It’s January going into February, and everyone feels the winter slump—the big crash after the holidays when the weather is bleak in a lot of places, and it’s a long haul to spring. Moods and morale are probably looking as bleak as the landscape. Even if you are fortunate to be in a temperate climate, you probably are still experiencing some doldrums as the humdrum routine has settled in.

In many schools, the following scene repeats itself time and again: A talented teacher is promoted to management (say, to a Department Chair or Division Head role). Everyone is very happy for his/her success. The leader (Head of School) smiles broadly, congratulates he/she on his/hers new role, and says, "Welcome to the leadership team." Perhaps someone eventually gives the new administrator a copy of the school's employee handbook. But that's about where it ends. No management induction program. No supervisory training. No professional growth plan. Nothing but, "Good luck—and we have a budget meeting on Wednesday."

Q: We have a poorly performing teacher whose contract we’re not planning to renew. However, we’ve never given him any written warnings in the past. Are we at risk for a lawsuit?

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.