ISM has written much over the years about Head evaluation. We now update and further explain the basis for the employer/employee relationship between the Board of Trustees and the School Head. An understanding of the critical distinction between the strategic plane and the operations plane resides at the heart of private-independent school governance. The Board lives on the strategic plane with its actions and focus encapsulated in the strategic plan/strategic financial plan. This vision of the school’s future, with its companion fiscally conservative assumptions, provides the guide rails to Board action through the annual Board agenda and to operations action through the annual administrative agenda. Thus, the strategic plane not only determines the school’s visionary future but, by direct implication, also determines the most important actions to take on the operations plane by the School Head and administration. The direction is inviolate—the Board decides the school’s direction and only the Board can change that direction. The School Head controls how to make that direction operational and has almost complete discretion over that, limited only by the strategic financial plan’s fiscal assumptions.