Operations Manager

SR1 College Preparatory and STEM Academy; Canton (MS); On-site; USD 50,000 - 61,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

School-sponsored health benefits

Job summary

SR1 CPSA in Canton, Mississippi, seeks an Operations Manager to run the school’s front desk, enrollment, records, facilities, safety, transportation, and daily logistics. You will oversee systems that tie operations together and protect the right to a great education for scholars.

The role requires care, critical thinking, and the resolve to ensure every family and student experiences a well-run environment that supports academic excellence.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree preferred; associate degree with relevant experience also considered.
• At least three years of operations experience in a school, nonprofit, or public agency.
• Strong systems thinking, reliability and process-building ability.

Responsibilities

• Run frontline family service and enrollment operations with attention to language access.
• Oversee facilities, safety, transportation, and daily logistics to run a smooth campus.
• Design, document, and improve operating procedures and record-keeping.
• Manage purchasing, vendor relations, and budget tracking with transparency.
• Provide executive support to the Provost and leadership and liaise with families.

Skills

Operations management

Organization

People skills

Startup mindset

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Associate’s degree

Job description

An Educational Civil Rights Activist Who Keeps the School Running

Canton, Mississippi • Full-Time, 12-Month Position — On-Site, Exempt • Reports to the Provost, with a dotted line to the Vice President • Startup school, year four that is seeking educational equality.

About SR1 CPSA

SR1 College Preparatory & STEM Academy is Mississippi’s first and only STEM-focused college preparatory charter school — tuition-free, public, and now in its fourth year in Canton, Mississippi. Our scholars are already outperforming the state: 88% of our 3rd graders passed the Mississippi ELA reading assessment on their first attempt, more than ten points above the statewide average, and roughly 75% of our kindergartners finished the year reading at or above benchmark. More than 88% of our scholars come from economically disadvantaged homes, and many arrive well behind grade level; most catch up within one to two years. Our tagline is not decoration: A Commitment to Excellence.

The Opportunity

A child’s right to a great education is not won in a courtroom or a legislature. It is won, or lost, every morning before the first bell — at the front desk, on the bus, and upon entering the building.

In Canton, Mississippi, the fight for equal education is not history. It is the daily work.

SR1 CPSA is hiring an Operations Manager who sees that work for what it is: educational civil rights work. You will run the operational life of the school — the front office, enrollment and records, facilities and safety, transportation and daily logistics, purchasing and vendors, and the systems that tie it all together — and you will run it with the conviction that an excellent school for scholars the world has underestimated is not a favor to be granted. It is a right to be protected.

Our current campus carries that history. SR1 CPSA temporary home sits in the former Holy Child Jesus School building — a place associated with Sister Thea Bowman and with generations of Canton families who insisted their children deserved the best. We take that inheritance seriously. The Operations Manager is its daily guardian.

This is a combined role. We are not currently hiring a receptionist who orders supplies, and we are not hiring a facilities manager who never sees a family. We are hiring one accountable owner for everything that has to be right for school to happen — the way a well-run small college runs its campus operations — reporting to the Provost, with a dotted line to the Vice President.

We are open to candidates from school operations, office and practice management, nonprofit and public administration, logistics, hospitality, the military, and community organizing. You do not need to have run a school before. You need to be able to think, to care, and to execute.

What You’ll Own

The Front Door: Family Service & Community Relations

• Be the first face and the steady voice of SR1 CPSA for every parent, guardian, scholar, educator, vendor, and visitor — in person, by phone, and by email — and make certain each one is treated with dignity, patience, and respect, every time.
• Give families clear, complete, plain-language answers about enrollment, attendance, meals, transportation, records, and their rights — and make sure families whose first language is not English receive the same answers, in their language, through interpretation and translated materials.
• Build trusted relationships with families and the Canton community; coordinate tours, events, family nights, and community engagement with the Provost and the instructional team.
• Track every family question or concern to resolution. A family who has to ask twice has already been failed once.
• Run enrollment from application through the first day of school — open enrollment and the lottery, the waitlist, enrollment documents, immunization records, and records transfers — so that no eligible scholar loses a seat to paperwork, and no family is turned away without a clear path to complete what is missing.
• Maintain accurate, confidential scholar and staff records in compliance with FERPA and school policy; reconcile attendance and enrollment in the student information system every day, because state funding and every scholar’s permanent record depend on it.
• Support the Educational Compliance Officer with state data submissions, attendance reporting, and records requests, and keep the documentation that proves what the school did and when.

Facilities, Safety & the Learning Environment

• Own the condition of the building — cleaning, maintenance, repairs, HVAC, grounds, and work orders, with vendors held to schedule and quality — so that every scholar learns in a space that is safe, clean, comfortable, and worthy of them.
• Run the school’s safety operations: visitor check-in and badge systems, fire, severe-weather, and lockdown drills, emergency plans, incident documentation, and coordination with local first responders.
• Walk the building. Find the problem before a family or an inspector does.

Transportation, Dining & Daily Logistics

• Coordinate daily bus operations with our Transportation Educators — routes, rosters, and driver coverage — and the communication that reaches a family before a late bus does.
• Partner with the Director of Dining Services so meal counts, schedules, deliveries, and special dietary needs line up with the school day, and support child nutrition records and review readiness.
• Manage the operational calendar — bell schedules, duty rosters, arrival and dismissal, substitute and coverage logistics, field trips, and testing communications to families— along with the supplies, mail, deliveries, and inventory that keep classrooms running.

