Your School's Community Programs
What kind of programs do you have in place in the community? From what you've learned in this course, what programs could you put in place?
Since our campus has had a recent change in ownership, we are working very hard to develop new relationships in our community. We have begun attending area events. Attended a Connecting with the Community event that puts various businesses together to network. We are opening up the campus for the Santa Claus parade, working with an area women's shelter, meeting with funders and numerous other events to get ourselves known in the community. What I learned in the course is the importance of tracking this to see how effective it is.
Our school's community programs include visits to nursing homes, where our students perform hand massages and teacher's appreciation day's, where the students perform chair massages.
The popular teacher's appreciation events have resulted in referrals of new students as well as referrals for Carrier Night presentations.
A unique program in which we are participating with the local hospital at the present time is called "Face in the Mirror". We are sending our Aesthetician students one day a week to the hospital to give cancer patients facials.
The program is a huge success and has brought our school a lot of publicity.
Thanks so much for sharing. Every massage and skin care school can do the same. Hopefully you are also getting great publicity from local newspapers. There are some great stories in what you do. Once published you can prepare copies for framing and also for mailing and emailing.
Thanks, Susan
We participate in Executive Intership Program of Pinellas County Schools. Furthermore our Faculty participates in the Great American Teach-in Day.
I would propose to get in touch with all High Schools and Middle Schools Career Councelors to let them know about our music program, I think this is a great idea that we can do to promote our school to our targeted population.
Also the Clearwater Jazz Festival has a Educational Division, I am already getting in touch with them to see what we can do together.
Hi Vicky
Looks like you are doing a great job of community outreach. Seems like you have a unique school and use music as a way to network. It's fun to be creative and any school can gain an edge by looking at their programs and thinking about what groups in the community they can ally with. Very good suggestions. Thanks, Susan
We seem to have lots of churches around us. As I was reading through the modules I thought we can assign someone to go out and see what social services each church provides and provide them possible solutions through partnerships.
Gret idea, Aram. Most churches have some sort of outreach program to assist their parishioners. It's important for these people to know that your school is a resource to them. You may be able to develop individual plans for each student so the student gets support from your school as well as the church. The church may have members who can provide jobs. Lots of opportunities. Thanks for sharing. Susan
Right now we have someone that is incharge of ourmarketing and she keeps an excell sheet on where our students are coming from what type of marketing that we have out there.
Nikeline,
Great that you have reports re results. It is important to know the quantity and quality of responses to marketing. Are applicants qualified and do they understand the programs they are applying for? Is the marketing helpful to the admissions process or hinder it by providing the wrong information and elicit the wrong expectations. Thanks, Susan
Dr. Susan Schulz
We are involved in many areas of the community for example:
We support local churches with their IT needs.
We take part in big brothers and big sisters.
We offer Lunch and Learns for seniors who do not understand IT (e-mail, internet etc.)
From this course I will work closer with our vendors and foster the membership into more community based professional organizations as well as trying to develop internships and externships.
Hi Dale
Sounds like you are doing some great community outreach and doing good. Now need to transform that into positive results for your school. Each of the projects can probably be written up and submitted as a story to your local press. When the story is published print copies and scan the articles and send them out to students, alumni, employers, and more. It's a good way to get information about your programs out to the community. And many of the people you work with on the community projects may also be business leaders that you can meet with about a more formal relationship with your school. Very good. Thanks, Susan
hi, we use programs like Blood Drives with the Red Cross and various walks where we raise money for various community groups. We are affiliated with various professional groups for our programs and the students get subsidized enrollments plus we go to a few local high schools.
HI Christopher
Your community programs sound great. Your students are bonding together, representing your school, and doing good. There are lots of pubicity opportunities as well. When students work with their fellow students and your staff they feel more attached to the school. So they think twice about dropping out. They don't want to lose the social connection, which is very important. Thanks, Susan
Currently we participate in Career Day and Exit Readiness exercise for all our high school. High school leavers are one of our primary sources. We also promote health and wellness and run a program on radio educating the community on the importance of good nutrition at the same time plugging in an advertisement for our other programs. The results have been good and it is something we will continue with. We have also put on a Food festival over the last few years encouraging Culinary Arts which have always been supported by our industry partners, student and faculty.
From this course I am looking to implement more professional courses, and see how best we CAN bring some of our programs into the workplace and churches and increase or awareness in the community and civic groups. Also looking to set up a standard evaluation system to better measure and report our success.
Hi Brikell
Sounds like you have a lot of community outreach and public relations events. That's great. Hope you get a lot of news articles out of these. The nutrition programs sound great. A value to the community and yes, a plug for the school. Yes, very smart. Hopefully students help with all these projects. When students participate and work with other students and staff they tend to bond with the school. This increases retention. Research shows this. Measuring results is always a challenge. It takes a while to figure out how to do this. Some things are easy to measure like enrollments as a result of the event. On the other hand, someone could attend the event and then enroll 2 years later! Always keep trying. You need to show ROI plus results of all programs. Thanks, Susan
We are going to get involved with Big Brother & Sisters, toy drive for Christmas, & we support the local homeless shelter. We need to get involved with more community outreach programs, so this course gave me a few more ideas.
Great Avery. How do the students get involved n the projects? The projects sound like they have strong merit. The goal is not only to give but to get students and staff bonding by working together. The more they bond the more likely the student will not drop out (and leave their friends.) You can also get good publicity benefits from this within the community, to put on your website, and to show prospective students how caring the school is. Also suggest you pick projects where students can practice skills and gain confidence working with the public. Thanks, Susan
We have externships and clinicals for each of our programs. We have Program Leads conduct evaluations regularly and give surveys to the on-site supervisors.
We continuously pass out surveys from our mod 1 students, throughout the terms, in externship, and at time of graduation. There are many road blocks and they come at any and every stage and we need to be prepared to assist.
Jim ,
Externships take a while to set up and get right, in our opinion. Once you have the "forumla" then they can be very productive. I once spoke with an externship coordinator who claims that 100% of grads get placed from their externship sites. That was amazing and made me think about what had to be done to make that happen. Students need to be prepared both in skills and knowledge. They also have to be well prepared in employment skills. They have to realize they are on a very long job interview! There must be on site and school supervisors who are constantly monitoring and coaching. Students have to be encouraged to work at their personal best. Every road block can be overcome with some evaluation and effort. Or another route found! Thanks, Susan
Dr. Susan Schulz
