The Customer is Not Always Right!: But We Sure Do Need Them.

By Brian J. Stephens

When Brian Stephens asked me to help him organize a book of his years of experience in public school professional development, I was excited but overwhelmed by the prospect. I couldn't imagine a better use of my skills and passions as a writer, editor and educator. But in his fashion, his completion goals were ambitious. I told him, "But, Brian, I've been writing my own book for a decade." He was undeterred. He started writing chapter after chapter. It was an inspiration to see it happen so quickly and so efficiently. The thing is, the information is deep, practiced and fresh because it's used every day in CaissaK12's holistic services to help public school districts understand the landscape of educational options and what tools they can wield to help keep students and resources.

Among the most valuable of resources discussed in this book is the human resource, in other words, it's you. When I began editing this book, I was intrigued by the depth at which Brian explores the value of empathy. The crux of this methodology is how to keep families in your district–how to keep your students coming back to build a thriving community and the budget to grow. What this book uniquely considers is how interaction with difficult student families poses an opportunity for leaving lasting positive impressions that win students back. The Customer Is Not Always Right! understands that this means school staff, faculty and administrators are placed in difficult situations with the potential to either drastically hurt or help their customers' experiences, and, as such, their bottom lines. For this reason, you'll find these rules promote a new kind of customer service that empathizes with families while reaching a common ground that fights staff burnout and turnover.

In the middle of book production, I was invited to join a live, in-person training session. We traveled to a public school district to deliver intensive courses to sets of principals and front desk staff members. What I witnessed surprised me. At every level of leadership, Brian's participants were not only engaged, roleplaying conflict scenarios in public schools, but they were having fun. If professional development training in the middle of summer doesn't sound like fun to you, that's because you haven't seen this one. What struck me most is how far this training goes not only to anticipate and practice working through trouble, but how much it centers empowering you, the registrar, the clerk, the teacher, the principal. This training is intended to give voice to the authentic experience of working with families in public schools. It thinks through the best way to acknowledge common problems–right or wrong–and address them. It offers techniques to make families feel heard and to allow staff members to keep their dignity.

I am genuinely excited to help bring this book into the world, and I am excited for you to have this reference guide for public school empowerment and exclusive tips in communications strategy. I hope you find these tactics useful, and I hope you find the anecdotes as illustrative, funny and insightful as I have. Keep fighting the good fight.

Daphne Maysonet

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667873237

Book preview

SECTION II:

RULES TO GET STARTED

RULE 1

SCIENCE BEFORE ART

All too often, I find people tend toward wanting to do all the fun stuff when it comes to running an active campaign to recruit students. They love to discuss what the mailers will look like, what’s going to be in the TV commercial and what the visual images will be. It’s as if everyone thinks the creative should drive the message, and it’s the exact opposite of that. The first thing you need to establish to run any great student recruitment campaign is the science. For instance, at CaissaK12, we conduct an annual nationwide parent and caregiver recruitment and retention poll, so we can learn from them what they want in a school. What is it that drives them to make a choice to either stay or leave?

TIP: Read the title of this rule again and again. It doesn’t read art before science. Your team will want to reverse this. Don’t!

I would encourage you to begin with asking really important questions that you can actually utilize to begin your recruitment efforts. Let’s review an example. One of the first questions that we ask, and I would encourage you to ask, is how likely are you to consider switching your student’s school next year? It’s simple. It’s concise, and it lets you know exactly where you are right now. We know that approximately 43 percent of parents are considering leaving schools nationwide. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to leave, but we know they’re susceptible to being recruited. Now, this is good and bad for traditional public schools. It’s bad, because that means a lot of your families are considering leaving, but it’s good, because a lot of students that are going to other types of schools are also considering leaving. There’s a lot of opportunity in this mix.

One of the second major questions that we like to ask is what are the top concerns you have when picking a school? That question alone gives you almost all the information you need to begin recruitment efforts. We’ve learned that there are three fundamentals that parents say–year in, year out– across the nation. It doesn’t matter what their demographics are. It doesn’t matter what their economic status is. Parents all care about the same things. And this is a nationwide survey, of course. I’m encouraging you to do your own science in your own community. We’ve learned that the caregivers care about safety first. When we first started doing this poll years ago, safety was bullying. Then it became gun violence. Then it became Covid. It’s right now beginning to transition back into gun violence. But safety is always among the main drivers that parents care about. They will never pick your school if they don’t feel like their children are going to be protected and safe.

The second main driver that we’ve determined through utilizing science before art is parents want to know that their children are going to be successful. What success means is different to every single parent in the world, but fundamentally they’ll fill the word success in with what they think about it. For instance, for me, success was the military, which led me to go get additional degrees after that. For some people, it’s a trade school, or it’s college, or it’s a great job. In short, it really means that the student graduates and doesn’t live in their basement forever. Parents want to make sure their children go off and become great people in the