Posts made in April, 2013

I’ve come up with the following process for creating and approving our budget.

1. Review the Vision and Mission Statement
2. List out the services and resources we want to provide based on our vision and mission statement.
3. Determine the number of students we want to provide our services to.
4. Calculate the number of teachers needed. This calculation is based on the max students per teacher minus 5 and then dividing that number by the number of students.
5. List out all of the expenses incurred by providing our services and resources.
6. List out the income from the state and fundraising.
7. Determine the budget shortfall that will need to be made up with community donations.
8. Notify the community of the budget shortfall and ask for donations.
9. Meet with local businesses and ask for donations.
10. Raise the money needed to cover the budget shortfall.
11. If the money cannot be raised, then one of the following decisions will be made
    1. Make changes to the services and resources we want to provide if they don’t violate our vision and mission statement.
    2. Make changes to the services and resources that violate our vision and mission statement.
    3. Decide that we won’t offer our services and investigate alternatives for our students.
12. Finalize and approve the budget.

I want to ensure that if we are not able to receive enough funding to provide services that are in line with our vision and mission statement then we partner with another group/agency that can or we find an alternative option for our students. There are a number of viable alternatives  for educating the children in our community that do not involve operating a charter school. We need to be cognizant of these options and be willing to pursue them at any time.

We’ve completed all of the pre proposal steps on the Starting a Charter School page. I’ve created a new page named “Our Proposal”. This page will contain our proposal. I’m going to try to keep the actual proposal on the web site instead of creating a separate document.

Progress:

• Started work on the school founders section, but I kept getting stuck. I’m going to wait till our next meeting and discuss this section with the group.
• I put our name as Lorem Ipsum Academy until we make a decision on the name.
• I copied the Governance Structure section from the 501(c)3 bylaws template on the IRS web site.

During our last meeting we discussed the name of our school. We decided to change the name from “Fall Creek Charter” to something that isn’t tied to a city. The list of names from our email thread are:

Top 6

• Mountain View Charter
  • mountainviewcharter.org – available
  • mountainviewschool.org – available
  • mountainviewacademy.org – taken
• Heritage Charter
  • heritagecharter.org – taken
  • heritageschool.org – taken
  • heritageacademy.org – taken
• River View Academy
  • riverviewcharter.org – available
  • riverviewschool.org – taken
  • riverviewacademy.org – taken
• Lakeside Charter
  • lakesidecharter.org – available
  • lakesideschool.org – taken
  • lakesideacademy.org – taken
• Provenance Charter
  • provenancecharter.org – available
  • provenanceschool.org – available
  • provenanceacademy.org – available
• Three Rivers Charter
  • threeriverscharter.org – available
  • threeriversschool.org – taken
  • threeriversacademy.org – taken

The Rest

• Lake View Charter
• Lincoln Charter
• Sapientia Charter
• Prudentia Charter
• Carpe Diem Charter
• East Lane Charter
• Timber Hills Charter
• Fountain Charter
• Riverside Academy
• Oak (Oregon Academy for Kids) Academy