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- 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.
The 2006 Business Manager Survey: Salaries
Volume 32 No. 5 // April 14, 2007
ISM recently surveyed Business Managers about their salaries and their working environments. We randomly selected 597 Business Managers from our I&P subscribers; 224 responded.1 This article examines Business Managers' salaries and implicaitons for recruitment and retention; a subsequent article will focus on Business Mangers' responsibilities and work conditions. There are no mandatory rules for a School Head when determining the appropriate compensation for a Business Manager. Factors that might impact salary include type of prior experience, special skills, the responsibilities assigned, the complexity of the school operation, the Business Manager’s number of direct reports, and the conditions endemic to the school or your locale. Also, be aware of the salaries offered for similar positions in comparable schools, other nonprofit agencies, and employers in the public sector for persons with that skill set, e.g., accountants.
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Key Elements in Your Search for a Business Manager
Volume 32 No. 5 // April 14, 2007
School Heads should determine the compensation package that will recruit and retain the best Business Manager possible. Having the right person in this position, one who is capable of covering multifaceted tasks that call for different skills (finance, human resources, facilities management), is crucial in providing the School Head with the support needed.
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The Management Team Retreat: More Than a Golf Game
Volume 32 No. 4 // March 29, 2007
One of the major tasks for the School Head is to guide the Management Team—the deputies to whom the Head delegates direct responsibility for supervising specific functions within the school. This guidance occurs in both formal and informal ways, such as regular meetings of the whole team, meetings with individuals, conversations throughout the day, and by example.
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Cash Reserves: Stability and Opportunity!
Volume 32 No. 4 // March 29, 2007
It has been no statistical fluke that in all three iterations of the ISM Stability Markers®, the No. 1 or No. 2 marker has been cash reserves. While this item is a formulaic mix of cash reserves, debt, and endowment, the practical piece of this is the cash reserve itself – an amount of money equal to 15% of the operations budget and 2% of the replacement of the school facility to a maximum of 20%. This is neither a quasi-endowment (i.e., restricted by the Board for its own purposes) nor the seed money for a real endowment. It is cash in the bank that can be accessed at a moment’s notice.
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Development Office Management: The ISM Stability Marker
Volume 32 No. 4 // March 29, 2007
Of the administrative offices at most private-independent day schools, the Development Office gets the most attention from your school’s Trustees. They tend to view this office as the (imagined or actual) source of all soft revenue—they know the dollar figure well and often (mistakenly) regard it as the most inviting source for alleviating tuition pressures on a parent body. As a result, Boards tend to scrutinize Development Office performance in ways that go well beyond the attention given comparable offices on your campus. The School Head may want, first, to consider the twin errors into which many Trustees fall when engaging in such scrutiny, and, second, to reorganize the Development Office functionally—not necessarily structurally – to conform more closely to the implications of the pertinent ISM Stability Marker™.1
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The Portrait of the Graduate: Three Good-to-Great Examples
Volume 32 No. 3 // March 5, 2007
ISM’s Purpose and Outcome Statements concept was developed in a series of I&P articles suggesting that mission statements alone will always fall short of their hoped-for goal of defining your school’s institutional purposes in ways that are simultaneously visionary and practical.1 Mission statements—abstract documents by nature—must be supplemented by two other documents: first, the Portrait of the Graduate, and second, Characteristics of Professional Excellence for faculty. Done well, these pithy documents supply inspiration, universality, particularity, and concreteness.
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Marketing Your Purpose and Outcome Statements
Volume 32 No. 3 // March 5, 2007
Recently in I&P, we recommended that schools refine or develop three Purpose and Outcome Statements: the school’s mission (more likely a review and refinement), the Portrait of the Graduate, and the Characteristics of Professional Excellence for faculty. While each one has its place in guiding the school’s day-to-day educational activities, they can also be used to clearly differentiate the school from its competition. The three statements and how they are fulfilled provide an excellent opportunity for the school to describe its distinguishing characteristics for its constituencies (internal and external).
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The Buck Starts Here: Philanthropic Responsibilities of Your Board
Volume 32 No. 3 // March 5, 2007
The central philanthropic duty of Board members—each member’s personal involvement in giving to the school and securing resources from others—is often unclear to Trustees, particularly those members who are new to the Board. ISM frequently hears comments like the following.
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New Federal Rules Spur Need to Review Email and Internet Policies
Volume 32 No. 2 // February 10, 2007
In December 2006, new federal rules went into effect concerning the sharing of electronic documents during the discovery phase of litigation. In brief, the rules require parties involved in federal lawsuits to produce “electronically stored information” prior to trial. While sharing of electronic documents prior to trial has become commonplace in recent years, the new rules codify the practice, as well as require that the documents be provided in a timely and efficient manner.
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Board Service: A Sample Written Commitment
Volume 32 No. 2 // February 10, 2007
Consistent with the implications of five ISM Stability Markers’™ collective emphasis upon the nature and importance of forming and maintaining a “strategic” Board of Trustees, ISM here offers a recommended sample form and process for use with new (and veteran) Trustees. This form is designed to go beyond the obvious “pledge and promise” implied by its title. It is designed to educate every Trustee equally regarding the nature of his or her acceptance of this volunteer role in your private-independent school. That being the case, ISM recommends that the Board President instruct the Committee on Trustees Chair to require a fresh signature from every Trustee, every year.
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