In efforts to reduce printing costs and “go green,” your school might have decided to make the switch to primarily electronic communications. As Business Manager, you probably don’t have a lot of influence over what promotional material is distributed to whom, but it is part of your job as your school’s Risk Manager to know what practices are legally compliant, reducing your risks of law suits, and which practices are not.

Q: We are a small school with 15 employees. I heard we could get money back for offering health insurance to our employees.If this is true, how do we apply or qualify for this?

There has been a lot of change regarding health insurance and coverage since President Obama came into office. The Affordable Care Act and the laws and provisions that it entails have made a rather large impact on everyone, both personally and in terms of business. Opinions on new provisions vary; however, without venturing down that slippery slope, let’s take a look at some medical debt facts resonating for those with and without coverage.

It’s a waste of your teachers' time as well as your school's resources to provide inadequate professional development, as what happened to some unfortunate Chicago public school teachers. In a video that’s gone viral, a participant secretly recorded a full 63 seconds demonstrating this district’s take on professional development.

Constant, reliable technology news about what’s important and pertinent to private schools can be difficult to find, much less rely on. (That’s why you subscribed to our e-Letters!) But sometimes you can find resources that, while only tangentially related, still help you keep abreast of conversations and imagine ways to take your school into the 21st Century. Take a look at these four ed-tech blogs and see if you’re not impressed and informed by each.

Tiered memberships. Financial incentives. Substantial rewards. These dangle like carrots tied to the proverbial stick, encouraging potential donors to reach for their wallets to make gifts to your private-independent school. But, are donor incentive programs really the way to drive donations?

Sometimes it can feel as though fund raising never stops. As soon as one campaign is over, another begins. Once the Parent Association raises enough money to send students to band camp, they begin another for basketball uniforms—and doesn’t the biology lab need new beakers? All of these requests can drown your families in a tidal wave of requests for money, leaving them exhausted by the time the annual fund comes around. An easy way to fix this is an “ask” calendar.

Remember when a “post on your wall” meant some strange form of graffiti and everyone had an AOL chat handle? In memory of some of our favorite social Web sites of days gone by, here is a list of three defunct social media sites, why they tanked, and what your school’s social marketing campaign can learn from their errors.

After days of maneuvering around stacks of unopened envelopes balanced on desks like paper Jenga towers and peering at indecipherable handwriting on recommendations and evaluations, you’ve done it. You have created the perfect incoming class for next school year. You are about to make some fortunate children (and their parents) incredibly happy. Now, to tell them the great news! Enter your acceptance packet.

How do you define “bullying”? Each state has a unique legal definition of what it means to bully, but what do you think of when you hear that one student has bullied another? Is it the boy who had his head flushed in a toilet, or the girl whose lunch money was taken? Sure, but bullying can also be more subtle and insidious. Take Colin, an eleven-year-old boy suffering from a sensory disorder similar to Asperger’s syndrome. Colin told his mother that he didn’t want a birthday party because no one would come. While indirect, this social ostracism certainly constitutes a sort of bullying—all the more difficult to combat because it’s so hard to identify.