Operations

School leaders everywhere have experienced parent, staff and student anxiety about school safety following the tragic attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. While these emotionally charged climates are understandable, making knee-jerk decisions with a “do something, do anything, do it now” mantra can lead to high-risk, high-liability actions that administrators and […]

Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis is an International Baccalaureate school serving students and parents from 54 different countries in pre-K through grade 12. When the school wanted to design a new playground, administrators wanted to demonstrate its global brand and create an area with a world theme reflective of students and their families. Stewart Crais, […]

How important was collaboration when designing the FirstView¬Á† suite of products? Extremely. When we began to develop FirstView, we conducted nationwide focus groups asking both parents and administrators for their transportation pain points. We received meaningful feedback. The study enabled a thorough and open dialog. Administrators wanted bus tracking and easy communication. Parents gave us […]

How can district administrators make more efficient, effective and strategic decisions? There is data available to support many of the decisions that school administrators make every day. Often though, it takes time to manually gather and model that data. If a project uses 80 percent of its timeline to gather and model data, that leaves […]

The much anticipated third and final phase of a construction project at Sonora High School (Sonora Union High School District, Calif.) ended with the creation of a new aquatic center featuring a 25-by-30-yard outdoor community pool. CHALLENGE: In 2012, the Sonora community voted for a $23 million bond to retrofit the school’s facilities. The project […]

Repurposing buses no longer suitable for daily transportation has provided schools with mobile makerspaces, traveling cafˆš©s and bookmobiles. The practice allows for extended use of an asset and adds a mobile dimension to programs that districts cannot always find space for in traditional classrooms. Cheatham County Schools in Ashland, Tennessee, is in the process of […]