The Journey to Starting: Stage 2

Back to our story…. We had the academics of our school designed. Now, to look more closely at 1) how we should organize the school, 2) who we should be enrolling in the Grand Strand area, and, ultimately, 3) where we should have the school located.

With respect to organizing the school, schools outside of the traditional public school environment include charter schools, private religiously affiliated schools and private secular schools. Any

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of these forms can target specific types/levels of learners and be either for-profit or not-for-profit. Charter schools are part of the current education system with some freedoms from certain levels of bureaucracy but not completely free of it. We wanted to be outside of the current system for this school. So, no charter school. Private religiously affiliated schools abound in the area and again we wanted to draw from any religious background. This left the private secular school.  A stand-alone tuition-funded option that would only be constrained by requirements of certification. The next issues was for profit or not-for-profit. We found a non-profit willing to accept our school as a project. This enables us to move to a not-for-profit status right away. We chose to pursue the private secular not-for-profit school.

We next considered who should enroll. Remember, as active faculty in higher education, the skill sets of incoming

students was our motivation to start a school. We knew that we wanted to reach those students gearing up to attend college. As a faculty member in entrepreneurship and strategy, I wanted to help our youth gain general skills required for starting companies and being a professional. This implied that our desired student has parents/guardians who seek to have their child prepared for college and those subsequent skills needed in business ownership and being a professional. They also should be willing and able to pay for it. This impacted our decision to centralize our location.

Finally, we considered where to have the school located. We wanted it to be about 30 minutes from most areas in the Grand Strand area of South Carolina. The triangle of HWY 501, Hwy 544, and Hwy 17 Business was our first choice. We found several promising locations but when we visited the City of Myrtle Beach, we found that they limited the zoning in which a school could be run (unlike the county)

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and they required 5 acres of land for any elementary school (which makes sense for a larger school but not a small school which was our initial goal). Myrtle Beach city limits was stricken from our list of potential locations.  We pulled our ideal boundary back to Hwy 17 Bypass but allowed for going few stop lights along Hwy 17 Bypass and along Hwy 707 to keep our total search area about the same size and in about the same centralized location.

More on our journey later!
Janice Black, Ed. Specialist, Ph. D.