Our
company provides a wide range of consulting services. Such services will
be rendered by legal counsel, administrators, risk managers, and other
educational professionals. The consulting services can be scheduled at
any location including your campus or offices and designed specifically
for your needs.
Our consulting services include:
Policies and Procedures:
Unambiguous polices, together with efficient procedures, serve many purposes.
They assure compliance with various federal and state statutes and regulations.
Equally important, policies inform the institution's employees and students
about their obligations, rights, benefits, and expected standards of performance
and behavior. At times, being able to show that employees or students
were aware of institutional policies will make institutional actions more
legitimate and easier to defend.
- Reviewing and drafting policies and procedures
- Assessing whether new or revised polices are required
- Advising whether method of dissemination meets requirements.
Complaint Procedures:
Federal and state statutes and their attendant regulations often require
institutions to adopt complaint procedures for providing for prompt and
equitable resolution of student and employee complaints alleging discrimination
based upon race, color, national origin or sex. Our consultants can provide
the necessary information and our services include:
- Drafting and reviewing complaint procedures
- Advising and reviewing regarding pending student, faculty or employee complaints
- Analyzing potential liabilities
Training Programs:
Although schools and colleges exist for the purpose of education, they
often overlook their own internal training. Administrators and faculty
members play major roles in supervising departmental and research staff,
addressing sexual harassment problems, hiring other faculty, and countless
other tasks that can spark dispute and ignite lawsuits. However, administrators
and teachers who have expertise in their teaching fields may have little
or no experience in management, hiring and firing, evaluating and dispute
resolutions. Our consulting services can provide your institutions with
training in the following areas:
- Policies and procedures
- Student issues
- Students with disabilities
- Grading complaints
- Sexual harassment
- Privacy of student educational records
- Conducting performance evaluations
- Confidentiality of personnel information
- Soliciting and providing employment references
- Permissible and prohibited inquiries in interviewing applicants
- Hiring and interviewing faculty members, including caution about making unrealistic future promises to prospective faculty, faculty evaluations, granting and denying tenure (and denying reappointment before the tenure decision)
- Faculty discipline and dismissal
- Academic freedom
- Discrimination law
- Accommodating employees and students with disabilities
- Harassment, sexual and other types
- Intellectual property basics
- Family and medical leave act
- Liability and indemnification
- Safety
- Fire procedures
- Laboratory safety
- Driving cars and vans
- Personal safety and campus crime
- Safety in off-campus programs
- Importance of reading and following the institutions’ policies
- Internal complaint and appeal procedures
- Dispute resolution mechanisms
- Computer use policies
- Policies on conflict of interest and outside employment
- Public records acts
- Any hot topics or new policies within the institution.
Investigations:
When a school or college receives a complaint of sexual harassment, discrimination,
or other misconduct by an employee, faculty member, or student, it should
undertake an investigation immediately. Our consultants can conduct those
investigations from start to finish, including:
- Interviewing the accused
- Interviewing other witnesses
- Preserving evidence
- Preparing witness statements
- Preparing reports
- Recommending sanctions
- Evaluating the credibility of witnesses
Media:
Whether crime, violence or serious misconduct, media-driven images of
school violence is pervasive, if not epidemic. Any number of events, including
student unrest, faculty protests, tuition increases, financial scandals,
or high profile crimes can result in unwanted media attention. Our consulting
services include:
- Designing a media plan
- Communicating with the media and target audience
- Managing media during a crisis
- Using basic media strategy
Referenced and fee schedules are available upon request
