Do you often find yourself struggling to stay on top of a growing list of tasks and emails, unsure how to prioritize, or occasionally dropping balls? You’re not alone—time and task management in school operations roles is uniquely challenging! The good news: the right tools and systems can bring order to the chaos and help you feel more confident, productive, and on top of your work.
In this session, you’ll evaluate and strengthen your personal organization systems by:
Learning Strand:
Personal Organization
Audience:
All roles: Anyone who works in school operations and wants to strengthen their time and task management systems
Running strong school operations requires efficient, scalable systems that we can execute correctly time after time—easier said than done! Consider these common pitfalls:
Sound familiar? There’s a surprisingly simple tool that can make your systems more efficient, replicable, and consistent: a standard operating procedure. In this session, you’ll:
Learning Strand:
Systems
Audience:
All roles: Anyone who works in school operations and wants to make their systems more efficient and scalable
No matter your role, you’re always delegating when you work in school operations: Maybe you hold teachers and staff members accountable to completing specific tasks, manage a vendor like a custodian or a transportation provider, or manage a team of direct reports. Whatever type of delegation you do, it’s a huge part of our roles, and it’s complex work!
But there are concrete tools and best practices that can help you manage more effectively and get stronger results when leading work through other people. Join us for this session, and you’ll:
Learning Strand:
People Leadership
Audience:
All roles: Anyone who works in school operations and wants to strengthen their people management practices
The student recruitment and enrollment landscape has become consistently more challenging, and operations teams are often tasked with driving the bulk of this work. Though we know there’s no single quick fix when it comes to fully enrolling your school, there are concrete tools and best practices that can strengthen your systems and drive stronger enrollment at your school. In this session, you’ll:
Learning Strand:
Systems
Audience:
Anybody whose work touches student recruitment and enrollment
Managing complex, long-term projects means gathering input from many stakeholders, balancing competing priorities, and adjusting as information changes. It’s challenging work, and without strong systems, progress can stall or outcomes can fall short.
But there are concrete project management tools that can help you coordinate stakeholder input, clarify decision-making, and move work forward effectively.
In this session, we will share project management best practices through the lens of a specific project: creating the school day schedule for a whole school. In this session you’ll:
Learning Strands:
Audience:
Anybody who manages complex projects with multiple stakeholders
Getting the right people in the right seats is crucial to building a high-performing operations team. But designing a clear, equitable process that gives you the information you need to make confident hiring decisions can be challenging.
You might be wondering: Who has the potential to make an excellent Office Manager, Director of Operations, Enrollment Manager? How do I assess for key operations skills like time and task management? Should I have candidates complete a performance task? What would that look like for an operations role?
We have guidance to help you answer those questions and more. In this session, you’ll:
Learning Strand:
People Leadership
Audience:
Anybody who hires operations team members
The experience that visitors have in your main office often shapes their impression of your school: When systems are strong, guests feel welcomed, cared for, and confident in your school’s professionalism. But the main office is a busy place! With so much happening day in and day out, it can be difficult to ensure that front office systems are clear, effective, and always running smoothly.
That’s why this session focuses on identifying and addressing the root causes of front office system challenges. In this session, you’ll:
Learning Strand:
Systems
Audience:
All staff members who work in the main office or manage front office operations (office managers, directors of operations, etc.)
When we think of school operations, the first things that come to mind are often systems, plans, and logistics. But even well-constructed systems grind to a halt if we don't hold people accountable to using them. Navigating these accountability conversations is just as important as building systems; however, we rarely have the opportunity to practice and receive feedback on this part of our work.
This session provides concrete guidance to help you plan for difficult conversations in a school operations context. In this session, you’ll:
Learning Strand:
People Leadership
Audience:
All roles: Anybody who works in school operations and wants to build confidence in their ability to have difficult conversations
Many school staff members view summer as a time to rest and relax, but operations staff are busier than ever, thinking about facilities repairs, purchasing next year’s supplies, enrolling new students, and many, many other tasks that need to happen for a successful school year launch.
Though an operations summer might never be called relaxing, a little planning can go a long way toward making it more intentional and manageable.
This session focuses on prioritizing your summer work, communicating priorities with key stakeholders, and creating a strong plan aligned to your priorities. In this session you’ll:
Learning Strand:
Project Management
Audience:
Anybody who wants to proactively plan for their operations summer work
This session is great for teams! We recommend you attend with at least one other member of your team
Working in school operations means that you always have a lot on your plate. During especially busy times of the year, you might be laser-focused on immediate tasks and find that longer-term work sneaks up on you, leaving you scrambling to catch up. But it doesn’t have to feel this way.
At SchoolOps, we believe in making time to save time: the idea that doing a little bit of planning now will pay huge dividends in the future. This session puts that concept into practice by providing you with the guidance you need to create a strong long-term plan for your year—a plan that will allow you to better anticipate upcoming work and more effectively collaborate with your team. In this session you’ll:
Learning Strand:
Personal Organization
Audience:
All roles: Anybody who wants to strengthen their long-term planning processes
Many of us who are great at operations are excellent executors—we get stuff done! But those very same traits that make us great executors sometimes trip us up when it comes to managing people. Maybe we think, “It’s easier if I just do it myself,” or, “I’m not sure my team is ready to own that whole project yet.” We then hold on to work or delegate only smaller tasks.
Overseeing school operations requires monitoring over 20 unique workstreams that we’ve listed in the Operations Responsibilities Bank. And delegating ownership of whole projects and workstreams is essential to strong management (and your own sanity and sustainability in your role), but it’s challenging. In this session, we’ll share tools and strategies to make it easier. You’ll:
Learning Strand:
People Leadership
Audience:
Managers: Anybody who manages at least one direct report and is responsible for delegating projects and workstreams
SchoolOps has facilitated several customized PD sessions for our network, and they’ve been a pleasure to work with. Their deep ops expertise makes sessions feel practical and directly relevant for our ops teams, and they tailor content to our context, all at a price point we can afford as a smaller network. I highly recommend working with SchoolOps if you’re looking to invest in training your ops team.
It’s been such a joy to work with SchoolOps. While our participants love their content for its relevance, I’ve been impressed by how they operate as partners. There is a peace of mind that comes with working with SchoolOps; they are always two steps ahead, with organized agendas and clear action plans. They don’t just meet deadlines, they anticipate needs and share key information before I even think to ask for it.
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