We've long said that bad attitudes on your faculty and staff can poison a school community. Toxic teachers can lead to resignations of your best staff, flagging enthusiasm, and a lack of innovation within your classrooms. Despite the best hiring protocols, many administrators believe that "Negative Nellies" and others of their ilk inevitably creep into any large community of professionals. People, the philosophy dictates, must learn to work around such roadblocks. However, recent research out of the University of Michigan has revealed that negative coworkers can bring the entire community down, rendering efforts to "work around" the toxicity as useless.

How much weight should student evaluations of their teachers carry? On the one hand, students are with their instructors nearly every day. Their engagement and education is directly impacted by how well their teachers perform, and so perhaps may deserve to be heard within the broader evaluation framework. However, new research suggests that students—even adult students!—may not have the emotional maturity or perspective to offer “authentic” reviews of their teachers.

In a time when public schools are cutting recess and other "down time" periods in favor of increased academic instruction, one school has decided to prioritize the role of play. In fact, with the generous help of Lego, it's going so far as to establish a "Professorship of Play" to study how and why playing helps children grow and learn.

The Board must not be involved in your school’s educational program, either as individuals or as a group. Discussions and decisions about the program are not appropriate topics for Trustees. The Board has hired the School Head to orchestrate the curriculum and programs, and supervise their delivery. However, that does not excuse Trustees from knowing how your mission is fulfilled and being able to effectively describe the excellence that occurs on your campus to community members and prospective families. Trustees must possess accurate information about your educational programs. What they describe must match what people see and experience in their associations with the school. The School Head must provide Board members compelling information that they can share. Consider employing the following strategies in education your school’s Board.

With any employer/employee relationship, there are paper and electronic files that must be maintained. Just as your school should have a policy on what is contained in an employee’s file and who will maintain it, your Board must do the same for its sole employee—the School Head.

Talking about sexual misconduct—sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual exploitation, and rape—is not a comfortable topic for anyone. Yet, it’s a topic that can’t be ignored. It demands that we push past our discomfort. As Risk Manager, you know that reacting to a situation without established protocol is dangerous. You might not react in compliance with the law, and you could add more injury to the situation—especially in cases of sexual misconduct that need to be handled delicately.

Summertime means afternoons at the pool, weekends at the beach, backyard BBQs, hiking trails, gardening, baseball games, conferences… summertime means extended hours outdoors doing what we can’t do during the long winter months. More sunlight and warm temperatures offer many health benefits, but extended exposure can also make us vulnerable to certain health risks such as dehydration. To counter dehydration, we fill up our coolers, water bottles, and canteens. But, water by itself can be boring, and energy drinks and flavored waters contain unwanted sugars and chemicals.

Not too long ago on the Admission Officer e-List, someone mentioned a struggle to retain students from the preschool/day care program into the school’s kindergarten classroom. While parents had not complained about the school’s care or education of their children, enrollment from the preK program to Kindergarten was incredibly low. If your school struggles with a similar retention issue between grade divisions, the solution may lie in your communication strategy.

Getting in touch with parents during a crisis—or even for regular updates or reminders!—can feel like you’re back in the 1800s, praying that your Pony Express courier hasn’t been trampled by stampeding bison herds. Thankfully, messages have come a long way in the past 200 years. We’ve borrowed some app suggestions from The Guardian and discovered more to give you a few dynamite tools to upgrade your parent communications.

In our last issue, we discussed the advantages of using cellphones during school hours. Proponents of the new policy say that cellphones provide increased educational opportunities for students—academically, personally, and emotionally—and improved lines of communication between students, parents, and administrators. Still, many detractors decry the new practice as disruptive and counter to educational goals. So this month, we’ll examine some of the argued points against personal cellphones use during school hours.