Cost of Doing a Class Development Leadership Retreat.

A class development leadership retreat is an annual event in which you work to create class identity and develop leadership traditions within your school. I believe it to be a valuable part of the high school experience. Because students who have no ownership to their class will not have any allegiance to their school. One reason an administrator may not do it is because they feel it is too costly during these times of financial uncertainty. So what does it cost to put on a retreat? I have done leadership retreats for classes as large as 400 and as few as 20. Lets base our numbers on a retreat for 80 students for a time frame of 5 hours going from 9am to 2pm. If you pay full price for everything you are looking at around $3500. If you get some donations from local businesses, have the students pay for their meals, snacks and drinks, promote an annual fundraiser to defer the cost, you can easily break even on this event. Here are some suggestions:

1. Send home a permission slip and envelop with your freshman or sophomores telling them your students are attending the annual "class development retreat". Tell them the outcomes of the retreat. "We are doing this to develop leadership, set class goals, and to support your students in having a quality high school experience by ending bullying behaviors and developing class traditions. The suggested donation for this event is $10 to cover snacks, drinks and lunch. If you don't donate your child will still be able to attend." They send back the permission slip in the envelop and most parents will send the $10.


2. Ask local businesses to sponsor the event. You might even be able to get a pizza place to donate the pizzas for the day. If you get can get 4-$250 donations you cut the cost dramatically. If you have a vendor like Coke or Pepsi that has machines in your school ask them to sponsor the drinks for the day, or ask for monetary donation from them. See if you can get some of the clubs or organizations in your school to set aside some dollars to fund the event. Often times organizations like FFA, FCCLA, HOSA, DECA or Skills USA would be happy to kick in a few hundred dollars to help sponsor leadership development training.


3. Work with a local presenter or speaker. In my next blog post I will talk about working with a local presenter, and who you should hire to maximize this initiative. Just make sure they are a quality presenter because not hiring a professional who does not have the skills to engage an audience will defeat your initiative.


4. Make it an annual event and at the end of day 1-year 1 ask the speaker to ask the class. "Was today a valuable experience for you?" If the speaker did a great job most will say, "Yes". Have them ask, "Do you think next years class should have this experience as well?" "Would you like to sponsor next years training for next years class? This could be a gift that you could give to them, and each class can continue to pay it forward for the next class." Their first initiative would be a fundraiser they could do for paying for the training for next years class. Let them decide what to do, and remember regardless of what they raise it will help defer the cost of the training for next year. By the way, leadership initiatives like this support students in using the skills they learned at the training and it becomes a reminder of what they learned at the event.

When you do the four above things it will help you defer the cost of the event, but back to my original question. "What is the cost of doing a class development leadership retreat?" The real cost of doing a leadership retreat comes when we fail to do anything to develop the leaders in our school. By choosing to do nothing to develop leaders you are likely to leave leadership up to chance. Some years you will have leadership and some years you will have a void. If you don't develop leaders early you will pay the price in discipline referrals, vandalism, drama, dealing with student drop-out (if you keep one student in school you have paid for the price of the retreat), and much more. The real key is to make sure you have a system in place for developing leadership in your school. By developing student leaders when they first enter your school you develop a tradition. By doing it every year as a class development project you will get the opportunity to relay the traditions and expectations of how people will treat each other in your school so they can maximize their high school experience. All this being said, I can tell you that having a quality person who leads this retreat is paramount in your success! I will cover that in my next blog post!