Role of Schools
Schools have been the bedrock of human societies across the globe for a very long time now. Although the type of schools may vary, the intent and purpose of schools are all same – to train the minds of future generations to think good, do good and be good. Therefore, there is no denying the fact that schools are the places where a person spends some of the most beautiful years of their lives learning how to work and live as a true human being in the society. Much of the success that we humans have achieved as a species can be attributed to proper schooling.
However, as with all modern entities, the complexities of successfully administering a school has gone up several times as compared to a few decades earlier. Although the core functions of a school and its administrator may not have changed at the fundamental level, but at the surface it seems to be apparently so.
Then and Now
The basic functions of a school administrator or the group of people entrusted with running a school successfully on a daily basis has to perform several routine tasks, and a lot of them involves communicating with the teachers, non-teaching staff, students, guardians, statutory bodies, committees, and media too, if the school is of good reputation and something deviates even slightly from the way things are supposed to happen. People spend fortunes to send their children to good schools and they expect top-notch professional service on part of the educators; anything short will simply not suffice.
Earlier, this was not the case. The responsibilities of the educators and school administrators primarily revolved around maintaining discipline, making sure that classes are taken on time and the exams are conducted maintaining its sanctity. However, this simple model was sufficient earlier, not now. Nowadays, the administrators have to single-handedly tackle multiple other functions and they are extremely busy with the chores. Their job is nothing short of busy executives running the corporate companies, although they have to perform with a modest budget and at the same time handle sensitive issues.
The Tough Job
Let us try to inspect in a greater detail the actual job of today’s school administrators and try to understand the difficulties the face in their job on a daily basis. Then with a solid understanding of the challenges faced by them, we shall look into a solution that is cost-effective yet simplifies the lives of school administrators to a great extent.
Currently, school administrators are entrusted with the following duties:
- Chalking out class routines, examination schedules and other academic exercises.
- Appointing new teaching and non-teaching staff, negotiate and manage their compensation and other facilities.
- Facilitating meetings and committees for discussing and resolving various administrative and academic issues.
- Ensuring the discipline, sanctity and safety of the premises and taking charge of any unwanted situation that originates from within or outside the school campus.
- Communicating with guardians of students on their child’s academic progress or disciplinary issues.
- Talking with statutory bodies and even media, if the situation demands.
All of these tasks have one thing in common – talking with people. A lot of communication is an integral part of every school administrator or educator worth his/her salt. In fact, this is no different from any other corporate executive’s daily life. To run a business, they also need to communicate with people for the major part of their day. At the fundamental level, these problems are pretty similar and therefore, when looking for the solution to such problems, we can definitely look into the tools that the corporate executives use in order to make their communication a lot for collaborative and well-rounded.
The Simple Solution
Clearly, the bottleneck in tasks for school administrators gets created when they try to communicate with multiple parties simultaneously, and this they have to do on a daily basis. So, a tool that will help them to telecommunicate seamlessly with many people from their office will be the game changer in the way they deal with their jobs.
Before going to the solution, we must accept a fact that technology based solutions are the best ones, for the convenience and reliability they provides. Businesses across the world have accepted and embraced technology solutions, and this has definitely added to their bottom lines. While the publicly acknowledged goals of schools are not anything related to making profit, the schools certainly have their reputations at stake.
Good schools put high value on their discipline, curriculum, personality development and other amenities needed to prepare their students for the grueling adult life. Parents who themselves are high achievers won’t hesitate to shell out good money if the schools ensure quality education for their child. Therefore, it is important for the educators to beef up the efficiency enhancement tools.
The technology oriented communication tool that will serve the purpose very well is VOIP based telephone systems, which in context of schools, is also referred to as school phone systems. These are not fancy toys to impress the guardians and convince them to send their child to schools that have installed the modern phone systems. Rather, these are real productivity tools that often comes with these facilities:
- Internet based voice calls and data tariff plans, that reduces the overheads related to telephone bills.
- Toll-free numbers, thus encouraging parents and other stake holders to call
- Virtual receptionists, so that while the number remains busy, the caller knows that his call will surely be attended once the intended recipient is free.
- Voice message recorders, so that people can leave their messages and the recipient can access them from anywhere, if internet is available
- Call schedulers and reminders, so that nothing important is missed.
- Conference call facilities with three or more people talking simultaneously, which may again be audio-visual in nature.
Perhaps, the only downside of the solution is the dependency on the internet, which might not be equally strong in all areas, thus resulting in call drops and delays or poor call quality. However, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages far more and hence, administrators of schools must give it a thought before deciding on the course of action.