Yesterday evening, I attended the Business Opportunities Task Force meeting at school. The Business Opportunities Task Force consists of members of the Maumee Valley community, including faculty, staff, students, parents, and board members. The purpose of the task force is to find new sources of revenue to help support the school’s increasing costs. This is because the school needs more funds in order to give pay raises to our amazing staff and faculty. The problem with this is that the administration would like to increase pay at a higher rate than we can raise tuition. I am one of the two students with the privilege of being on the task force, and although I can’t speak about everything, I will speak in general terms about last night’s meeting.
The meeting yesterday primarily consisted of discussion of such business opportunities to create revenue. At a previous meeting, some business opportunities were already discussed, and individuals who had volunteered to research such potential business opportunities reported their thoughts and findings back to the task force.
The idea that we discussed about most at yesterday’s meeting was the idea of opening a satellite Maumee Valley campus in a foreign country. An example of an independent school that has done this is the Barstow School in Kansas City, Missouri. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the implications of an expansion in any foreign country. Firstly, it would be a very risky investment, and would require a risk analysis before the task force decides to move forward. Secondly, it would be very difficult to recreate the culture of Maumee Valley in an expansion located outside of the United States. There are so many experiences and traditions about Maumee Valley that make us Maumee Valley, like preschool concerts, the little/big buddy program in the Upper Intermediate, and Thanksgiving assembly, just to name a few. It would be difficult to transfer the culture of Maumee Valley to somewhere else, especially to a country with a different culture from ours. Thirdly, we would need to find out how we would be able to retain control of our school. It would do us no good if we invested money in any sort of expansion but can’t collect revenue or retain control over some day-to-day operations at the satellite campus. All of these implications led to a question: why are we so interested in a faraway satellite campus? After all, we spent a good portion of the meeting discussing these three main implications. These points of concern raise several questions that we will need to seriously discuss if we decide to continue with such an expansion.
One of the ideas that had not yet been researched in much detail was opening a makerspace at Maumee Valley for public use. Someone had brought up this idea sometime earlier, and although it sounds quite expensive (and also needs to take local demand into consideration, as well as a price we can charge individuals for using it), I figured that I would volunteer to look into the possibilities for this type of business opportunity. As team leader of the Maumee Valley Robotics Team, I know how to do some research as to some of the equipment costs, as well as individuals whom I could talk to in order to see what equipment would be wanted most in a makerspace. I will be doing just some basic research for now, and I intend to report my findings at the next meeting.
The next Business Opportunities Task Force meeting is after the intensive. My model will have been completed by then, and I will be explaining the model to the task force. I will also report back what I find about the logistics and costs of building a makerspace at the next meeting. As I have explained earlier, creating a financial model is the final project of my independent study, and the purpose of the model will be to allow the business opportunities task force to evaluate the feasibility of any possible business opportunity.
Today, my focus will be to continue building the model as I did during the day, yesterday. I will keep adding more formulas and tables with information, and this isn’t very different than what I did yesterday.
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