A school administrator has a lot of responsibility for students and everything that goes on inside a school building or in a district. Within a school district hierarchy, the school administrator provides many kinds of top-level management. That means dealing with budgets and finances, as well as student and faculty health and safety issues. It often means taking a top-level approach to evaluating school operations and optimizing results as necessary.
So, school administrators have a lot to do. They’re often evaluating many different school departments, from faculty affairs to transportation, athletics, food service and more. Through day-to-day and long-term analysis, they are expected to maintain a good understanding of how schools are doing and how they can be improved.
A number of different types of school administrators work together to enhance school operations. Principals and vice principals of individual schools are administrators. At the top, there is a superintendent who is the head of administration for the district. Other kinds of administrators will have department head positions or be responsible for different aspects of school operations.
Administrators faced many challenges during the pandemic. They had to navigate staffing issues, logistics of distance learning, the need to create hybrid models and more.
One challenge cited by many experts in the wake of the pandemic was “digital equity” or providing for families with less access to broadband and IT tools. The U.S. Census determined that 93% of families were involved in some form of distance learning during 2020; that brought with it a series of logistical challenges, and schools had to pivot quickly.
There was also the struggle to maintain multiple modalities. One way to evaluate this is through a “snapshot” of some 8700 districts provided by the CDC in September of 2021, where researchers found that 96% were offering full in-person learning, 4% were offering hybrid learning, and 0.4% were offering full remote learning. With in-class learning comprising the vast majority of school models, social distancing created major demands for resources in terms of busing, cleaning buildings, and spacing students in classrooms, as well as masking requirements.
All of this puts enormous pressure on teachers and administrators as well, and though some of these demands have eased, it’s still a difficult time to prioritize as a school administrator.
Take a look and Vanco’s services and think about the many ways that this technology can empower school administrators and personnel across a school district to improve how they serve their communities.