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Article by Stacey Freed
Independent schools take pride in their low student-teacher ratios; they’re a key marketing differentiator. Small class sizes mean more faculty. Add promises for specialty classes, experienced educators and individualized learning (additional differentiators), and the number and cost of teachers spiral ever upward. In addition, said Grant Lichtman, former COO of Francis Parker School and now a change management consultant to schools, “There’s been a significant increase in the last decade or two in non-teaching personnel.” Every new program seems to need a new administrator.
Business officers are all too familiar with ever-expanding staffing costs, which already comprise the biggest piece of the budget pie. But given the cutbacks many of them championed after the 2008 recession, they’re not finding much room — or appetite — for further attrition. Just ask David Wright, finance director of University School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. “We’re not willing to take on those battles,” he said. “We have a tendency to deal with things in crisis mode.”
So how does a school satisfy families while keeping a lid on costs?
As the following examples suggest, you might explore the potential of alternatives to full-time faculty in some cases. Or offering access to online classes. Or even rethinking your traditional salary structure.
Faculty Surrogates
Lichtman suggests a new way of looking at the student-teacher ratio as an alternative to the expensive full-time faculty model. Consider the independent school that boasts of its 12-to-1 ratio. “They define that ratio by the idea that students and teachers exist in a classroom together for a certain number of hours each day,” he said. But “having a static number of students in a static number of classrooms with teachers who all have similar teaching skills may not accomplish the most effective learning.”
As an alternative, Lichtman suggests assigning certain teaching responsibilities — say, “coaching” students within classrooms, or serving as teachers’ aides — to adults with different skill sets. Even non-credentialed adults can have a role, especially as learning becomes more project-based. “Perhaps 15 students are working on a project and don’t need a teacher hovering over them,” he said.
Consider using teaching assistants to take over labor-intensive tasks like labs or grading.
Karen Moore, CFO/COO of Shorecrest Preparatory School in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been presenting similar ideas as her school looks for ways to save money. She suggests using teaching assistants to take over labor-intensive tasks like labs or grading so that “senior professors can do what they do best and we don’t have to hire a third teacher.” Where certain very experienced teachers might make a salary in the upper five figures, “for $80,000 you could get two or three teaching assistants and leverage the amazing ability of the professor, instead of him or her being bored and frustrated doing paperwork every day.”
Lichtman also sees great promise in certain technologies as next generation learning “levers,” especially as costs continue to decline. Consider virtual and augmented reality programs. “They will break down the idea that the most effective learning takes place when there are a fixed number of students in a classroom with one teacher for a fixed period of time each day,” he said. “That variability is already starting to provide opportunities for schools to rethink the traditional student-teacher ratio that drives so much of the budget in our [current] ‘Industrial Age’ [education] model.”
Online Learning
Speaking of technology, the continued growth and evolution of online learning platforms are helping hundreds of independent schools expand their curriculum — dramatically, in some instances — at what is often a fraction of the overhead costs associated with full-time faculty. One of the best known online platforms in the independent school space is One Schoolhouse, which provides online academic courses for students as well as online professional development courses for educators and administrators. Started as the Online School for Girls in 2009, One Schoolhouse now has 100 independent schools in its consortium. Almost all of the courses are geared toward high school students.
One consortium partner is Trinity Hall, an all-girls Catholic high school in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. Of the 32 students in the school’s senior class, “Twenty-six of them are taking 27 courses [that cost us] under $45,000,” said Head of School Mary Sciarrillo, citing courses that include AP psychology, politics, forensics, neuroscience and marine science. Even if those 26 students wanted to take only 10 different classes, “I’d have to hire two to four teachers at, for example, a $50,000 salary each. It would cost me a minimum of $200,000.” Online learning, in her opinion, “is a no-brainer. We’d never as a new school have been able to offer those courses at that level without One Schoolhouse.”
Some parents may initially see online learning as anathema to the independent school experience they expect.
This is not to say that online learning is free. “That one child taking that one class doesn’t save you money,” explained Donna Pacchioni, chief financial officer of Hawken School, in Cleveland. “You pay a fee; it’s an added expense.” Offering additional classes online “certainly makes you more of a full-service school, but you wouldn’t save money until you got so many people taking an online class that you would be able to reduce classes on campus.”
You may also need to massage your messaging. Some parents may initially see online learning as anathema to the independent school experience they expect. Moreover, “full-time teachers may be concerned that they’ll lose their jobs to online teaching,” noted consultant Palmer Ball, who spent 21 years as the business officer at Spartanburg Day School in North Carolina. “But that’s not what a school is after,” she said. “It’s about ways to offer a class when you don’t want to add a new expense to the budget. You don’t offer online learning to get rid of faculty, but to supplement what you’re doing without hiring new faculty.”
New Salary Models
Independent schools are mission-based, so why don’t more of them connect mission to compensation? John Littleford, senior partner of the consulting firm Littleford Associates, recommends re-examining and clarifying your mission, developing “a philosophy of compensation that sends a message to teachers of the traits the school wants,” and tying pay to how effectively individual teachers fulfill this mission.
“The salary delivery system is hugely important,” Littleford said. “And how money is paid out is just as important as how much money is paid. You want to give teachers predictability in earning power but also clarity about the tools by which they can influence their earning power.”
By comparison, the current salary system, Littleford believes, is broken. Many schools have “no rhyme or reason to their pay scale,” he said, citing variables like advanced degrees, longevity, experience or benchmarking against other schools. Once you start down the path of stepped increases, “you no longer have a salary system that is philosophically supporting your mission.”
Littleford cited a school that hired him to analyze its compensation spending. “I found that 25 percent of the teachers had a reduced course load, costing $20,000 per course reduced. Plus they all received a stipend of $5,000” for extracurricular roles (yearbook, drama, advisory system, etc.) as well as tasks such as grade level coordinator or subject coordinator. “The school was spending a huge amount of money on reduced loads which, when added with stipends, were costing a small fortune.”
At another school, Littleford said, “85 percent of teachers had titles beside their names, and with those titles were stipends.”
Collectively, he believes that these models send the message that effective, dedicated teaching isn’t valued as much as factors like job title and “building one’s resume for promotion,” he said. “How was that related to the mission of the school, which was excellence in teaching?”
