"campus." We did this in Montgomery, Al, in 2001, combining St. Bede elementary, Queen of Mercy elementary and Catholic High into "one school on three campuses " and renaming this new entity "Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School." We then built a middle school on the high school campus, and reconfigured the K-8 elementary schools into K-6's. The model has been highly successful, reversing a decade-long slow bleed in enrollment, creating PR, development, and financial efficiencies impossible for any one school "going it alone." From 2004-2008, enrollments grew by 35%.
In the mean time, however, the most common model remains K-8 parochial schools funneling into a (typically) diocesan high school. I believe that even within this structure, there are "alliances" which can be created between schools that are of mutual benefit to each school within the alliance. Drawing lines of distinction between the schools too sharply or thinking too narrowly misses opportunities for mutual collaboration and benefit. Most of what this alliance entails depends on what the high school is willing to do. Here's some of what I've done and am thinking about doing in this regard (Some of this has gone on for years between high schools and elementary schools around the country.)
1) First, let us be very generous in sharing facilities with the K-8 schools and their families. This begins to create the important sense of "we" in the K12 community. In Nashville, the two Catholic high schools hosted all CYO soccer, football and basketball contests for the elementary school kids. That meant that once a week or so, parents on those teams visited our high school with their children. Is that taxing on the high school? You bet!--so much so that I reconfigured our assistant athletic director's hours to work Saturdays and be off Sundays and Mondays, so that he could be the liaison between the school and CYO. But development experts will tell you that the chance of families enrolling in your school down the line increase dramatically if they visit your school three times or more, so I saw it as a healthy long term investment in admissions. And in the interim, I'd argue we're doing the right thing by sharing our resources with the broader Catholic community--our schools don't belong to "us," after all, but to the Church.
2) Encourage a sense of "we" in the faculties of the younger grades. I tell elementary school teachers and staff to consider themselves as "adjunct faculty" of the high school, and to emphasize this point, I send them event passes for all home athletic contests and musical concerts, and encourage them to come see their former students perform. More substantively, I tell them that I want their sons and daughters in our school, and emphasize if they need help to meet tuition costs, I will absolutely prioritize them in giving out limited financial aid monies. If we want to be a true "presence" to the younger grades, the best way is to make sure the teachers in those grades are parents in the high school!
3) I believe that we in high schools should also prioritize financial aid to assist families with children who are in both the high school and elementary schools at the same time. I think it wise to "package" this priority in some sort of marketable way, by telling parents, for example, that "If they have children in both the Catholic high school and elementary school simultaneously, we'll give the family half tuition scholarships if they qualify." That doesn't create an additional burden on the high school, because those families must qualify through an independent financial analysis, whether they have kids in other schools or not. And if they do, these are truly the families we want to help first! By setting things up this way, we acknowledge the sacrifice families are making to send their kids to our schools, and simultaneously, we assure the elementary school leadership that we're thinking of them and seeking to add value to their school.
4) High school athletic programs are a powerful uniting force for the Catholic community, bridging over parochial divides. If possible, consider combining the middle school programs of each elementary school into "middle school" athletic programs of the high school, playing the same area K-12 private schools that the high schools play, only at a younger age . We did this in Montgomery to great effect--the "Knights" middle school program began in 2001 and actually paved the way for building a new middle school and reconfiguring the elementaries into K-6's in 2004. And here in Mobile, with an active CYO program, we're not advocating pulling the elementary schools out of CYO, which would hurt the Catholic league, but combining the Baldwin County Catholic elementary schools, some of which are too tiny to support their own teams, into a single CYO team whose name will be the "Cardinals" (our high school mascot) and which will play at the high school site. Doing so improves access for athletics to students in these smaller schools even while creating a unified "identity" that can only help the high school in its future admissions. Everyone wins!
5) I haven't yet fully implemented this, but it's on my agenda to explore: I believe there are monies to be saved if the high school works in concert with elementary schools to negotiate bulk purchasing for things like paper, internet access, or copy machine contracts. The more business we can bring vendors, the more powerful our alliance, and the more willing vendors will be to negotiate with us. Often the high school has a finance director that can negotiate with vendors in a way that secretaries of elementary schools simply don't have time or the expertise for, benefiting everyone.
Aristotle once said: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." In a similar vein, Steven Covey urges us to "Think win-win" in his "Seven Habits of Successful People. I think we're wise to think this way about our K12 schools.
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