Systems & Process

• Use and improve the school’s systems — the student information system, family communication platform, visitor management, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and scheduling tools — so that technology serves families and educators instead of slowing them down.
• Design, document, and continuously improve the school’s operating procedures. If a process lives only in someone’s head, write it down. If it fails twice, fix it rather than absorb it.
• Troubleshoot everyday technology processes and know when, and to whom, to elevate.

Budget, Purchasing & Vendors

• Manage operations purchasing under board policy and public‑procurement rules — quotes, purchase orders, invoice review, receiving, and inventory — with every dollar documented, because public money spent on other people’s children deserves a paper trail.
• Manage vendor relationships and service contracts (custodial, maintenance, technology, transportation, supplies), and review every invoice line by line.
• Track the operations budget with the finance lead and flag variances early, before they become problems.

Support to the Provost & Leadership

• Provide operational and administrative support to the Provost and the leadership team — calendar, correspondence, meeting materials, board‑meeting logistics alongside the Compliance Officer, and follow‑through on decisions.
• Serve as the liaison between leadership and families and staff, with discretion and sound judgment.

Advocacy in Practice: The Activist’s Work

• Notice who is falling through the cracks — the scholar with mounting absences, the family who stopped answering the phone, the bus stop no one can safely reach — and act, in partnership with the Provost, the school counselor, and community partners.
• Remove barriers. Help families secure and complete documents, transportation, meal applications, and services; connect them to the school’s health and community partners; and know what McKinney‑Vento, Section 504, and special education rights mean for the family standing at the front desk.
• Help families understand and use their rights — enrollment, records, attendance, and complaint procedures — in plain language and in their language.
• Stand up, respectfully and with facts, whenever a scholar’s access to school is at risk.

What An Ideal Candidate Brings

• A bachelor’s degree is preferred. An associate’s degree paired with strong, directly relevant experience will be considered.
• At least three years of experience running operations, an office, or a program — in a school, nonprofit, public agency, clinic, business, military unit, or community organization — with results you can describe in specifics.
• Reasoning ability: you can triage eight things at once, apply a rule to a case, catch the error on an invoice, and solve a problem that has no procedure yet. Our hiring process tests all of it.
• Technology fluency: you learn systems quickly — student information systems, communication platforms, spreadsheets — and use them to make service better, not just faster.
• Exceptional organization and follow‑through: you keep calendars, build checklists, document everything, and close the loop.
• People skills that hold up under pressure: warmth, patience, plain speech, and the ability to de‑escalate a hard conversation at the front desk without losing either the family or the standard.
• Unshakable integrity and the backbone to say “this is not right” — clearly and respectfully — to a vendor, a colleague, or a supervisor.
• A startup mindset: comfort building systems that do not exist yet, and ownership beyond the job description.
• A demonstrated commitment to social justice, and the conviction that scholars in under‑resourced communities have a right to schools that are excellent in every respect — including the parts no one sees. Experience in community organizing, advocacy, family engagement, or civil rights work is a strong plus.
• Spanish, or another language spoken by our families, is a strong plus.
• A willingness to be genuinely present in the greater Canton and central Mississippi area. This is an on‑site role, and school starts early.

The Honest Part

Advocacy has a cost, and we will not pretend otherwise. A school that sets out to prove what children in Canton and surrounding areas can do will draw attention. Some of it will be supportive, some of it doubtful, and some of it simply not true. The person in this seat will hear all of it, often first, and often at the front desk. We do not answer negativity with more negativity. We answer it with accurate records, calm facts, and fierce protection of our scholars future and families’ privacy.

Why SR1 CPSA

• Work that matters, measured in children — many scholars arrive behind, and most catch up within one to two years and then surpass the averagee. Operations is part of why.
• Receipts, not theory — our scholars already outperform the state average, so you are protecting a record worth protecting.
• A building with a legacy — the former Holy Child Jesus School, associated with Sister Thea Bowman, now home to Mississippi’s first college-preparatory STEM charter school.
• Real authority — one accountable owner for operations, reporting to the Provost with a dotted line to the Vice-President with the standing to fix what is broken.
• Compensation that grows with what you build — a founding base, permanent growth steps, and incentives tied to operational excellence and measured family outcomes. Full detail below.

Compensation

Base salary: $55,000 or Higher. Twelve-month, full-time, exempt salaried position, commensurate with experience.

We are a school of 120 scholars growing into fifth grade and beyond, so — like every SR1 CPSA leadership role — this package is built to grow with the school and with what you build, rather than leave your pay flat while the school around you grows.

• Grade-expansion steps
• Grant and partnership incentives
• Operations excellence and family‑outcome incentives
• Benefits — school-sponsored health benefits. Please note we do not participate in PERS (Mississippi’s Public Employees’ Retirement System); our compensation structure is built with that in mind, and we are glad to discuss it candidly.

Final compensation is subject to board approval and the qualifications of the selected candidate.

Finalists will complete SR1’s on‑site reasoning assessment as part of the interview process.

www.sr1cpsa.org | 601.206.4544 | SR1 CPSA is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Creating the Future as One with A Commitment to Excellence