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No matter if you’re a School Head, Admission Director, Development Director, Board member, or any other private school administrator—Ideas & Perspectives, ISM’s premier private school publication, has strategic solutions for the pervasive problems you face.
- Tuition not keeping pace with your expenses? In I&P, explore how to use strategic financial planning to create your budget and appropriately adjust your tuition.
- Enrollment dropping off? Discover how to implement the right admission and enrollment management strategies that engage your community—and fill your classrooms.
- Trouble retaining teachers? Learn how you can best support your teachers using ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development framework. Your faculty members will become more enthusiastic about their roles—which ultimately improves student outcomes.
- Fundraising campaigns not as successful as you’d hoped? Implement ISM’s practical advice and guidance to build a thriving annual fund, construct an effective capital campaign, and secure major donors—no matter your community size or location.
- Not sure how to provide professional development—for you and your staff? Learn ways to develop and fund a successful professional development strategy. You can improve teacher-centered satisfaction and growth, which in turn strengthens student-centered learning.
- Problematic schedule? You can master the challenges of scheduling with the help of ISM’s practical advice, based on our experience with hundreds of schools and our time-tested theories.
- And so much more.
I&P has shared targeted research, up-to-date insight, and sound theory with school leaders since 1975. More than 8,500 private school decision-makers find the answers to their schools’ administrative and governance matters in our advisory letter. We give you the strategic answers you need.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
Private High School GPAs and Credits: Still a Competitive Advantage?
Volume 29 No. 7 // June 1, 2004
The National Center for Education Statistics has just released the report The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricula and Achievement, 1990-2000, which examines the “trends and changes in high school curriculum and student coursetaking patterns for the past decade.” The study included public and non-public schools. The findings are of particular interest when scrutinizing the contention that private schools provide a superior academic education when compared to public schools.
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Your School's Annual Report: A Strategic Financial Plan Reporter and Institutional Promoter
Volume 29 No. 7 // June 1, 2004
Your Board has become a well-organized strategic entity that promotes institutional well-being. However, do parents, donors, and community members actually see the differences you’ve made or recognize and appreciate the nuances of your hard work? Caroline Taylor writes that the work of nonprofits “is often accomplished with little fanfare or notice.” (See Publishing the Nonprofit Annual Report: Tips, Traps, and Tricks of the Trade by Caroline Taylor (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002).) However, institutional promotion can keep your school in the forefront of the public’s mind and go a long way in telling the compelling story of your school’s unique mission, while attracting and retaining students and donors.
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Food Services for Day Schools: Mission and Planning
Volume 29 No. 6 // May 8, 2004
There is an interesting dilemma facing parents today. On one hand, their hurried and scheduled lifestyle may make it difficult to provide consistent and appropriate nutrition at home. On the other hand, parents and students are more nutritionally aware than in past years and are constantly bombarded with health messages.
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Private-Independent School Navigational Forecast: Bumpy but Manageable
Volume 29 No. 5 // April 12, 2004
In October 2002, The National Center for Education Statistics released Projections of Education Statistics to 2012, Thirty-first Edition. Included in those projections were predictions regarding private school enrollment. (See the accompanying table, “Enrollment in Private Schools: 2000-2012.”) Consider the following points as you revisit your planning process this year.
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Auditing Your Business Office Operations
Volume 29 No. 5 // April 12, 2004
ISM endorses a strong working partnership between you, as the School Head, and the Business Manager. The “silent” partner in this relationship is the Board of Trustees. Your Business Manager works with Board members via the Finance Committee (and, depending upon how your Board organizes for its work, other committees as well). This exposure can confirm to your Board the quality of the Business Manager’s work. If the Board reports unsatisfactory performance, do not ignore opinions that differ from yours. Discounting the Board’s concerns may put you in peril as well.
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Common Restroom Problems and Student Health
Volume 29 No. 4 // March 31, 2004
According to a Kimberly-Clark Professional survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, 20% of middle and high school students admit to completely avoiding school restrooms because the facilities are dirty and unsanitary. A similar study concerning public restrooms, by Impulse Research for the Georgia-Pacific Corporation, determined that, of those surveyed:
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Keeping Your School 'Accessible'
Volume 29 No. 4 // March 31, 2004
Private-independent schools annually wrestle with complex financial issues that center on the question of tuition. Trustees, Heads, and Business Managers often find themselves asking, “How can we keep our school affordable?” ISM believes this is the wrong question to ask if one of your school’s strategic goals is to maintain long-term financial viability. The proper question is, “How can we keep our school accessible?”
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The Strategic Board: Guidelines for Board Meetings
Volume 29 No. 3 // March 7, 2004
ISM has long stressed the fundamental importance of Board-level strategic planning, coupled with annual Board (and administration) agenda-setting, as being critical for a school to sustain long-term programmatic excellence. This set of core ideas collectively forms ISM’s Stability Marker No. 2: “Stable schools will have ‘strategic’ Boards.” These tenets must be linked explicitly to such organizational practices as Board profiling (itself on the second-tier of the ISM Stability Markers®), new-Trustee orientation, bylaw revision, formation of a strong Committee on Trustees, and Board self-evaluation.
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Clarify the Role of Your School's Learning Specialist: A Checklist
Volume 29 No. 3 // March 7, 2004
“The core theme of K-12 education in this century should be straightforward: high standards with an unwavering commitment to individuality.” – Mel Levine, M.D., “Celebrating Diverse Minds” Educational Leadership, October 2003
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Facilities and Faculty Retention
Volume 29 No. 2 // February 12, 2004
When discussing ways to enhance faculty recruitment and retention, do you include the condition of your school facilities in your considerations? As Head, if you’ve noticed teachers complaining about their classroom space, noise levels, air quality, lighting, and other facility inadequacies, this may be a red flag indicating deeper problems.
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