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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.
Sustainable Leadership for Private-Independent Schools
Volume 31 No. 5 // April 17, 2006
At any given moment, the Board may be operating highly effectively. The same is true of the School Head and Management Team. The problem, however, is always how to sustain high-level leadership over time. As changes occur, when the Board President finally rotates off, or the Head accepts an appointment elsewhere, or a new facility is proposed or a program added, what will ensure that the direction and vitality of the school is not lost?
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Management and Leadership Training for Academic Administrators (Part Two)
Volume 31 No. 4 // April 1, 2006
In Part One of this two-part series, eight critical ingredients and six steps were offered as a foundation on which to build management and leadership education and training systems for your Academic Administrators. Part Two provides a recommended sequence of School Head decisions and actions. The implicit opportunity, both for organizational enhancement and for individual professional growth, is enormous in its potential impact throughout your school. Moreover, its results are cost-effective.
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Faculty and Support Staff: Mutual Respect and Support
Volume 31 No. 4 // April 1, 2006
Support personnel may seem invisible in a school. These employees—personnel who are not administrators or faculty—may not appear to be as highly valued, nor as integral as the faculty to the school’s mission and to the education of children. Their roles are largely indirect. But this in no way diminishes their importance in your school’s culture. Take steps to build the faculty/support staff relationship, with the ultimate objective of improving opportunities for students in your school.
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Price, Product, or Process: How Do You Define Your School?
Volume 31 No. 4 // April 1, 2006
Borrowing originally from concepts advanced in the for-profit sector, ISM has for a decade taught a basic competitive-marketing truth: private-independent schools can compete on the basis of price, product or process, but not on the basis of all three at the same time. The implications of this truth for strategic planning would be hard to overstate. As you, the Board President, prepare for your next planning event, take responsibility for assisting your colleagues in working from a marketplace stance that fits your school’s actual competitive platform.
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The 2004–05 School Head Compensation Survey: Focus on Salaries and Bonuses
Volume 31 No. 3 // March 8, 2006
In the spring of 2005, ISM surveyed School Heads about their jobs and compensation. We randomly selected 934 Heads from our I&P subscribers; 468 responded. This article examines Heads’ salaries and bonuses; subsequent articles will focus on Heads’ benefits.
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Re-examine Advanced Placement in Light of Your School Mission
Volume 31 No. 2 // February 14, 2006
Nearly 15 years ago, ISM wrote that private-independent schools “should examine their policies on Advanced Placement (AP) offerings carefully. On the one hand, these courses provide students with challenging, standardized materials, parents with reasons to boast, and schools with credibility. On the other hand, they also can place a lid on a school’s creative potential, short-change students, and lead to a marketing dead end.” This is even truer today than it was in 1991.
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Management and Leadership Training for Academic Administrators (Part One)
Volume 31 No. 2 // February 14, 2006
Within our schools, there is little systematic training for members of the Academic Administrative Team (those leaders of the faculty who report directly to the School Head) and other levels of academic leadership (e.g., grade-level coordinators). Why does that matter?
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The Support Staff Culture Profile
Volume 31 No. 2 // February 14, 2006
This article describes an ISM tool used to identify the culture of support personnel (not administrators or faculty) in your school, such as various office staff in the admission, development, business, facilities, transportation, and food service areas. Previously published culture profiles included those for faculty, students, Academic Administrators, and Operations Administrators.
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Receiving Non-Cash Gifts: Fair Market Value and Appraisals
Volume 31 No. 1 // January 16, 2006
When donors decide to make gifts to your school, they want to know that you have a reasonable set of procedures in place for accepting the gifts and that you have a full understanding of the laws that govern the use and tax deductibility of the contributions. Donors trust you to be good stewards of their gifts, and to be conscientious counselors during the gift-giving process. Consequently, you must be prepared to answer questions from donors and to follow the IRS regulations governing the acceptance of gifts.
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Board Evaluation and the Nature of the Committee on Trustees
Volume 31 No. 1 // January 16, 2006
Historically, evaluation of the Board of Trustees has been either (a) non-existent or (b) accomplished via a generic form designed for use by any nonprofit Board. If the results were used at all, they formed the basis for a discussion at an annual retreat session—an exercise best described as corporate self-analysis that seldom led to diagnosis and prescription for reconfiguring Board structure and function (i.e., for Board development) over time.
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