Organizational Management

Through my studies and professional work I have shown organizational management competence by:

1. Demonstrating an understanding of organizational systems;
2. Defining and using processes for gathering, analyzing, managing and using data to plan and make decisions for program evaluation;
3. Planning and scheduling personal and organizational work, establishing procedures to regulate activities and projects, and delegating and empowering others at appropriate levels;
4. Demonstrating the ability to analyze needs and allocating personnel and material resources;
5. Developing and managing budgets and maintaining accurate fiscal budgets;
6. Demonstrating an understanding of facilities development, planning and management;
7. Understanding and using technology as a management tool.

Reflection:

Organizational decisions can be very challenging as personnel can constantly change from year to year, budgetary restrictions can limit resources available, and schedules can be one of the most time-consuming tasks for a principal when the school year is coming to the finish line. Being a very organized person, I enjoy taking time to work out different processes that make the school function more effectively from an organizational perspective. I have worked with athletic directors to assign soccer officials for all schools within a 60 mile radius of Fargo-Moorhead for the past four years totally over 1,000 assignments, so I have already had experience in scheduling and working with school administrators. I really enjoyed helping make both the teacher class schedules for next year and also the student groupings for the middle school sections.

I realized that there can be very difficult decisions to be made even with scheduling, as the administration team took stakeholder voice into consideration and decided to exchange a semester of P.E. with a semester of SMARTLAB STEM class for all eighth graders. This decision caused a change in the preps some teachers were responsible for as well as the periods that some teachers needed to teach given there is only one SMARTLAB classroom. However, we did figure out a way to work it out with the teachers, and we made the schedule to have every content area had at least one shared prep period, which is something we hadn’t be able to do in a very long time. It took a lot of effort and energy and it was crucial to include more than one person to make the schedule to avoid any mistakes like double-booking a classroom or teacher for a period.