Memphis City Schools’ Plan for Business Managers

School business manager help in running of the school activities reducing the work load of the principles and other members of senior management teams.  They concentrate on business management aspects of running school while educationist are left to concentrate on the academic issues at the school such as curriculum development, testing and teacher evaluation. In this regard the idea off hiring school managers is flattering but also has great financial ramifications. These can be clearly seen in the articles by Roberts and which explore the implication of hiring school managers to Memphis City Schools.

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First Robert notes one great benefit of hiring business managers to run the Memphis City Schools. Incorporation of school managers in the school system is successful; up to 70% of the workload conducted by principles in the daily administration of the schools will be offloaded. The business managers will oversee activities such as daily schedules maintenance, management of transport and cafeteria, management of after-school activities and the non-teaching staff.  This will allow the school principles to focus fully on academic issues of the school. According to Roberts (2012a) the principles will channel their efforts to other activities such as key instruction and observing performance reviews. This would certainly improve the management of schools as well as their performance.

However, the implementation is not all rosy and does not guarantee success in the performance of the schools and also need heavy funding. The initial funding will be done using teachers and principals’ bonuses, certainly denying them their benefits. The initial funding will consume up to $960,000. Afterwards, it is unknown how the school business managers will be sustained, since funding may present a great dilemma.  The city requires $52,000 every year for salary per School business manager; paying 23 school business managers will be very expensive. According to Roberts (2012b) staffing 100 schools with business managers will require a minimum of $4 million, certainly, a heavy burden on the school budget.

Spending such amount on hiring school business managers is unnecessary. The principles have always managed to meet their obligations and it would be wasteful to pay a lot of money to someone to do half the tasks the principles the principles are now doing and still pay the principles equally large sums of money while their workload is halved.  This money could have been used to fund other more academically productive activities such increase the number of classrooms to reduce congestion in current classrooms. As Keith Williams the teacher union president opined,

“a business manager doe nothing to increase teaching and learning … if the money can reduce class sizes, it would be much greater benefit than hiring another person that will not have much contact with children” (Roberts, 2012a)

His opinion is a clear statement that school business managers are unnecessary and will merely consume resources that can be used to improve the quality of education offered to children.  If the city authorities want to improve the performance of unified schools, they would better higher teacher assistance to serve the children. Incorporating school managers into the school system may also require more resources.  First, staffing model in schools will have to be changed to create room for the new employee. Such change will require funding and may call for new employees such as an assistant for the manager, further stretching the schools’ budgets.

In sum, hiring school business managers is a waste of education resource. The only advantage such a move would yield is reducing the principles workload. This, however, does not guarantee spending large amount of resources expanding the administration, employee extra employee who want impact on children’s learning process. It is also unfair to use teachers’ bonuses yet teacher work tirelessly to help children realize academic excellence. This money would best be use to reward teacher to boost their morale, reduce class sizes or higher teaching assistant to boost the school performance. Otherwise, the principle and his depute should be able to run a school and conduct assessments.

Reference

Roberts, J. (2012a). Memphis City Schools to Hire 23 Business Leaders. Retrieved from
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/feb/17/mcs-to-hire-23-business-leaders/

Roberts, J. (2012b). Memphis City Schools’ Plan for Business Managers to Ease Principals’ Workload Premature. Retrieved from http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/feb/21/mcs-business-managers-on-hold/

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