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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.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
ISM Loses One of Its Cofounders
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
Anne Louise Kurtz Snelling December 1, 1930–September 19, 2011 How do you encapsulate Anne Snelling’s 80 years of concern for others? How do you describe her love of nature, friends, and family? How do you relate the role she played in the betterment of private-independent education on multiple continents?
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The 21st Century School: 10 Myths
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
So much is being published on the 21st century in education that it is time to reflect on the many claims that are being made, and provide some direction as to what makes sense and what does not. As a School Head, you must be able to discriminate amid the blizzard of information being offered you. So, here is ISM’s list of what we believe to be the major myths around the education changes that are influencing our schools.
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Green Strategies for Pest Control
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
If not controlled, insect pests and rodents can pose serious health threats to students, teachers, and employees at your school, and may also be responsible for significant and costly damage to your facilities. However, toxic chemicals and pesticides traditionally used for pest control have been shown to be hazardous to humans, particularly to students susceptible to asthma and breathing difficulties or those who have issues with their immune, endocrine, or neurological systems.
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Ease the Transition for the Incoming Head
Volume 36 No. 13 // October 12, 2011
When a school experiences a change of leadership, the Board must ensure that the new Head’s transition into the school goes smoothly. Responsibility for directing the essential work of assimilating, assisting, and supporting the new Head usually falls to the Search Committee, the group of four or five Board members who guided the Head-search process.
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Estimated Family Expenditures on a Child
Volume 36 No. 12 // September 22, 2011
Since 1960, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has released its annual report, Expenditures on Children by Families,1 which estimates the costs of raising a child. The tables offer a general sense of what your school’s families may be spending on their children (see Table 1), and can be revealing if you also factor in your tuition over the years. The cost differs significantly depending upon the income level and the region in which a family lives (see Table 2). If your school has a high percentage of single-parent families, you may also be interested in the figures in Table 3. (We have used figures for upper-income families in the accompanying tables.)
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Strengthen the Ties Between the Development Director and the School
Volume 36 No. 12 // September 22, 2011
In a 2007 study, the Association of Fundraising Professionals found that Development Directors stayed at an organization an average of 3.6 years (3.5 for females and 4.17 for males). Given the time it takes for a Development Director to gain trust with a Board and develop relationships with school donors, it is important to develop strategies that would enable your school to keep its Development Director for a lengthy period of time.
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Faculty Accountability, the School Head, and the Athletic Director
Volume 36 No. 12 // September 22, 2011
There is a management conundrum that is usually hidden in the area of faculty accountability. The vast majority of what ISM has written relates to the support and evaluation of faculty with regard to their academic function, overlain with their numerous other responsibilities for advisory, lunch duty, and so on. However, many teachers—stretching across all divisions—also act as coaches within the school and thus also report in that capacity to the Athletic Director. As coaches, they are responsible to the Athletic Director for student athletic accomplishments, students’ actions, successes and failures, parent relations, and volunteer coordination. It is a management tenet that an employee cannot effectively report to two people, and this dysfunction is a complication in many teachers’ lives.
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Next-Level Placement and Documented Success
Volume 36 No. 11 // September 2, 2011
Part of a school’s internal marketing assessment is to ask what parents can expect of their children after graduation. The Portrait of the Graduate describes the student you expect to have developed over the years that she/he has spent under your faculty’s tutelage. Examples of this portrait in action require you to track alumni to gather examples of graduates who exemplify it. This is one of the least used—yet potentially most effective—approaches to determining your school’s overall success. From these examples, you can create a database with which to strengthen your marketing impact.
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Appropriate Tuition Adjustment: Recasting Financial Figures, 2011–12
Volume 36 No. 11 // September 2, 2011
Each fall, ISM publishes a set of conversion factors to facilitate the recasting of previous tuitions into current dollars. (See the table below.) We continue to use the Urban Consumer Price Index (CPI-U).1 However, we realize that the CPI-U does not completely reflect expenditures in private-independent schools; it can only serve as a base figure. There are compelling arguments for adjusting your tuition at a rate 2% above the overall inflation rate. The CPI has a built-in “productivity factor.” It assumes that the work force is increasingly productive as computers, streamlined mechanical devices, and other laborsaving developments provide greater output with fewer personnel. The more efficient a business becomes, the more the business can stabilize or reduce the effects of inflation.
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Establish a ‘Key’ Policy/Security System
Volume 36 No. 11 // September 2, 2011
Even if your school has the budget for security guards, sophisticated alarm systems, and electronic access doors,* there are other steps every school can take to deter would-be thieves. Many problems stem from the fact that there are numerous keys to offices and classrooms floating around with only an informal system of tracking them. Faculty members often lend keys to upper school students who are using school facilities after hours or during the weekends. Children of employees may also present security problems.
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