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 Opportunity Charter School Reach and Recruit the Right Families to Boost Enrollment and Increase their Funding
Opportunity Charter School is a public charter school founded in 2004 in Harlem, NY. The mission of Opportunity Charter School is to provide students at the highest risk of academic failure, most of whom struggle with complex learning disabilities, with an intensive intervention that is responsive to their individual needs and fosters academic excellence, emotional stability, and social acceptance, preparing them to be successful in college or a career setting. OCS believes every student can succeed if provided the tools they need and aims to meet every student where they are to help them reach their individual goals. OCS serves a student body of 420 students in grades 6-12, primarily from underserved communities. 60% of their students have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP).
Prior to working with Schola®, OCS was doing several recruitment initiatives such as canvassing, in-person and virtual open houses, community events, calling parents, newspaper ads, and more. Though these efforts were often successful at attracting interest for general education students, they still lacked applications for students with IEPs, their primary student population.
Opportunity Charter School had to find new ways to attract and target this specific population of scholars. In addition, OCS didn’t have the human capacity on staff to reach out to interested families, so they needed to implement effective and timely ways to follow up with these students to boost enrollment and provide quality, accessible education to students with IEPs, giving them the best opportunity for success.
“We’ve always had a lot of interested families for general education; we even have a waitlist. But we primarily focus on providing quality education for students with learning disabilities, and that was the area of applications we were consistently falling short on.”
To overcome this challenge, Opportunity Charter School needed to streamline its recruiting efforts and focus on targeted outreach to potential applicants. The school realized they didn't need to attract large amounts of leads but rather focus their time and efforts on suitable applicants. This meant identifying the channels through which they could reach and follow up with parents of children who needed specialized education and support.
Knowing that Schola® could really focus on bringing in students with IEPs and support with the follow-up, OCS started working with Schola® in 2020. Especially during a time when in-person events like open houses were no longer an option, OCS needed support launching online recruitment channels to target these families, and Schola® was ready to step in. Through these online recruitment channels and additional tools like Schola’s email and text messaging, Opportunity Charter School was able to ensure that they were getting in touch with the right families for their unique program.
As a ScholaRecruiter Pro™ client, OCS received daily support from a team of bilingual Schola Parent Outreach Specialists who managed and tracked all the follow-up with families interested in the school, no matter the source those leads came from. This aspect significantly benefited OCS, as it freed up valuable time and resources, allowing them to enhance their on-the-ground recruitment efforts and address other crucial tasks. Moreover, the comprehensive support level provided by Schola® emerged as one of the key advantages for the OCS team, effectively complementing their internal efforts and augmenting their current staff.
“I love the level of support we receive. It’s not just bringing in leads and calling them, but it is providing additional recruitment ideas, visiting us in person, going above and beyond to help us organize our database, and always being dynamic and receptive by implementing adjustments that adapt to our evolving needs.”
- Krystal Vazquez
Since working with Schola®, OCS has received 1,269 leads and 383 applications. These applications have the potential to bring in $6.75 million in funding for OCS. Data-driven decision-making is critical to Opportunity Charter School, so receiving more comprehensive reporting and insights into its recruitment efforts from Schola® was extremely important. Year after year, OCS continues to analyze this data and chooses to continue working with Schola®, knowing the return on investment is well worth it.
Since Working With Schola®
“Being able to make the most out of our recruitment efforts is so important to us, which is why we pay such close attention to our ROI. We know that every student that Schola® brings in that submits an application is potentially more funding that we can put back into the classroom to ensure we can stay open and provide these students with the education they deserve.”
- Krystal Vazquez
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