With the start of a fresh school year comes the opportunity to incorporate new programs and incentives for your faculty and staff. If your culture doesn’t already incorporate a mentoring program, we strongly encourage you take advantage of the new academic year to instill one. The benefits greatly outweigh the pains of initiation.

Typically, those involved in setting and announcing tuitions fear that parents will complain and rebel at any increase. Will you lose families? Will there be angry telephone calls and demands for meetings? Will there be negative feedback on social media? You need not worry if you plan your announcement in a way that highlights your reasonable cause for raising tuition—the benefits for the students.

Paid advertising, social media sites, newsletters (emailed or printed), admission packets, banners hung around campus, posters throughout your hallways, your marquee—all of these are just a few examples of how your school communicates with its families and community as a whole. Your school’s story—what truly makes your school special—should be incorporated into most, if not all, of your school’s communications.

Student handbooks contain all the policies, rules, and regulations that outline expectations for everyone at your school. However, they’re often notoriously dry documents that can be dismissed by folks not paying attention. Sure, you can send home a “contract” stating that the student (and his or her parents) have read the handbook and will abide by the policies, but that’s hardly a guarantee of painstaking attention to every detail. So for our September 2016 issue of The Source for Academic Leadership, let’s take a moment or two to discuss your school’s plan for policy dissemination to your students.

For a comprehensive approach to the faculty hiring process, include the advising role you require of your middle- and upper-school teachers. Your advisory program and advising role(s) should be not merely included but also highlighted in the process. Candidates should walk away from their campus visits with a clear sense of the role, some understanding of how it supports school mission, and, ideally, some enthusiasm for taking it on. Failure to inform (even inspire) prospective teachers in this way implicitly undermines, from the outset, a sense that the role is taken seriously at your school.

In the last issue of The Source for Private School News, we discussed the impact that the new mobile game Pokémon Go may have on the private-independent school community. The Admission Office, in particular, could leverage the gaming sensation to great benefit during its recruitment sessions this fall.

Two years ago, The Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Association ran an extremely successful fundraiser that encouraged people to donate to their organization, film themselves dumping buckets of water on their heads, and challenge others to do the same. We wrote about the lessons to be taken away from the viral episode and filed it away as a one-and-done subject. We were wrong to dismiss it so easily, as The ALS Association beautifully leveraged their previous success to offer those of us in the development world another great lesson: Remind your donors what their sacrifices have accomplished, and so grow the relationship.

Homeschooling is increasingly becoming a viable option for parents looking for alternatives to traditional classroom learning. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), for example, showed a 54% increase in the practice from 2002 to 2012 (1), and stories like the wunderkind twelve-year-olds starting their engineering degrees at Cornell University (2) inspire other families looking to nurture their gifted children. However, rather than looking at homeschooling programs as competition for your private school, look to them as you would any other “feeder school”—as an opportunity to expand the pool of prospective students. This month, let’s discuss the ways in which you can leverage the unique opportunity of homeschooled students.

If you’ve noticed more people than usual roaming your neighborhood, noses glued to their phone screens, then you’ve already encountered this summer’s biggest gaming hit: Pokémon Go. Popular with adult gamers and school-aged children alike, the game presents both opportunities and concerns for school administrators. So this month, we’ll talk about what Pokémon Go actually is, potential dangers for your students—and possible ways to leverage the game’s popularity to benefit your school.

There’s been some amusing hubbub in the education world this summer regarding financial aid and fiscal priorities. Popular educational writer Malcolm Gladwell proposed an odd correlation on his podcast, Revisionist History: The greater a college’s investment in quality food, the lower its commitment to socioeconomically diverse student populations in the form of financial aid. This debate in higher education can be reframed for K-12 private-independent schools, in that your school’s investment in various programmatic aspects should reflect its mission, not the latest fads.