Tetrahedronics Articles Are Moving To STAFFAdvancement.com

After nearly 2 decades of offering these articles on SchoolAdvancement.com, they are moving to STAFFAdvancement.com.

There are a number of reasons for this.

The idea behind SchoolAdvancement.com was to show the importance of systems thinking in solving problems in education. As Einstein is credited as saying, “We cannot solve the problems of today with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

SchoolAdvancement.com’s logo was the Tetrahedron – a physical representation of a five-sided system.

A tetrahedron is commonly referred to as a “three-sided pyramid.” There are actually 4 sides, but one is hidden.

The base.

How does this relate to faith-based schools?

There are three elements that are readily visible – enrollment, retention, and marketing. Newly enrolled students are retained from year to year, and the positive word of mouth marketing fosters additional students to be enrolled. Tying all this together is the base – Development – since that brings fund to the school. You can see that each of the visible sides have a connection to the process of bringing sustainable gifts to the school to solidify its financial foundation.

But there’s a fifth side – the side that no one sees. That’s Asset Management, and it’s what holds the other four elements together. This category encompasses the financial management aspects of the school – using payment plans to bill for and collect tuition, as well as strategically allocating financial aid to families who cannot afford the cost to educate their child in the school.

And, interestingly, that’s where most of the issues with sustaining faith-based schools today are seated.

The irony, however, is that one cannot just work on one elements of the five, since an adjustment to one will cause a change in the others. The physical reality is that the tetrahedron has equal sides – created by 4 equilateral and equilangular triangles. Change one thing – and the whole thing must change to keep it’s shape. Otherwise, it’s no longer a perfect tetrahedron.

The elements of Advancement as defined by SchoolAdvancement.com were these five: Asset Management, Retention, Marketing, Enrollment and Development. STAFFAdvancement expands on this idea, in that this is only one system of five elements at work in your school. The acronyms form by those elements create their own “overarching” acronym of STAFF (SIGNS, TEACH, ARMED, FACTS and FAITH).

Tetrahedronics articles provide the framework for understanding systems thinking, so that we can look at the issues we face through a different lens. As Stephen R. Covey stated in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “The way we see the problem is the problem.”