It helps to hire an District Administrator who is actually a solid $ manager. Getting the old one fired, first, might be necessary... so, good luck with that But, co-opting the core in executive resistance by ensuring the administration will work for you, from the top down, instead of against you... helps a lot.
I did that first... so ended up not ever going to the school board... at all. I got the administration to do it all for me... because I allowed them to let everyone think that what I came up with was all the District Administrators idea. He got a pay raise and a promotion out of it, eventually.
So, I got a "brand new" charter school built in my (former) home town... for very little effort. It wasn't hard at all with the Administration supporting it. The only real obstacle in our case was $... and I found the money for them, just by digging around looking for it. I found it lurking in hidden assets they had, for which they didn't know the value.
Rather than building a new building... we instead got the old original high school brought up to code. It was solid enough structurally, but had been vacated long ago (50 years ago ?) as it was not up to modern earthquake standards, and the cost of retrofitting was deemed too high given more $ needed for upgrades to meet the electrical HVAC and communication tech standards.
Their budget had that old school, built in the 1880's I think, as a huge unmet future expense... as a huge future cost item to have it torn down.
I found it filled with old style school desks and chairs... late 1800's early 1900's... made of solid oak. Every classroom had a wall covered with a gigantic, thick, real slate blackboard, framed in oak. The windows were double pane, double hung, with the old wavy glass in them, and all made of solid oak.
I found them an architectural recycling firm. You would not believe how valuable that old school stuff was to them. And in removing it... they did half the work of getting ready for the refurbish. After selling them all the fixtures... there was enough money left over after fixing the building to code, with new insulated windows, the earthquake standards met, new power, HVAC and comms... fully insulating it... to buy computers for all the classrooms... and elevate the landscaping.
It didn't happen for free... the city did some work on the parking lots and the driveways, but that all happened within the existing budgets just by juggling a few things around. Personnel issues at the new school... made the place competitive. All the teachers wanted in...
A giant black hole in the future budget planning for the removal costs... just evaporated. A huge liability became a self funding new school...
None of that would have happened, still, if I'd not already been spending a lot of time with the Administrators while working on trying to improve the math curricula... and solve a few other problems. They trusted me as "not an idiot"...
That's probably not a viable path for many others out there... but you never know... |
