How Turlock Christian Went From a $500,000 Hole to $130,000 in the Black

Turlock Christian had built its economy on what it was before COVID. Then COVID was over, and the enrollment that carried that budget was not there anymore. The math stopped working, the losses piled up year over year, and by the time I came alongside them, the people carrying the school were weary. Too few people were carrying too much.

The instinct in that situation is always the same: cut. Cut the program, cut the people, cut the school down to whatever the fear says you can afford. And that instinct is how a hard year becomes a death spiral, because every cut gives families one more reason to leave, and every family that leaves makes the hole deeper.

I stood in front of that board and said: I do not care if you think we are not going to make it. We are going to find our $500,000. We are going to make it, and we are done cutting. We are going into the school year, and we are going to find a way through.

Then we did the unglamorous thing, the part of financial stewardship nobody puts on a brochure. We broke it down. It turned out we needed $60,000 a month starting in February. Fine. Then that is what we start raising now. No magic, no gimmick. A number, a month, and honest asks. Donors do not want to pay for your bad decisions, so we did not pretend there had not been any. We told the truth: we are underwater right now, here is the plan, here is what your gift does. When one said no, we went to the next one. That is Christian school fundraising at its plainest.

One donor gave $250,000. Johanna worked relentlessly to fund the rest. And when you think nothing is happening, it is: the school ended the year $130,000 in the black.

Johanna Fischer is a brilliant businesswoman who runs multiple dairy operations, and she would tell you herself she did not come up through education. It did not matter. What tipped this turnaround was her knowledge of exactly what she did not know, and her refusal to quit on what she did.

Could it have gone the other way? Yes. If Johanna had believed she could do it alone, it would have. A less experienced leader caves to the fear, makes drastic cuts, slashes the program, and the school is never the same. Instead we talked every weekday morning, Monday through Friday, through the whole war. We still do.

While the money was being raised, we did the structural work: built a new board and trained it, ran the school through its first strategic plan, and guided a head of school search that ended with the right person in the chair.

The board rebuild is the part that keeps this turnaround from needing a sequel. Building a board is not collecting warm bodies. You help the chair pick the people, then you run them through training before they ever vote on anything. Every new trustee gets paired with a mentor, which trains them both. And every one of them hears the same speech from me: the second you put on this role, people will think you have power and can get an agenda done. Do not do that. Keep your decisions in the boardroom.

A board has three jobs. Guard the mission, vision, and values. Encourage and evaluate the head of school. Own fiduciary responsibility. That is the whole list. I call it The Three Roles, and it sits at the center of my school board governance work. Turlock's new board learned all three before the crisis was even over, which is exactly backwards from how most schools do it, and exactly why it worked. In Johanna's words, the engagement strengthened the school's governance practices and restored confidence among its leadership. That is what a trained board feels like from the chair's seat.

"When Paul first came alongside Turlock Christian, he knew neither our community nor me personally. Yet he immediately embraced our mission as though it were his own."

"He listens far more than he speaks. He asks thoughtful questions before offering solutions."

"His calm confidence never ignored reality; rather, it reminded us that God's faithfulness is greater than our uncertainty."

"If I were ever called to lead another Christian school through a season of transition, Paul Harrell would be my very first call. I recommend him wholeheartedly and without reservation."

Johanna Fischer, Board Chair, Turlock Christian School, from her recommendation letter, July 2026

Johanna and I kept coming back to Nehemiah through that year: pray, step forward, rebuild what is broken, and remember the work belongs to God. "The God of heaven will give us success. We His servants will arise and build." That was not a decoration on this engagement. It was the operating plan.

Money problems do not cause your problems. They reveal them. Turlock's money hole was real, but the repair was never just financial. It was trust, honest communication, a board doing its three jobs, and a school owning its story out loud. The money followed the trust. It always does, and I have never seen it run the other direction.

The other lesson: it is later than you think, and it is not too late. Turlock acted while there was still a year to save. The schools that do not make it are the ones that spend that year arguing about whether the crisis is real. If your school's numbers look like the before picture on this page, run the School Health Check this week and find out where you actually stand.