The Director of Operations is the operational backbone of the campus. This course builds the foundational knowledge and situational awareness you need to manage student services, campus safety, and daily operations — and your most critical responsibility: being ready to step in for the Head of Operations at any time.
The DOPS role and your place in the campus operations team
Student services and financial programs — socioeconomic forms, financial aid, and the lunch program
Safety and security — door sweeps, badge compliance, Raptor, drills, and emergency response
Campus operations — dismissal, PikMyKid, supply ordering, vendors, and building procedures
Covering for the Head of Operations — knowing when to act, when to wait, and who to call
1
Lesson 1 of 6
The DOPS Role
Your place in the team and the four domains that define the work
The campus doesn't run itself. Someone has to make sure the building is secure, families get the information they need, staff have what they need to do their jobs, and the hundred small things that keep a school day functioning actually happen. That's you.
The Director of Operations sits at the center of campus life in a way that's easy to underestimate from the outside. You're not just managing logistics — you're the person other staff rely on when something goes sideways, the person who notices what's slipping before it becomes a problem, and the person the Head of Operations trusts to hold things together when they're not available.
From day one, your job is to understand operations deeply enough to step in for the Head of Operations at any time — not eventually, not after you've settled in, but as a baseline expectation of the role.
This course won't walk you through every task you'll encounter. What it will do is build the situational awareness you need to recognize what's in front of you, make sound decisions, and know when to call for backup.
Your Campus Operations Team
The people listed here aren't just colleagues you'll occasionally cross paths with. They're the team you'll rely on to do your job well, and who will rely on you in return. The stronger those relationships are, the smoother everything else runs.
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Direct Supervisor
Head of Operations (HOPs)
Your direct supervisor and the person you'll learn the most from in your first year. They oversee all campus operations and are your go-to for guidance, escalation, and decisions that fall outside your authority. When the HOPs is unavailable, you may be asked to support in their absence.
Campus Leader
Head of School (HoS)
The HoS leads the campus and is ultimately responsible for everything that happens there. You won't report to the HoS directly, but you'll work alongside them regularly — especially on safety, family communication, and campus events. When the HOPs is out, the HoS is who you coordinate with on decisions that need school leadership input.
Closest Operational Partner
Front Office Coordinator (FOC)
They manage the front office, visitor check-in, phones, and a lot of the daily family-facing communication. You'll support the FOC and they'll support you — when one function gets slammed, the other helps cover.
Student Health
Health Care Coordinator (HCC)
The HCC manages student health needs on campus. Your overlap with this role is mostly operational — emergency procedures, drills, and making sure the campus environment supports student safety. You're not responsible for health decisions, but you need to know how to support the HCC when something happens.
Programs & Finance
Auxiliary Programs Coordinator (APC)
You'll work closely with the APC on extracurriculars, the lunch program, Blackbaud delinquencies, and family-facing financial communications. The APC owns the auxiliary programs — your job is to support, not run, those programs.
Student Movement
Monitors
Monitors are on the floor with students during transitions, lunch, and dismissal. You'll coordinate with them on safety procedures, dismissal logistics, and anything that affects student movement on campus. They're a critical part of how operations actually runs day to day.
Technology Infrastructure
IT Coordinator
The IT Coordinator handles technology infrastructure on campus. You'll work together on equipment setup, badge and access systems, and anything tech-related that touches operations. Before the school year starts, this partnership is especially important.
You don't need to have all of these relationships figured out on day one. What matters is knowing they exist and understanding how they connect to your work. As you settle into the role, these partnerships will start to feel natural — because you'll be living them every day.
Core Areas of Work
Your work as a DOPS spans four core areas. Each one is its own world — but together they make up the full picture of what it means to run operations on campus.
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Student Services & Financial Programs
You're responsible for reviewing socioeconomic forms for every family, determining eligibility for financial aid, and managing the lunch program. This work determines which families can access the support they qualify for.
Safety & Security
From door sweep logs to emergency drills, you're one of the people keeping the campus physically safe. That means staying on top of daily security practices, knowing the emergency response protocols, and making sure staff are following them too.
Campus Operations
Dismissal, supply ordering, vendor relationships, building procedures — this is the day-to-day operational work that keeps the campus running. It's the area where your support of other staff roles shows up most visibly.
Supporting the HOPs
Over time, you'll build a broad enough understanding of campus operations to support the Head of Operations — and step in when they're unavailable. That depth doesn't come all at once, but every part of this course moves you toward it.
Knowledge Check
Two questions — one on the team, one on the domains.
A parent walks into the front office upset about a billing issue with the lunch program. The FOC calls you for backup. Who else is likely involved in resolving this?
Which of the following best describes the DOPS role?
Operations on campus is a team effort — and as the DOPS, you're one of the people holding it together. The rest of this course goes deeper into each of those four areas — starting with the work that affects families most directly: student services and financial programs.
2
Lesson 2 of 6
Student Services & Financial Programs
Care and accuracy — the work that affects families before the year begins
Some of the most important work you'll do as a DOPS happens before a student ever walks through the door. Managing financial aid, determining eligibility for free and reduced lunch, and reviewing socioeconomic forms for every family — this is work that directly affects whether families can access the programs the campus offers and whether the school maintains compliance with state and federal requirements.
