school over time is too important and complex for someone’s ‘to-do” list; the process takes research, time, collaboration and buy-in, as well as coordination with the other goals of the charter school. Ideally, staff and the board check in on the plan’s progress at least quarterly.

Governance planning ensures that you have the board you need to effectively support the school in accomplishing goals and can help school leaders keep abreast of new issues that impact its success.  Using the strategic plan as its guide, the board for an independent charter school can start with an honest self-assessment of their strengths and areas for improvement. A good governance plan maximizes the ability of the board to advance the school through strategic relationship building, strong fiscal management, and enhanced capacities identified in the strategic plan (such as fundraising or media training or better community outreach). Governance plans can include board training, member recruitment, and succession planning; as well as the development of necessary policies and procedures. Ideally, the plan helps your Board to stay out of “the weeds” of endless bylaws discussion or other details; instead, it should help the Board help you at the highest level to maintain and execute the vision for the school. See Brian Carpenter’s article, Why Most Charter School Boards are Ineffective—And What to Do About It for a provocative take on this subject.

Sustainability planning marries your long-term programmatic plans with strategic financing. Thoughtful cross-walking of your independent charter school’s current operations and future strategic goals with realistic projections of what it will costs to implement those goals yields you a longer term projection of how much funding you will need to support what specific activities. Looking at short- and long-term gaps in funding, you can develop a specialized plan for grantseeking, fundraising, or partnering that meet the school’s needs for monetary and non-monetary resources long after the current school year has come and gone. More and more sustainability planning tools are being developed for charter schools, like The Finance Project’s Revenue Planning Tool for Charter School Operators and consultant Holly Hart’s Overview of Sustainable Charter Schools.

Specific Planning Tips for Indie Charters

• Keep your planning streamlined and balanced with implementation. We all know people and systems that plan everything to death. Don’t let protracted or overly complicated planning get in the way of ‘doing.’ However, indie charter schools have a lot on the line to just “wing it.” Design a balanced process and engage a team balanced with ‘planners’ and ‘doers.’

• Recognize that you are in very different positions from planning leaders in public school systems and multi-site charter school operators (as if it weren’t obvious enough!). A poorly planned public school will still function because the system will pull it along. This difference means you have fewer resources with which to plan and smaller margins of error; however, you also have a smaller “universe” you are working to impact. In fact, visionary planning for change can be far more impactful within an independent charter school than is planning for a monolithic or “replicated” system.
• Ensure that any planning effort is responsive enough to where your school is in its development. Brand new schools, for instance, need planning that is sensitive to monthly cash flow and can quickly identify future shortfalls; Boards for those schools can’t afford to postpone fiscal training for members to another year. A school further down the path can begin to look outside the walls of the school for more partnering opportunities from a stronger position of power than can a school still figuring out its internal systems.

This blog post is part of the Charter Notebook, sponsored by the Network of Independent Charter Schools, a project of the Center for Educational Innovation - Public Education Association.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.