The Bottom Line – Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools

The Bottom Line is a program of LAPCS that offers charter school staff, school leaders, and board members professional development in the areas of legal compliance, human resources, finance, and general operations. By partnering with a variety of local and national experts as program hosts, the Bottom Line seeks to keep charter schools well informed of current hot topics and long-standing best practices through a series of year-round in-person events, webinars, and memo updates.

The Bottom Line offers a comprehensive line up of training events every year as follows:

Bottom Line Essentials

An annual 2-day, intensive mid-summer training program that helps schools troubleshoot specific student and operational issues that arose during the previous school year in preparation for the upcoming school year.

Typical topics covered during this program: SPED, ELL, student discipline, HR legal updates, fiscal management best practices, and creating a communications plan for your school.
Target audience: Members of a school’s leadership and administration team, including school leaders, HR managers, SPED coordinators, finance directors, and operations directors.

AFR Training

An annual one-day, intensive, training program held in the late summer/early fall that helps schools with the preparation of their Annual Financial Reports and audits.

Target audience: members of a school’s finance team.

Apply Yourself

An annual one day, late-fall training program for those in the final stages of submitting a charter school application. This program will include a panel of experts to provide writing-lab assistance for the charter application, as well as a panel of experts to provide various final reviews and check-lists for applicants in the areas of legal, finance, academics, and governance to help ready school developer members for the school start-up process once their application is approved.

Target audience: school developer members, or those who are planning to submit a charter school application.

Bottom Line Basic Training

An annual two-day training program in January that provides high-level overviews in the areas of legal, HR, finance, operations, academics, and governance for new schools, new employees, and authorizers. The program will help ease the transition for schools between application approval and the start-up phase; help ready schools for their first renewal process; help ease the anxiety some new charter school employees experience, even at established charter schools; as well as provide support for charter school authorizers and help them identify various high-quality authorizing best practices.

Target audience: charter school applicants, charter schools in years 0-3, new charter school administrative employees, school leaders, and board members, and representatives from an authorizer’s charter school oversight team.