Schools fail not from bad buildings but from weak finances. Once a school takes on debt or a bad lease, recovery is nearly impossible. The sector needs to teach sound financial practices from day one, with model budgets and benchmarks showing what healthy schools actually look like.
It started, you know, people see the building and think that the building was the thing. It started with the business fundamentals being great. It started with families being there, but them having a really strong operating model and being clear about how they were going to make it work and how they were going to grow sustainably. And so I think that's the number one takeaway for me is we need to really think hard about how we encourage that sustainability on the front end. It's really hard once people are operating and if they're in debt or if they're in a bad lease or if they're in a bad situation around their finances. It's really hard to dig out of that, especially at the scale that folks are operating at. So I think we're really thinking long and hard about what does technical assistance look like in the future and also how do we encourage on a kind of more sector wide basis. And I think this is where thought leadership and some of the work that we're excited to do with building Hope and the team comes in is how do we, how do we communicate what we're seeing? Like this is what a good budget looks like, this is what a good net income looks like.
