While everyone agrees that helping our students become "global citizens" is crucially important, many Catholic high schools believe such a goal is beyond their means, despairing that it is only possible for wealthier, "elite" schools. And indeed, scheduling a two week tour of Europe through an agency like EF Tours is likely to cost anywhere between $3,000-4,000 per student-- too much for many of our families.
I would argue, however, taking such a tour is not the best educational way to promote global learning, and it certainly is not the cheapest way to study abroad. Rather, I believe the better educational model is to create "sister school" relationships with Catholic schools in different countries, pair students in each of these schools, and then swap visits, with each student living in the homes of their paired student.
We've been doing it this way at JPII for seven years now, beginning with St. Edmund College in Hertfordshire, Ware, England, but now including the Mauritz School in Muenster, Germany and St. Riquier in Amiens, France. The model is the same for all three schools: they send their students to the United States to live with a host student and his or her family for two weeks, usually in early August when we are in school and they are not, and we send our kids to their families in early June, when we are not in school and they are.
Part of the time, students attend the school of their host; part of the time, there are planned activities that all the students in the program are engaged in, but most of the time, the responsibility of "what to do" during those two weeks is the responsibility of the host family. When English students arrive in Nashville, TN, they will spend three days in our school and our school will take them will as a group to downtown Nashville, where they will tour museums, walk down Broad Street and listen to the country music coming out of the bars, or spend time at Centennial Park. But individual host families may take their guests to Gatlinburg to ski on one of the weekends, or travel to Memphis, or visit the caves of Kentucky, or spend a weekend on a boat on the lake--whatever the host family prefers. When we visit St. Edmund's, the school will take a day tour of London just an hour south, but individuals families may take our kids to Oxford, or to the East or West Coast of England, depending.
We do this with no more than twenty students at a time and send two of our faculty members to be our "boots on the ground" in case there are issues, especially early on. Our faculty enjoy it immensely, because so much of the responsibility is "off" them once our kids get paired with families, giving them the opportunity to do some local site seeing of their own. It's actually a nice side benefit to working at our school, and it's not hard to find volunteers.
There are many advantages to this model, chief of which is our kids and their kids see the other country from the "inside-out:" through the perspective of the host family and the paired student. This perspective is richer, fuller and more authentic than a blitzkrieg tour of all the sites typical of tour companies. Second, schools share the responsibility of the success of the program with the host families, taking a significant burden off the school and its faculty to "entertain" their guests for an extended period. Third, the relationship with the "sister" schools abroad adds cachet to our school's "brand" in our community. Fourth, students develop friendships that are meaningful and long lasting. Many of our students will go back to Europe on their own--after graduation, for example--and stay with their new "family" and "friend." They, in turn, will come to visit us.
And, to my opening point, this is a much cheaper model. The trip costs a school the cost of two faculty adults who travel with our kids--money that we include in the price structure. The only other significant cost is the round trip ticket, which could run anywhere from $1500-2000, plus a little spending money for the kids when they go sight-seeing.
I, too, have benefitted from the relationships with our sister schools. When I spent a week in England with St. Edmund, I came back and started a "House" system here, so impressed was I by the quality of pastoral care these provided. They've been doing "Houses," after all, for centuries! Our kids love the new House system.
It's not hard to set these up. Many European students are looking for an opportunity to visit America, and this model is cheaper from their end as well. I would encourage you to ask your language teachers to begin making inquiries of other Catholic schools abroad in the desired locations. Finding such "sister schools" adds great value to our school programs and what we can offer our students.
I recommend these kind of exchange programs highly.
There's simply nothing more important to our schools' marketing plans than a really good web page. Back in the early 1990's, I learned a little bit about HTML so I could create a web page for our school; these days, however, that's no longer necessary, as there are many services "out there" who will help us create beautiful pages and maintain them with no coding experience required.
Even so, I believe good school web pages have the following characteristics:
First, they are highly visual, with the image(s) or video comprising 50-70% of the page. Too much text virtually guarantees that people won't spend much time on our site--there's simply too many more interesting things out there. For what I consider some excellent visual school sites, go to http://www.am-hs.org/, or http://groton.org/, or http://www.saa-sds.org/. Large pictures tell a compelling story--make sure the diversity and balance of your pictures tells the right story, without an disproportionate share of athletic pictures, for example.
Second, school web pages should feature an up-to-date, all purpose calendar, including all school and athletic events. This is the "driver" of traffic onto your site--parents need information about upcoming games, theater events, parent-teacher nights. Schools must make this available to them in an easy to find, easy to read format.
Third, school pages should highlight contact information for teachers and administrators. Schools should invite parents to contact their teachers via email--it's the most efficient means of information swapping--and cuts down on interruptions. But for too many web pages, it's a game of hide and seek to find that information. It shouldn't be.
Fourth, I believe our web pages should contain "good news" stories about the school, via links on the front page ( see http://ideasincatholiceducation.blogspot.com/2013/10/marketing-on-shoestring.html ). The theory here is much like the design of a grocery store: When people come to the grocery store for a single item, they're usually on the hunt for something like milk or eggs. That's why the milk is usually in the back of the store--to get there, the shopper must "collide" with all sorts of sales displays which will hopefully entice him to buy more stuff. People don't come onto our web page to read our news stories, but to check dates and times. When they do, we want them to "collide" with good news about the school, so they can share this news with others.
