Higher Ground is bringing on a Regional Operations Lead to join our regional support team for the Northwest. This will cover our schools in the greater Portland, Oregon and Seattle/Tacoma area. The Regional Operations Lead supports school leaders in operational excellence by managing effective scheduling, ensuring data accuracy and consistency, and creating a smooth parent experience. Operational excellence is a key metric that leads to full, thriving school communities.

High-quality, authentic Montessori programming is core to our organizational success, as well. To support this, the Regional Operations Lead will work alongside school leaders to support move-ups across classrooms, create effective and efficient campus routines, and more.

We’re scaling quickly and have over 115 schools with a current pace of growth of 50 new schools per year. We’re looking for an individual who is both a big-picture thinker capable of surveying our vast landscape of school needs and a hands-on doer with the skills to quickly solve problems and scale practical, effective practices that help us have thriving and profitable schools. If you’re excited about working in an entrepreneurial environment and building capacity in others to enable widespread change in education today, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

The Regional Operations Lead will be a member of a small but mighty regional team supporting a portfolio of about a dozen schools.  This team functions in a cross-functional manner including enabling school leaders and teams to own the holistic success of their school.  Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Build operational excellence in school teams. This individual will play a key part in supporting our school teams to have clean data and tight running day-to-day operations. Utilizing both deep experience and knowledge of our systems and processes alongside data-rich metrics, this regional team member ensures that our school teams have the support and coaching to effectively support items like timely tuition billing and collection, optimized staff scheduling, efficient and fiscally responsible school-level processes, pristine online student and staff files, and passion for great operations driving an overall exemplar parent experience.
  
  
• View operational excellence as a key to a great parent and staff experience. A key part of this role will be embracing accurate data and smooth operations as a key enabler of a thriving school community. Our parent and staff expect and deserve a smooth operational experience and we demand that of ourselves. Our regional support teams ensure that our school teams are inspired and equipped to deliver. When systems and processes are accurate so that the complexity fades to the background, we’ve deemed it a success. It’s not enough to coach from afar, in our organization we jump in and do alongside others as they are building their capacity to do for themselves. You’ll be leading Heads and Assistant Heads of School to be the operational leaders of their campus. As part of this work, you will train, support and model sometimes jump in and do directly.  You will also provide action oriented and practical feedback to improve operational skills, build judgement and expand problem solving capabilities. You will also build capacity in school leaders to hold themselves and each other accountable to a high standard of operational excellence through feedback and support.
  
  
• View operational excellence within the lens of a profitable and thriving school. Having a high-quality Montessori program is mission critical to our organization. We believe that when operational excellence is coupled with successful student outcomes, thriving enrollment, and passionately engaged staff --profitability is the outcome. We are unapologetically a for-profit education organization; this is how we can carry out our mission to bring Montessori education far and wide. To this end, profitability of each school within a region is the responsibility of every regional support team member, including the Operations Lead. This role will work collaboratively with the Regional Manager, Regional Programs Lead, and Regional Community Lead to ensure a full portfolio of thriving, successful and profitable schools

Skills

We’d love to talk to you if you have…

• 3 years’ school operations experience
• Deep systems experience using Salesforce, online student and staff files, virtual tuition management and collection, parent and staff communication tools and student learning management platforms
• Drive to dig in and do, not just direct or coach, including a propensity to get in the schools and know every community member at every school
• Rigorous analytical and problem-solving, including ability to assess a situation by gathering facts and evaluating data (esp. Excel, PowerBI, etc.)
• Ability to operate independently, and execute from end-to-end (incl. communication, time management, project management)
• Strong organizational skills and ability to manage multiple competing priorities
• Clear and succinct written and verbal communication skills
• A passion for education

About us

At Higher Ground, we're driven by a deep desire to bring about widespread change in education today. Since our founding 7 years ago, we have opened 115 beautiful schools across the world serving brick and mortar and virtual students from birth through high school. We offer:

• Hybrid work: approx. 50% remote, 50% travel to schools in your region
• A competitive salary
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Paid time off and paid holidays
• 100% tuition discount for two children at any school within our network 
• Career growth and promotion opportunities, and a leadership team who wants you to thrive on your own terms