Flex Academies

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here's your choice:
A parent volunteer or paid person to coordinate everything, take payments, manage insurance, building permits etc. OR you get a company like Flex to do all the work but they raise the prices because they need to get paid.

If you have someone willing to do the work, great. If not, Flex makes sense.

I could have written this! The only difference is that when I organized our school's, we handled the sign ups and processed the money. We also asked vendors to offer 2 scholarships if classes met a certain threshold. It was a fair amount of work but totally manageable. I like your model even better. Still, I worked really hard to make sure our classes were affordable, raised money for the PTA (we also offered parent-volunteer led clubs which made money for the PTA) and served FARMs kids. Now, the have two coordinators, but it is "too much work" so they brought on FLEX. One even said she didn't care if the offerings made money for the PTA or served FARMs kids as long as enrollment was easy and online. Now there are fewer classes, fewer FARMs kids served, exorbitant prices, no money for the PTA, lots of bureaucracy and no accountability.

I have volunteered in a wide variety of roles in my kids' schools for the past 12 years, and much of that time has been in coordinating after-school activities. In my experience, it is truly a lot of work to get enough parent or teacher volunteers for the range of activities the students and parents want, and takes constant time and attention and guidance and help. I have also brought in outside vendors when we can't get volunteers, and yes, they do a lot of the work -- but it is still a significant effort on my part. If there were an easier way to do it, I'd have gladly taken that route -- instead, the choice is either do the work or don't have the activity.

Flex would certainly add to the expense, but then parents who don't feel like volunteering have options for their kids that wouldn't be there. If they don't like the offerings, they need to get Flex to bring in things that the kids want -- and people who have used Flex tell me that this is what they will do. If they don't like the expense, they can volunteer to bring in individual vendors themselves. It seems unfair to blame Flex for costing more and offering less when the parents could solve this problem, they just appear to choose not to do so because it actually IS work to do Flex's job.

In most of these cases, the activities vendors are already at the school offering after school classes - when flex takes over, the only thing that changes is those vendors become sub-contractors to FLEX and FLEX handles registration and creating flyers instead of the individual vendors. What else is FLEX doing, really?

Yes, exactly!

Ok, so let's summarize this whole thread. Lots of people are saying that Flex makes things worse and more expensive, but they're spreading from school to school anyway. Nobody's twisting the arms of these schools to bring in Flex, are they? So someone at each school is making a decision that Flex is easier for them. Parents (customers) don't like it but they're not taking the lead and doing the work of Flex, or else this wouldn't be happening. It sounds like we need to hear from people who are choosing Flex, or from people who don't like the choice so are working to fix it.