Fifth, web pages should contain a gallery with lots of pictures and movie clips--homecoming events, football games, the latest pep rally or 8th grade visit. Perhaps it's a sign of our own vanity, but we love to look at ourselves and our children on line! If a school wants to drive traffic to its site, it needs to take a lot of pictures and post a lot of videos. These need not be of the professional variety! It's almost more authentic when it's unprofessional--what we can generate with iphones and post on google galleries or youtube pages is usually good enough. I'd also warehouse your school's newsletters on line--you can give the good news stories within a longer shelf life.
Sixth, school pages should have a place where all routine forms--permission slips, driver's license certification forms, physicals, etc are housed. We shouldn't be chasing paper anymore, or using fax machines to shuffle forms back and forth. Fax machines are a 1990's technology!
Seventh, our pages should link to all social media sites the school maintains. These sites should be, at minimum, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. The object is to have all of these platforms criss-crossing the other, driving traffic in multiple directions so as to tell the school's story.
Eighth, our school web pages should provide somewhere, a "Quick Facts" section or something like it where all the school's statistics can be located. This is both for the type-A parent who is comparison shopping schools, but it's also for reasons of institutional control. Educational statistics can be manipulated and misunderstood, so I prefer to be the person who puts these statistics together, and I refer all people who write stories or grants for us to use the statistics on this page. For an example of such a page, here's what we do: http://jp2hs.org/about/quick-facts/
Ninth, our pages should include employment opportunities. If we have openings, we can wax on eloquently about the positions we have open and the advantages of teaching in our school, so that when we post openings in parish bulletins, or in diocesan weeklies, or on national web sites, we need only post the link to the opening. In addition, I believe the task to find good teachers is an on-going one, so I encourage interested prospects to apply, even if we don't have a current position open! The bigger the pool of resumes we receive, the better our chances of finding a truly superb teacher.
Tenth I believe our web sites should give what I call "consumer" information to prospective and current families. This includes all tuition and fee costs, a copy of our student handbook of all school policies, (it saves money to simply publish these on line), a "curricular guide" that explains our academic program, and information about extra-curricular events. Keeping all this available on line helps our families find the information they need--and cuts down on the volume of phone calls to our receptionist! Do her a favor!
I am not suggesting our web site is perfect, but we've tried to put all these suggestions together here.
One final piece. Do you want to save money? Prices vary wildly between school web design vendors--depending on whether you want to use a company's existing templates or design your own page, which could cost as much as (literally) fifty thousand dollars. The best value I can find out there for Catholic schools is from the guys at http://www.ecatholicwebsites.com/, a company that works with Catholic schools and churches. They will allow you to use their existing templates for a $100 set up fee and a $20/month maintenance fee (these are insanely low prices). Or, they'll help you design your own site for $2500 The last time we designed our school web site, it cost us $25,000, and the time before that, it cost $15,000!
I've looked over institutions that have used their services, and they're quite attractive, such as here (http://www.usordinariate.org/) or here: http://www.dioceseofnashville.com/ or a Catholic school here: http://www.hccsf.org/ or here: http://www.pj23.org/. I recommend these guys highly.
Spend time on your web page before you spend any other monies for advertising. Everything else we might to advertise for our school pales in importance.
Most of us in Catholic schools don't market our schools very well, mostly because we see it as a luxury we can't afford. In fact, newspaper ads, slick admissions brochures, billboards and radio spots are very expensive, and given what we pay our teachers, it's not an unreasonable position to be hesitant to spend money on what may or may not "pay off" in the long run. But that makes us uneasy, because we know that enrollment is the life blood of our school's long term health.
The best marketing, however, doesn't cost us anything.
I believe the best marketing for our school is "inside-out" marketing--that is, equip our parents and teachers with "good news" stories about our school, and then let these "insiders" share those stories with others. If you think about it, "word of mouth" is the way that parents choose schools for their children anyway--they don't do it by the quality of an admissions brochure.
So what are our parents saying?
Parents are proud of us, and they want to feel good about their choice and sacrifice to send their children to our school. Teachers are proud to work with us. They both want to hear good news stories, and they're eager to share this news with others.
The key question is this: how do we equip our "insiders" with these stories?
I believe that it's incumbent on us as school leaders to generate 2-3 "good news" stories every week about our students or teachers, and we must be creative in doing so. It isn't just what Mrs. Johnson did in second grade this week, although it could be. It might be about a student who just became an Eagle scout. It may be an interesting service project our kids are involved in. It might be a quick "catching up" with a recent graduate who is now in high school or college. It might be a quick interview with a teacher who is celebrating his or her 10th, 15th or 20th year in our schools. It could be an interview with four sixth graders who tell us what they like about our school. Perhaps it's a quick interview with a new parent, about why they chose our school for his or her child.
These stories need not be the long "feature length" quality--in fact, shorter is usually better. But they should include a picture that resonates with the reader, and they should reflect on the mission of our school and all the diverse, wonderful things our students, faculty and parents do.
Don't have the time to write these stories? Perhaps that's something we can ask a volunteer to do for us once/week.
Once we have these 2-3 stories, we should share them with everyone. They should be posted on our school's facebook page and as links for our "Twitter" feeds. They should be placed as links on the front page of our web site (if they're on page 2 of our website, no one is reading them--see how we do this here: www.jp2hs.org). They should be sent out as links in the school's weekly email to all of our constituents. They should be mailed to the diocesan and local papers (What they publish we can't control, but if they need content, we're giving it to them. With the razor thin margins papers are operating with, we've found about 1/2 of what we send to them is published, often word for word with what we've written.)
In this world of "rubber-necking" to see the latest accident or tragedy, we must be very disciplined and persistent in countering with positive stories about our school and students. The word "gospel", after all, means "good news."
Let's share the gospel unabashedly!
