How to Schola Helped Central City Vale High School Optimize its Online Presence to Reach its Enrollment Goals
Central City Value High School is a Public Charter School located in Los Angeles, CA, part of the Value Schools Network. The Value Schools’ mission is to establish and support high quality, values-based elementary and secondary charter schools for populations of students who have been historically underserved by the public school system. CCV strives to provide a rich learning environment, including academics, athletics, clubs, counseling, and community involvement, to prepare students for success in college. CCV has a history of helping students achieve incredible academic growth by the time they graduate, and currently serves a student body of 475 students.
Prior to working with Schola®, CCV was hosting tours, open houses, attending recruitment fairs, and establishing positive relationships with middle schools in the area to engage with their eighth-grade students. However, the onset of Covid-19 quickly brought all these once successful recruitment efforts to a halt. With in-person campus tours and visits to middle schools no longer available, CCV faced difficulties showcasing all of its offerings to prospective families... This posed a significant hurdle to attracting new enrollments.
“Prior to Covid-19, school tours were always a very effective way for us to recruit new students. At the time, the exterior of our building was not a good representation of the inside of the campus or our school community, so not being able to invite families for in-person visits really hurt our recruitment efforts .”
-Joaquin Arroyo
To overcome this challenge, Central City Value needed to establish an online presence that was able to highlight their school and reach families in their community digitally.
Knowing that Schola® would be able to address this exact challenge, Central City Value partnered with Schola® in April 2020. Schola® immediately started building social media campaigns to showcase CCV to prospective families in the area. Through social media and the Schola® platform, the school's message reached a wider audience, resulting in a noteworthy increase in requests for more information from interested families. Now that families were interested in attending, a second hurdle that CCV had to overcome was actually getting these families to fill out an application digitally. Schola® stepped in and was able to contact and support families through the entire application process so CCV did not miss out on any prospective students.
"The fact that Schola® could give us a stronger online presence and reach families in our community was innovative and exactly what we needed. Schola helped us get a significant number of students between April and August 2020, and we were able to be fully enrolled by the start of the school year.”
-Joaquin Arroyo
Since working with Schola®, CCV has received 798 interested families, 143 applications, and 53 enrollments, generating over $1.6 Million in potential funding. Despite being located in an area with a declining population and intense competition from high school options, Schola® has helped CCV maintain steady enrollment numbers year after year. By leveraging Schola's expertise in digital marketing and online presence, CCV has been able to overcome their challenges, maintain enrollment, and continue providing quality education to students in central LA. The minimal cost of Schola's services in comparison to the substantial return on investment has made it a highly advantageous partnership for CCV.
“Even beyond just improving our online presence, the support we received from the Schola® team and the tools available on our dashboard were incredibly helpful and easy to work with. Our partnership with Schola® has not only helped us spread the word about Central City but also saved our team valuable time. We greatly appreciate their dedication."
-Joaquin Arroyo
How Schola® Helped TEACH Public Schools Streamline their Recruitment Process to Maximize Productivity and Reduce their Workload.
TEACH Public Schools is a network of three public charter schools in Los Angeles, California. TEACH's mission is to create a high-quality, innovative teaching and learning environment that focuses on literacy, integrating state-of-the-art technologies across the core curriculum to achieve academic proficiency for all students. In addition, TEACH aims to reach students of all backgrounds by serving the whole child, including the student's social, physical, emotional, and intellectual needs. TEACH Public Schools' diverse campuses are each approximately 35-40% African-American students and 55-60% Latino, serving nearly 1,100 students in total.
TEACH lacked an established and functional process to recruit and enroll new students. Instead, the "system" in place consisted of a handwritten list of names and numbers – some of which were crossed out, circled, and illegible – and just one person, Luis Ramirez, responsible for reaching out to all the families. On top of that, TEACH aimed to enroll and retain "legacy" families who would re-enroll each year and actively participate in the community as TEACH ambassadors, spreading positive word-of-mouth endorsements about the school. Without a functional process, it was nearly impossible for the TEACH team to prioritize creating connections to build legacy families.
“On my first day working at TEACH, a random pad of paper with names and numbers to call was dropped on my desk. That was the 'system' we were working with.”
While TEACH was successfully generating interest among new families through positive word-of-mouth, they were falling short when it came to follow-up communication to get them fully enrolled, which meant missed opportunities and several prospects falling through the cracks. As is often the case with charter schools, their staff members were juggling multiple roles on any given day and in addition to feeling drained when it came time to start making phone calls, they also lacked a key ingredient for effective follow-up with their leads – time.
Schola® addressed this gap by providing a bilingual outreach team to call, email, and text all the families that had shown interest in TEACH while also attracting new prospects through their own lead-generation channels. With the Schola® team managing follow-up with prospects, the TEACH team could focus more of their attention on deepening the relationships with current families and with those emerging from their grassroots and word-of-mouth initiatives to create "legacy families" and maintain a strong retention rate.
“It's not just about enrollment; it's about relationship building. The Relationship Manager is incredible because there is so much data there from the Schola® team that helps me guide further conversations with families.
Getting families to go from interested to enrolled is really a team effort, and we are so thankful to have Schola® on our team.”
- Luis Ramirez
What's more, Schola® helped TEACH organize and centralize all their recruitment efforts into an easy-to-track CRM through the use of QR codes and tracking links. They have full visibility into the conversations with interested families and can monitor the automated email and text campaigns being sent on their behalf.
At the end of the day, it comes down to results. With the advanced Reporting Hub in the Schola® platform, TEACH was able to track their progress and monitor outcomes every step of the way, giving them the ongoing confidence that Schola® was working diligently to convert the interest of new families into actual applications and enrollments – and without any scribbled papers or crossed out names – thus transforming a once chaotic "process" into a well-oiled and streamlined recruitment machine!
In the past two years, TEACH has seen significant results, receiving over 1,100 leads and 183 applications through their partnership with Schola®, but they emphasize that the impact from what Schola® does extends far beyond just recruitment and enrollment numbers. The real value lies in the time and emotional energy regained by Luis has regained, enabling him to be more present and engaged on campus, both physically and mentally.
Prior to working with Schola®, Luis simply lacked the time and energy to meet personally with prospective families. Now, with Schola® taking an estimated 30-40% of the workload off his plate each week, he's able to focus more on community building with his fellow staff, current students, and even has the opportunity to visit new families in their homes to make genuine connections, which ultimately leads to more of those families enrolling at TEACH.
Since Working With Schola®
“Schola® has made such a difference not only in improving our recruitment and enrollment, but in our school community by freeing up our time and saving us emotional energy. We can now invest that time in fostering positive relationships with the TEACH families and building a better educational experience for our students.”
- Luis Ramirez
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