eeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBut that’s not how today’s parents see a community.<\/p>\n
Their community resides on their phone.\u00a0 It’s their Facebook friends, or people they Instagram and Snapchat with.<\/p>\n
Today’s parents see their community as what other have in common with them…not necessarily what they have in common with others.\u00a0 It’s more like having a “community of individuals” rather than having a “community.”<\/p>\n
Mentor families are symbiotic: If a family in your school’s current parent community has a task to mentor a new family, it will make the current family less likely to leave because they have a significant role to play in the continued life of the school. It will also make the new family less likely to leave since they know someone at the school who can introduce them to other members of the school community.<\/p>\n
While you can develop some kind of training for potential mentor families, perhaps the best strategy is to let them be themselves. The actions they come up will then be authentic rather than feel scripted.<\/p>\n
Sound too simplistic?<\/p>\n
Try it.\u00a0 It works.<\/p>\n
A community my wife and I belonged to when we were first married helped prepare engaged couples for marriage.\u00a0 If we didn’t have our mentor couple (which were called “prayer couples”), we wouldn’t have lasted very long because the work we were assigned to do was difficult!<\/p>\n
This couple called us to see how we were doing, and then invited us to their house to share dinner and a movie.\u00a0 We met their family; they met ours.\u00a0 Since this was a group of people that had a ministry to the engaged, they helped us to remain “engaged” with the community!<\/p>\n
Here’s the amazing part! Several years later when I was out of work and my wife was a stay-at-home mom, it was this community that sustained us through prayer, support and even a meal that appeared on our doorstep several times!<\/p>\n
Along with Mentor Families, here are three more ways to retain families, making sure students show up on the first day of school:<\/p>\n
1) If you have a non-refundable registration fee, make it a 3-digit one.\u00a0 Parents will walk away from a $25 or $60 registration fee.\u00a0 That’s called dinner at a restaurant.\u00a0 $175?\u00a0 $250? That’s a little more difficult to walk away from, and shows the level of commitment necessary to be part of the school community.\u00a0 And if families say they can’t afford that, then how are they going to afford the $500+ per month tuition payment they will be expected to pay throughout the year?<\/p>\n
2) Roll your registration fee into your tuition, and then payment #1 of 10 is your registration fee, making your tuition payable in 9 payments.\u00a0 That way, in-full payers don’t pay the registration fee – but it’s due before the end of the current school year, before the next school year begins.\u00a0 Frankly, THIS is the way that every faith-based schools should be operating today!<\/p>\n
3) Collect your registration fee in January, February or March, but start tuition payments in April or May with a maximum 9 month payment plan.<\/p>\n
While these are not strategies that can be implemented overnight, it is possible.\u00a0 If you’d like to know how to get started, send an email to schooladvancement@gmail.com<\/a> and put “3 digit registration and 9 months tuition” in the subject line.\u00a0 One Catholic school in West Virginia did it over a decade ago, and they still have over 400 students enrolled!!<\/p>\nIf you’re thinking, “But we’ve never<\/em> done it that<\/em> way,” you’ll know you’re on the right track, since “But we’ve always<\/em> done it this<\/em> way” leads down one of two paths – one which follows the Law of Diminishing Returns (exerting more and more effort simply to maintain the status quo<\/em>), or one that leads to declining enrollment…and we all know where that one ends up.<\/p>\nAnd today, in our new “Post-Covidian” era, you’re not going to be able to do the things the way you’ve always done them, so now is the acceptable time to start to make all things new!<\/p>\n
And how appropriate that Pentecost is just around the corner!<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Michael V. Ziemski, SchoolAdvancement, 2006-2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leaders of faith-based schools know the drill all too well: parents show interest in your school, pay their non-refundable registration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2311,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advancement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Advancementality.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ggCS-1gX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4895"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8206,"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4895\/revisions\/8206"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schooladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}