It's also work that's easy to get wrong. Not because it's complicated, but because the stakes aren't always visible. A missed form, a miscommunication with a vendor, or a family who slips through without the support they qualify for — those aren't just administrative errors. They have real consequences for real people.
How the Programs Connect
The financial programs you manage as a DOPS are connected. Understanding how they fit together helps you see why each step matters — and what goes wrong when one gets missed.
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1
Socioeconomic Form Review
Every family submits a socioeconomic information form — not just families requesting financial aid. Your job is to review all of them. This is the data that drives everything else.
2
Eligibility Determination
Based on the form data, you determine which students qualify for economically disadvantaged (eco dis) status. This affects state reporting and directly informs who qualifies for financial aid and free or reduced lunch.
3
Financial Aid Setup
For families who qualify, you manage the communication and setup process — coordinating between the family, the APC, and other staff to make sure aid is applied correctly.
4
Lunch Program Administration
You work with the meal vendor to ensure free and reduced lunch is set up accurately for qualifying students. The vendor needs to know who qualifies, and that information has to be current and correct. Each step depends on the one before it — getting step one right protects everything downstream.
The Socioeconomic Form Requirement
Every family is required to submit a socioeconomic information form — and you are required to review every single one. Not just the families who indicate they need financial aid. All of them.
This is one of the most commonly missed requirements in the DOPS role, and it's easy to see why. The form feels like a financial aid form, so the instinct is to focus on the families flagging a need. But the form serves a broader purpose — it's the data the campus uses to understand its socioeconomic makeup and meet state reporting requirements around economically disadvantaged status.
If a family doesn't submit the form, you reach out. That's not optional. Every family needs to be accounted for, regardless of whether they're requesting anything.
Determining Eligibility
Once you've collected and reviewed the socioeconomic forms, you use that information to determine which students qualify for economically disadvantaged (eco dis) status. This determination has two significant consequences: it affects how the campus is reported to the state, and it determines which families qualify for free or reduced lunch and financial aid.
The form itself guides the determination — you're not making subjective calls about who deserves support. You're applying the criteria to the data families provide. What requires judgment is what happens around the determination: how you communicate with families, how you coordinate with the APC and the meal vendor, and how you handle situations where the information provided is incomplete or inconsistent.
You don't make these determinations alone. The HOPs is your resource when something doesn't fit a clear category. When in doubt, ask.
Scenario: Borderline Eligibility
It's mid-August, two weeks before the first day of school. You're working through socioeconomic forms when you come across a family whose income puts them right at the boundary between free and reduced lunch eligibility. The form is complete — nothing is missing — but the numbers are close enough that you're not sure which category applies. The deadline to submit the list to the meal vendor is tomorrow.
What do you do?
The principle: Borderline cases will come up. The instinct to protect the family's access while getting a second set of eyes is almost always sound. The HOPs is your resource — use them.
Financial Aid Coordination
Once eligibility is determined, the work shifts to setup and communication. For families who qualify for financial aid, that means coordinating across several people — and making sure none of them are working from different information.
The communication chain typically looks like this: you confirm eligibility, notify the family, coordinate with the APC on aid application, and provide the meal vendor with accurate free and reduced lunch designations. Each of those handoffs matters. A family who qualifies but isn't notified, a vendor working from an outdated list, an APC who doesn't know a new family has been added — any of those gaps creates a problem.
Your job is to make sure the chain is complete. That means tracking who has been notified, following up when you don't hear back, and keeping your records current as families are added or their status changes throughout the year.
The Lunch Program: Knowing Your Lane
The lunch program is a shared responsibility between the DOPS and the APC — but the lines are distinct, and knowing where yours ends matters.
DOPS Responsibilities
Provide the meal vendor with accurate free/reduced lunch designations
Communicate school calendar information that affects service days
Update the vendor when a family's eligibility status changes
Loop in the APC when eligibility changes affect program rosters
APC Responsibilities
Own the lunch program overall
Manage registration and family-facing communications
Handle the Blackbaud billing side of lunch
Field questions from families about signing up
When something falls in the middle — and it will — the default is to communicate. A quick check-in with the APC is almost always faster than untangling a miscommunication after the fact.
Knowledge Check
The line between DOPS and APC responsibilities isn't always obvious at first.
The meal vendor emails you to say they haven't received the school calendar for the upcoming trimester and don't know which days to skip service. What do you do?
A parent calls the front office asking how to sign their child up for the hot lunch program. Who handles this?
Student services and financial programs is some of the most consequential work you'll do as a DOPS — and a lot of it happens before the school year even starts. Review every form, get eligibility right, keep your communication chain complete, and know where your responsibilities end and the APC's begin.
End of course preview
This preview covers Lessons 1 and 2 of 6.
The full course continues with four additional lessons — each following the same structure of instructional content, scenario-based practice, and knowledge checks.
3
Safety & Security — Door sweeps, badge compliance, Raptor visitor management, emergency drills, Stop the Bleed, and incident response using the Standard Response Protocol.
4
Campus Operations — Dismissal and PikMyKid, supply ordering through Concur, deposits, building procedures, and supporting the APC without overstepping.
5
Supporting the HOPs — A decision framework for covering when the HOPs is unavailable: when to handle it, when to wait, and when to escalate immediately.
6
Course Wrap-Up — Key takeaways, summary of all four domains, and orientation to the field guide as an ongoing operational reference.
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