“Effective marketing techniques paired with high-quality products is a natural formula for brand success.” – Entrepreneur Magazine
This article in the Star Tribune tells us that RAS is marketing its schools to local parents to help stop the bleed of students to other districts, charter schools or home-schooling:
Loss of enrollment is a concern to school districts because state education aid is allocated on a per-pupil basis; fewer students means less state aid.
Last year, Robbinsdale reported one of its biggest enrollment declines in a decade, totaling 477 students. At $5,174 in basic state aid per pupil, that equals a loss of at least $2.5 million in state funding. That was a major factor contributing to the closing of two elementary schools and a middle school at the end of the 2008-09 school year.
The district recently reported a loss of 567 students this year. Projections further into the future show enrollment levelling off.
For the most part, district officials said, those losses have been the result of fewer births and an aging population. But the district also is losing students to other schools.
Lesson learned: you can’t expect effective results without a quality product (as the old “lipstick on a pig” saying goes). Marketing one or two choices (like Spanish Immersion which has a waiting list to get into or IB in schools with student safety problems) will not bring kids in, but offering competition will keep students in our district. Sell some of our unused schools to charter or private schools: RAS earns money without state funding, students get a choice and stay here. It’s a win-win.
281 Exposed 
December 13, 2009 at 4:17 am |
Does anyone have any idea, hypothesis or guess regarding:
How many students left due to the reorganization and the closing of SH, PLE and Sandberg?
Just curious…
December 29, 2009 at 3:54 pm |
What is amazing about this site is that parental responsibility isn’t mentioned ONCE. Who encourages students to do their homework? Who are the primary educators of ALL kids, ALL ages? Parents/grandparents/guardians. While TEACHERS and in some small ways, administrators bear SOME responsibility for the standard test scores, PARENTS (who make up most of the membership of this “expose” blog, I imagine) bear the biggest responsibility — and should bear at least some of the blame.
As a parent of two Cooper students, my wife and I were deeply involved in guiding our kids to success — in the Rdale schools and beyond (in college, where they were successful because of the job WE did — with the help of teachers and sometimes administrators.) Perhaps you can direct some of your laudable efforts at exposing evil in the easy target district 281 presents to exposing evil in the families from all socioeconomic classes who renege on their responsibility for educating their own children and place the entire responsibility for that education on a school district that (thankfully) has little to say and do in the life of the family.