With two faces (to look forward and backward), Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and endings – and the root of the word “January.” It is appropriate, then, that the new year often gives us pause to reflect on the events of the year passed and to look forward to the needs and plans of the year ahead. There is no better time to think about … performance evaluations. We realize that planning for, conducting, or even thinking about performance evaluations is no one’s favorite activity. Yet, it is a necessary and important activity for all administrators.

Basic drills (evacuation, reverse evacuation, shelter-in-place, and lockdown) are a critical aspect of your crisis plan. Well thought out and practiced drills are key in helping you to protect your students and school community at large.

Nearly everything your school does, day in and day out, can present risk. Transportation, field trips, hiring (and firing), use of volunteers and vendors, facility safety issues, etc., all create risk or exposure to a varying degree. So do, of course, athletics. Managing risk in school athletics is really no different than managing school risk in general, only more focused. An effective plan needs three critical elements: 1) a review of what has or can go wrong; 2) a discussion of how to prevent those things from happening (or reduce their impact); and 3) how to respond to a given incident should, all planning aside, it still happen.

Q: Help! We just heard from someone who purchased a week-long vacation at a Florida vacation home during our annual auction nearly two years ago. The purchaser had finally carved out some time to be able to take the vacation, and contacted the contributor to make arrangements—only to find the contributor has sold the house! Now, the purchaser is asking that the school return the money. How do we handle this?

In a recent study, Network For Good found that relationships are just as significant in online fund raising as they are in traditional fund raising. Simply put, Development Directors must remember that online giving is a conduit, not an end, to boosting donations. Network for Good, an organization that provides nonprofits with platforms for collection of online donations, studied the $381 million given through its service. Its services include branded charity Web sites (similar to the development page on your school's Web site), giving portals like CharityNavigator.org, and social-networking sites like Facebook. What the study found is applicable to all online giving efforts, including private-independent schools.

In the previous article about scheduling, we said that succumbing to pressure to let students take on too much is one of the trends that leads to a toxic schedule. But it can also lead to a burned-out student. A new documentary called “Race to Nowhere” addresses this pressure issue through the stories of boys who drop out because of it, girls who suffer from stress-induced insomnia, and students who feel the only way to live up to expectations is through cheating. The pressure kids are experiencing is starting in elementary school.

Technology is redesigning the way children learn from standard desk and lecture traditions to an interactive demonstration technique of concepts and project assignments. You might be familiar with the terminology “21st Century School.” It seems to be a buzz phrase around private-independent campuses nowadays. Yet, although a buzz phrase in the U.S., technology in the States is still lagging behind other nations.

Over the past decade, the Internet has reshaped the way major companies have marketed their products and services. After the dot-com crash, advertising agencies and marketing firms alike refocused, and Web metric analysts joined the conversation on how to best place marketing materials online. Demographics, psychographics, and behavioristics that are important in media planning concerning traditional mediums such as print, radio, and television, are just as important when discussing online marketing. And, moving forward into 2011, Web metrics are going to play even a larger role in decisions companies make for online placement.

With changes beginning to unfold from the health care reform policies, there has been some buzz around changes to Form 990. Here are some general Form 990 FAQs taken from GuideStar. What is an IRS Form 990? Form 990 is an annual reporting return that certain federally tax-exempt organizations must file with the IRS. It provides information on the filing organizations mission, programs, and finances.

Many people start off the new year with the tradition of setting resolutions. That might mean a new diet, a different way of looking at things, or even something as dramatic as a career change. And, with the new year just a few days away, blog sites and social forums are exploding with promises of how people are going to make a difference in the year ahead. Here are a few that we came across on Twitter that made us smile.