Why I Wrote 200 Standard Operating Procedures for a School
One of the first things I did when we opened The Nest was start writing standard operating procedures. Nobody asked me to. At our size, nobody even expects it.
But I have watched what happens, at basically every job I have ever had, when an organization runs on tribal knowledge. The knowledge walks out the door with the person. And then everyone stands around trying to remember how the thing was done.
So I wrote it all down. We now run on a library of more than 200 SOPs across 17 domains. How we open a room and how we close it. What happens the minute a teacher calls out and a ratio is at risk. How we notify families. Who is responsible for each piece, by name, so nothing lives in the category of “someone should probably handle that.”
When people hear 200 SOPs they picture something rigid. A school run like a factory. Honestly, it's the opposite. A guide who knows exactly how the morning runs doesn't spend her energy improvising logistics, she spends it on the children. A director who has a written playbook for the hard day doesn't panic on the hard day. The system carries the logistics so the people can carry the relationships.
I didn't learn this in education. I picked it up a little bit of everywhere. The Army, where every item and every responsibility had a name attached to it. Clinical work, in trauma shelters and hospice rooms, where I learned that people going through uncertain seasons need an environment they can trust before they can accept help from anyone in it. Software, where your system either handles the weird edge case or it fails at 2 AM and now it's your problem. Different worlds, weirdly the same lesson.
Montessori people already understand this, they just use different words for it. A prepared environment is the whole idea: everything has a place, everything has a purpose, and a child can trust the order of the world around them. All I really did was extend that to the adults. Teachers deserve prepared environments too.
And then there's the part of this I actually believe in the most, which is what you do when the system catches something. Because it will. That is literally its job. You don't hide it. You stop, you fix it, you write the lesson into the procedure, and the organization gets stronger at the exact spot where it broke.
We have had our hard days at The Nest. Every school has them, most just don't say it out loud. Ours have all ended the same way: lesson written down, system improved, someone's name next to the fix.
I think that's what families are really asking about when they ask if their child will be safe and known with us. Underneath the question is a bigger one: is this a place where everything matters?
It is. I have about 200 documents that say so.