Sharing our Experience and Knowledge
You have a fantastic school and it’s founded on strong principles, exceptional values, and good teaching. People are excited and students are learning! This is exactly what you dreamed of!
 But will it last? The question is no longer, can you build a great school? The question now becomes, how will you sustain it? When your founding members or director move on, how will your school continue on the same path? Ten or twenty years from now, will your school still be filled with best practices or will the direction change completely?
It is not unthinkable that your school may alter some practices through the years, acquiring new and innovative strategies to help students. In fact, this is most desirable. The problem, however, is keeping alive the values on which your school was founded. How do you do that when you are spend- ing every waking moment just running the school?
Our Grant Project
SJS will assist schools by providing successful practices from the SJS’s 14 years of operation. In addition, existing schools will be assisted in organizing their own practices into a well-formatted publication that can be used to ensure they continue to remain focused on their core values and beliefs. With inevitable turn-around in staff, Board, and parents, charter schools run the high risks of losing their individuality and those pieces of their culture that ensure continued success
Why the Manual?
This document became essential for two reasons. First, the SJS lost vital staff members who had helped develop the values into an integral part of the program, and second, while these values had been planted and nurtured for years, nothing had been documented. It became frighteningly clear that the framework and foundation of the SJS could potentially be lost forever. A grant from the Oregon Department of Education allowed for these vital best practices to be documented and disseminated among new members of the Sheridan Japanese School. Additionally, the grant provided funding to develop a format for other schools that might also need to document their philosophies, methods, and procedures so their visions can continue if and when their own founders move on.
Developing your Operations Manual
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