With holiday celebrations behind us—including classroom parties, bake sales, and seasonal concerts that with festive intermission snacks—you might be taking some time over your break to think about refreshing your policies on food allergies. (Or, create one.) Allergy emergencies are intense, and, depending on the level of preparedness of your faculty and staff, they can be downright frightening. However, implementing too strict of policies can leave food-allergic students feeling isolated and outcast.

The holidays aren’t joyful times of the year for everyone. In fact, for some, the season triggers depression and lingering sadness. It can be a challenge to hold onto your positivity when those around you just want to rain on the parade. Staying positive is good for your health, though. Pessimistic people have a 20% higher risk of dying over a 30-year period than optimistic people. Smiling is healthy. Laughter is healing. And, even if you, are in a seasonal slump, these few tips can help you to keep focused and keep positive.

Successful educational programs require hard work and (occasionally) difficult changes. It can be daunting to keep and sustain the sort of drive needed to make them take hold and become permanent. But, that doesn’t mean you should allow excuses or circumstances to prevent you from trying new initiatives to improve your school. Here, then, are seven common excuses that shouldn’t stop you from starting difficult changes—along with the one reason you should halt any initiative before it gets off the ground.

It’s easy to get caught up in the details and duties of your own division. Faculty meetings, evaluation and coaching, professional development, and perennial "fires" all demand your attention. But when you’re one Division Head of several in a multidivision school, you have to think beyond your own area. You must understand how your particular “cog” turns in the overall “machine” of the school, and how your students’ needs change as they age.

Some private schools today, looking for ways to alleviate budget demands, have turned to government vouchers to supplement tuitions. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice found that Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin are currently the top states in which private schools are accepting vouchers; 27 states have some variation of vouchers. Catholic schools serving inner-city and low-income neighborhoods comprise most of private schools participating in voucher programs.

Start your school’s diversity efforts at the Board level. Here, diversity can be addressed without the kind of direct costs usually associated with achieving socioeconomic or socioethnic diversity in your student body, or diversity in your administration, faculty, and staff. As Board President, your starting point is in your planning document, every iteration of which should call for a Board profile to be developed to fit the strategic or long range plan. Open the way for a Board discussion of diversity, even for a broad topic like “Increase the socioeconomic and socioethnic diversity on the Board of Trustees.”

Your school’s newsletter is a powerful internal marketing tool, in addition to being an ongoing source of vital information for the school community. As such, you can work to guide casual conversations through your “Head’s Column”—the portion of your school’s newsletter in which you can talk as School Head about important topics that directly impact the school. Writing such a column on a monthly (or even bimonthly) basis can feel daunting, but take a deep breath. We have three things you can do that will immediately improve the column—and your community's response to it.

The midyear doldrums will strike your school in the post-holiday haze, dragging at the school community as everyone gets back into the regular schedule. That’s not to mention the temporary onset of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), triggered by the waning daylight hours and plunging temperatures of winter. Re-inspire your students, teachers, and fellow administrators through these winter blues busters!

It was a once-in-a-lifetime shot, and Bethany Academy mother Angela Ramey couldn’t have had a better time to make it. Standing in the middle of the gymnasium, dwarfed by towers of boxes packaged for needy families to enjoy a hearty holiday meal and surrounded by cheering students and parents, Angela and her daughter Grace pump themselves up for the opportunity to halve their 2016-2017 tuition bill.

Everyone seems to be glued to portable screens these days, whether that’s a phone, tablet, or some other newfangled device that blinks and buzzes and glows at its porters. Considering this newfound attachment to cellular devices, some schools on our Development e-List have wondered whether text-to-give programs could (or should) be integrated into their general fundraising programs. We’ve compiled a list of benefits and disadvantages to consider when looking at your constituents’ phones as a gateway to their wallets.