Organizational Analysis: Defining Your General Organizational Realities for the Case Study
The structure of the organization is hierarchical and pyramidal with a two-way flow that allows that communication from bottom-up and from top-down to be implemented. The chain of command is indicated in the following: the principal is at the top, followed by the vice-principal. Under the vice-principal are the counselors, guidance committee, academic deans of various subjects, department heads of special educations and of all grade levels, faculty/staff, and finally students. The formal authority in the organization is the principal and administrators, all of whom are overseen by the board of directors. Economic authority rests with the board of directors; they assume legal, contractual and collegial authority, although in the daily monitoring of business affairs, the school HR is responsible for hiring, contracting, and financial affairs. The board merely operates as an oversight committee.
The span of control in the organization is based on tenure-track services; all faculty members report to academic deans and department heads once a week for teachers' meetings, and these reports are filed with the principal's staff. There are four levels of management in the school: the principal level, the dean/department head level, the teacher level, and the staff/administration level.
The departmentalization structures of the organization consist of administrators, counselors, deans, humanities, maths, sciences, special education, trade, health, and sports. These departments are structured with heads/leaders, teachers, assistants, and staff, and the whole report through the head to the principal level.
Decisions are being made at teachers' meetings in a democratic fashion in the form of recommendations, which are then passed to the principal level for ratification; if approval from the oversight committee...
On the centralized continuum, major administrative decisions are made by the principal -- these regard teachers' freedoms in the classroom, hours for meetings, requirements for testing, and disciplinary actions; in terms of the decentralized continuum, a teacher is free to conduct his/her classroom in a manner that is of his/her choice so long as it falls within the parameters of guidance given by the principal and the oversight committee. In terms of disciplinary action, the guidelines for assessing behavioral situations and/or functional behavioral assessments is stipulated by the board and allows teachers the room to recommend actions; but for suspensions given by the principal level, board stipulates automatic behavioral assessment implementation in line with the nationwide research on the subject (Chandler, Dahlquist, 2014; Drasgoq et al., 1999; Sugai et al., 2000).
Staff/line distinctions are made in the organization and these are clearly outlined within the departmental structure, meetings, and overall organization communication flow.
With regard to James in the case study, the primary level at which intervention begins is in the decentralized level of the faculty/teacher(s) who deal directly with James in the classroom and who will make recommendations for his high school teachers/administrators in the file that goes with him to the next academic level. The teachers will makes observations and record their data in the file, which will be used for the functional behavioral assessment that the school will rely upon going forward in order to best understand how to help James.
The functional behavioral assessment is not used to determine manifest determination but rather to identify the reasons for the behavior -- and this is achieved through observation, interviews with James, family members, teachers, staff and…
