Top Ops People

Get Top Ops Results

Your Student Information System isn’t set up for the new reports your authorizer requires, and you’re already behind on compliance. Your reimbursement requests for the National School Lunch Program were rejected and now your school is paying for meals out of pocket until the problem is fixed. Your transportation vendor is wildly expensive and regularly late, and you want to run your own transportation but don’t know how. We take on those projects — and we bring the top operations specialists in the country to solve them.

Specialists in Every Operations Domain

What might take a generalist days or weeks can be accomplished in just hours with the right operations specialist at the table. Setting up your Student Information System correctly requires an SIS expert. Moving food service from a vendor to scratch cooking requires somebody who knows menu design, health department approvals, NSLP reimbursements, and bulk procurement. Selecting a new janitorial service requires somebody who has written five janitorial RFPs before, and knows how to negotiate the most advantageous contract.

SchoolOps works with a national network of operations specialists: SIS experts, food service operators, transportation planners, facilities consultants, HR practitioners, and more. When a school brings us a problem, we bring the right people to the table, and roll out national best practices.

What Counts as an Operations Project?

Almost any operations responsibility that lives outside of teaching and learning. A non-exhaustive map of what we take on:

Nutrition & Food Service

Vendor or self-operated management, NSLP reporting, special event nutrition planning

Procurement & Inventory

Purchasing systems, accounts payable, RFP design, asset inventory, purchasing policies

Student Information Systems

SIS selection and contracts, SOPs, error correction, compliance and revenue reporting

Transportation

Vendor or in-house management, reporting and compliance

Technology

Purchasing, internet infrastructure and security, device management, email and account administration, printers and copiers

Front Office Management

Phone systems, visitor management, front office systems

Events

Event backwards planning, stakeholder communications, execution

Communications

Family communications across all channels, school phone systems

Human Logistics

Arrival and dismissal, transitions, lunch, special schedules and field trip logistics

Human Resources

Onboarding, HR concerns escalation, documentation

Attendance

Daily collection systems and SOPs, truancy escalation, compliance reporting

Scheduling

Master schedule vision, drafting, special schedules.

Standardized Testing

Scheduling and logistics, testing technology readiness, compliance and reporting

Student Health

Nursing management, health
procedures

Student Safety

Emergency drills, real-time emergency response, facility safety, procedural safety

Finance & Budget

Developing SOPs to support financial management, finding efficiencies in workstreams that represent our biggest expenses.

Staff Recruitment

Identifying hiring needs, sourcing and recruiting, interview pipelines and logistics, offer letters

Facilities

New facility search, maintenance and construction oversight, janitorial management, security systems, co-location
If you don’t see it, ask us. If it’s not something we support, we probably know the people who do support it.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A few examples of projects we’ve taken on recently. Names and identifying details have been kept general.

Student Information System Cleanup and Support
When the SIS is wrong, everything is wrong

A high school had the same administrator managing their Student Information System for years. When this person turned over, the administration realized that the system had been set up incorrectly for a long time. Errors were piling up in the state reporting feed, FTE counts were uncertain, and high-poverty and free/reduced lunch designations weren't being verified — all of which directly affected the school's funding.

SchoolOps engaged a state-specific SIS specialist to audit the system end to end. We cleared errors flowing into the state reporting database, audited FTE counts to confirm the school was being paid for the correct number of students (they hadn’t been!), verified high-poverty designations to confirm correct Title funding allocations, and reviewed free and reduced lunch status data ahead of an NSLP application. We documented the corrections and built repeatable processes the school can run itself going forward, and in the process we saved them over $15,000 and some major compliance headaches.

Most operations leaders don't have an expert in PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward, Synergy, or any other SIS on staff. If the one person who owns this tool isn’t getting it right, they might be leaving a pretty big mess for the next person to inherit. Having an expert fix these errors and set things up properly will pay dividends for years.

Food Service Transformation — Vendor to Scratch Cooking
A six-figure food service budget, rebuilt from the ground up.

A small school was spending nearly $2,000 per student annually on a vendor-managed food service program, far beyond what could be federally reimbursed. The school's leadership wanted to know whether a self-operated model could meaningfully reduce costs without compromising meal quality or reliability.

SchoolOps took over food service management end to end. We worked directly with the state Department of Health to confirm the school as an approved self-operating site. We designed the year's cycle menu, owned all food purchasing, and built out roles and responsibilities for on-site assembly and service. We engaged a specialist with deep food service operations experience to set price targets and source aggressively. Within months, the school had ditched their expensive contract, and had a functioning onsite food service program.

Operations leaders often suspect there is money on the table in their major operational line items, but they don't have capacity to test the alternatives. We can run that test on their behalf, finding the savings you always knew were there, but didn’t have time to uncover.

Bring Us Your Ops Problem

If you have an operations project on your desk that needs an expert, we’d like to hear about it. Initial scoping conversations are free, and our proposals are written to make scope, cost, and outcomes legible from the first page. Fill out the inquiry form below to get started.

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