School Heads today rely strongly on the support and guidance provided by their Head Support and Evaluation Committees. Despite this support from the Board, however, the Head’s perennial problem is professional isolation. Heads often express their concerns about the issues they face during the school year—problem parents, the budget, Board relations, fundraising, etc. To lead their schools effectively, Heads must learn how to better delegate authority and to develop a professional support network outside the school. Even though Heads have other administrators to help resolve problems, they often tackle too many issues alone.2 When a Head makes every school concern a personal concern, eventually every problem—no matter whose purview—will come to him or her.

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As Admission Director, one of your various tasks is to develop and maintain productive relationships with the schools that traditionally send students to you each year—your feeder schools. These schools can provide a steady, typically dependable, source of new students. But, beyond that, there are other advantages to having a portion of each year’s new students come from familiar programs.

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As independent schools jockey for a position in a competitive marketplace, there are at least three strong forces pushing them to change:

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ISM’s Advancement Model illustrates the key relationships existing among your school’s advancement efforts—admission and enrollment management, development, and marketing communications.1 With a common focus on your students and mission, your advancement efforts must share a strong message inviting families to enroll and re-enroll, and inspires them to make philanthropic gifts. The model provides a framework for planning, implementing, and evaluating your advancement program. 

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Many private-independent school leaders—often members of the Board of Trustees—develop a measure of tunnel vision regarding their school’s tuition level. And given the emphasis on price in market economies, this can be justified as an understandable fixation—even an obligatory one.

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If your school ends at the lower or middle division level, it’s a feeder school. You send your “graduates” to the next level of precollege education, in effect “feeding” those institutions. Your assistance with placing the students has strong implications for school image, reputation, and bonding.

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Schools that suffer the withdrawal of their Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification lose the ability and authority to enroll any international students. And the nonimmigrant students falling out of status must depart from the U.S. and may further jeopardize any future opportunities to study here in the United States. So, the stakes are high.

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The ISM Stability Markers® have been used by private-independent schools since the 1990s. Most longtime readers of Ideas & Perspectives have established an annual or semi-annual discipline of Stability Marker self-scoring, and then forcibly addressing any organizational or financial weaknesses highlighted by their self-score outcomes. This has, in turn, enabled schools to sustain institutional strength in the face of the ebb and flow of their schools’ enrollment demand levels, and of the inevitable fluctuations in the national and regional economies. Not all Stability Marker veterans are equally savvy in using their own self-scores. A healthy perspective on these data arrays helps you, as Board Chair or School Head, to make wise decisions in response to your regular Stability Marker self-scoring exercise. Following is a list designed to assist you in making those decisions

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  Solicitation is a process, not just an event. It’s an invitation to a prospect to invest in your school—and to feel excited about supporting an area resonating with him or her. Whether the process involves one meeting or several, a single solicitor or a team, the way that invitation is ext...

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Most Boards and School Heads understand the power of a well-crafted, emotionally evocative mission statement as the foundation of a compelling case for enrollment and giving. Most also know the mission statement should distinguish the school in a marketplace replete with schools of all types. However, many mission statements fail to capture a school’s essence or provide any clear distinction from other schools. Your mission statement may not be definitive enough to provide guidance to the Board, administration, or faculty in their pursuit of programmatic excellence. It may be an assertion that better describes the school 20 or even 50 years ago. It may not answer the essential question, “Why does our school exist?”

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