Getting your school’s message out there is easy. Getting your school’s message heard through the clutter of everyone else’s is the tricky part.

Since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut, school administrators and parents are on edge. The tragedy has thrust gun control and school security issues to the forefront of the national conversation, and zero-tolerance policies are once again in the news.

Daniel Day Lewis’s striking portrayal of Abraham Lincoln as he works the political maze to pass the 13th amendment to outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude in the film Lincoln will be coming to all public and private school middle and high schools as soon as the DVD hits stores.

Q: I’m the Business Manager/HR person for a midsize school (50 employees). I’d like to automate our HR record-keeping functions, and I’ve started to look into what our payroll provider offers. Is there a software program or vendor that you would recommend?

In the 12 months since we released the new ISM Evaluation and Growth Cycle model, we’ve been asked to compare this to other approaches that schools currently use. We’re happy to address one particular theme concerning evaluation rubrics.

Looking at the calendar (and observing the cold, gray weather here in the Northeast), we know that we’ve reached the winter doldrums—the time of year when measures of enthusiasm, engagement and morale bottom out in schools (and most other organizations, for that matter). Part of the collateral damage often involves a fraying of working relationships between groups as well as individuals.

If your school has a Facebook presence, but you’d like to see more wall banter, why not have some fun? Facebook isn’t just for posting cat pictures! Give your Facebook fans something to comment on, just for the sake of commenting. After all, engagement it what it’s all about, and it’s a painless way to engage your alumni.

SUCCES. No, it’s not a misspelling. It’s the acronym for what authors Chip and Dan Heath call “sticky messages.” In their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the Heaths outline six key principles that are the recipe for messages that resonate. Consider how to adapt SUCCES into your marketing message.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed voluntary guidelines to assist K–12 schools in establishing and implementing environmental health programs in accordance with the Energy Independence & Security Act of 2007. In carrying out this statutory mandate, EPA, along with its federal partners, developed these guidelines to help states establish the infrastructure needed to support schools in implementing school environmental health programs.

Q: It has recently been suggested that we should stop using employment contracts with staff employees. Do you agree with this advice? And, if we discontinue using contracts, we have to communicate their new salaries to employees in some way. What do you suggest?