Shelby Academy membership votes 52-10 to keep financially troubled school open

Posted by Scottie Vickery — Birmingham News July 14, 2009 8:39 PM

The membership of the financially troubled Shelby Academy voted 52-10 tonight to keep the school open.

After the board vote, the crowd erupted into cheers.

Shelby Academy’s membership — made up of board members, parents of current students and parents of former students who pay a $100 membership fee — voted.

Mitchell Spears, attorney for the school, said the school is about $576,000 in debt. It owes $376,000 on the mortgage, and the rest is in unsecured debt and salary and wages owed to the staff. He said it would take about $80,000 a month to run the school if it had 100-110 students.

Paige Watson Phillips, who is a member of the alumni association, said before the vote that there were 1,000 alumni ready to help.

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You’ve defined your requirements, talked to vendors, seen demos, found the right donor management software for you and worked through the contract—now you’re done, right? Not so fast. You still need to implement the system, which requires additional planning, teamwork, configuration, data migration and testing . . .

Read this Idealware article by Keith Heller

A new white paper titled “Unlocking the Full Spectrum of Community Support” has been published by DeHavilland Associates. This paper was written as a briefing for school and district education leaders, but should be of interest to anyone involved in building community/school partnerships. It covers:

• The key trends that are changing the landscape of K-12 education for the foreseeable future
• The ways in which different community partners can contribute to schools and districts
• Thoughts on how to build community support

You can access this paper, along with other DeHavilland Associates papers, surveys and guides, at:

http://www.DeHavillandAssociates.com/resources.html

Since Catholic education in America peaked in 1965, half of the nation’s Catholic schools have shut their doors, with an average of 250 closing per year. Many of these schools have been in inner cities, making the closings a particularly tragic development for disadvantaged students, who’ve benefited tremendously from the orderly environment and first-rate instruction that these institutions provide and who now have no educational alternative but failing public schools. Continue reading →

Facebook announced new features on its Web site in March 2009 that will allow colleges [and any school] and other organizations to create a centralized public profile and publish a live stream of announcements for their followers.  Read the rest at The Wired Campus, the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Carmina Pérez is a writer, speaker and digital media marketing consultant.  Read her blog post on “Schools Using Facebook to Track Alumni” and read how her school, Dana Hall School, launched a Facebook page for alumnae.

By Derrick Feldmann and Dave Sternberg for TheNonProfitTimes

Here’s a common question: If we hire a director of development (a fundraiser), how long before that position pays for itself?

Typically, this question is asked when a nonprofit has secured funding for a development director for one year, or when an organization has adjusted its budget to fund the position.

Either way, this question reveals a common error: assuming that funding is the biggest consideration when adding a director of development. That error often is compounded by a second mistake: creating the position with short-term funding. Either error (and, certainly, both together) can doom a development director before the person even takes the job.

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