Making Sense of Your School District's Policies

     Recently, I have been reviewing policies from hundreds of school districts in Illinois regarding their policies and procedures that govern "Community Use of School Facilities." If your church wants to host a Christian club inside of your local public school, one of the first things you will want to learn is what the school district's established policies and procedures are. There are three principal ways to uncover these documents:

1. Look at the school district's web site. Often they post information about facility rental or facility use on their web site.
2. Contact the person in charge of buildings and grounds and ask them about rental of the facilities by outside groups. 
3. Submit a Freedom of Information Act request for the policies and procedures.

      Below is a sample policy statement (from a real district), which is very typical of what you will find:

In case you can't read the policy at this size, you can also download it here. Now the question is how to interpret this policy. The first paragraph basically means that this school district is open to renting out their facilities to outside groups. This is good. The second paragraph tells you that it may cost you something unless you are "student and school-related" in which case, the building use is free. This is very typical, and how your church will be viewed by your district depends on their administrative procedures. (Hopefully, they have clear administrative procedures because if they don't then it is at the whim of the administration as to how they treat groups.)
     Very often school district procedure statements outline categories of rental groups. Below are the rental classifications established by the school district whose policies are above (download a copy here):

In this example, I think that a Crossroads Kids Club should be placed into Classification I. The rationale is that it is a children's program that is serving the students of this district during a time when a custodian is normally on duty. If this district wants to be difficult, they could attempt to say that a church would fit under Classification IV ("Non-profit organizations based within District No. 20."). However, it is a difficult case to make since the program in question is clearly for the children in the school. Some policies are better than these, but these are quite typical of what you will find out there. They do leave some things up to interpretation and that is yet another reason why you need to not only know the facts but also make friends with the school leaders.

Need help deciphering your local district's policies and procedures? Contact me at matt@crossroadskidsclub.com. I would love to help you figure out what they mean!