I have been concerned for many years about Classical Conversations Directors and the liability that they carry when they sign a licensing agreement with CC.
My main areas of concern include:
Areas of liability for CC Directors
Safety of children participating in the Community day including physical, health and safety concerns. This means that the Director should be conducting Background checks on all participants. She also needs to have a two-deep policy meaning that two adults be in the room with children at all times. The Director needs to follow state guidelines on COVID-19 precautions and other health codes.
Building use which includes a rental lease agreement, property insurance, fire codes, conducting fire drills, ensuring the building is safe and secure.
Potentially jeopardizing the church’s property tax exemption by operating a for-profit business in a church.
Business licenses and business registration.
Daycare licensing if the Community has a nursery or childcare for pre-school children.
Hiring tutors. Training tutors. Employment agreements. Paying tutors as employees not Independent Contractors. Potential fines and penalties for misclassifying workers. Payroll processing, including payroll taxes.
Illegally using volunteer labor. Businesses cannot use volunteer labor. They must pay everyone working in their business.
Tax reporting of their own income and expenses as well as Form 1099-NEC reporting to the tutors and other workers.
Fiscal management including invoicing families, record keeping, paying bills, paying tutors
Conforming with all CC licensing requirements on delivering the program, hosting informational meetings, attending Practicum training, submitting to the Support Reps, Area Reps and others up the CC chain of command.
Mandatory reporting requirements of suspected child abuse or neglect. The Director will need to be eyes and ears everywhere.
Negotiating conflict between families, between parents and tutors, between children (bullying), etc. If not handled well, these can result in lawsuits against the Director as the businesses owner.
Nonprofit homeschool programs face some of these issues (but not all), but they have a board of leaders and volunteers to help comply with all these areas. All the responsibility is not on one person in a nonprofit organization.
CC Communities are different. CC Corp pushes all the liability for the operation of the Community onto the shoulders of the local licensed Director. She is carrying this burden alone.
Read more about directing a CC Community
If you’d like to hear a former CC Director address the issue of liability on CC Directors, watch her video at : Former CC Director explains the liability that she carried as a Director
If you want to investigate the reality of being a CC Director join these Facebook groups:
Let Us Reason for Real Facebook group
Talk Classical Conversations
Their are CC-endorsed Facebook groups, but they are heavily monitored and do not encourage open discussion or allow questions that may seem critical of the program or CC Inc.. So alternate groups like these have been formed.
I know this is a sobering topic. My concern is that CC Directors fully understand what they are getting into before signing (or resigning) a licensing agreement.
There is a better, easier way to run a homeschool organization that doesn’t involve one person carrying all this liability. It’s called running a nonprofit homeschool program independent of a CC licensing agreement. Thousands of homeschool leaders have been doing that for decades.
Read my book Homeschool Co-ops: How to Start Them, Run Them and Not Burn Out and join this Facebook group I am a Homeschool Group Leader