In recent years, partly because of the challenges in our economy and partly because the techniques are so successful, some schools use a capital campaign-style, personalized approach to donor cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship that has inspired many to give and others to continue to increase their level of giving. ISM now suggests that this become the norm, not just a response to special circumstances. The annual fund is the foundation of your fund-raising efforts. Like all development programs, its impact goes beyond dollars—the ultimate goals are to build relationships and to create a culture of giving in your school. Because the annual fund is broadly based and occurs regularly, it connects your school with the widest possible group of donors in your community. It also helps you identify individuals who later might become primary supporters of your capital, endowment, and major gift programs. A robust annual fund also provides a training ground for volunteers to identify, cultivate, solicit, recognize, and steward donors and prospects.

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Creating a master schedule is challenging enough when you attempt to accommodate the basic demands of people, function, time, and space during the day. Those challenges multiply when you add the following factors to the equation. Faculty who teach in more than one division of the school. The need to create a schedule that is age-appropriate in each division without impacting the schedule of any other division. A single facility—most commonly a gymnasium or lunchroom—that must be shared by all divisions. Groups of students that must move a substantial distance between buildings—or even campuses.

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The School Head is the sole employee of the Board, and management of the Head’s compensation is a high priority. Numerous entities are now asking how much compensation is too much for nonprofit CEOs. Never has it been more important that the Board be fully conversant about Head compensation. Only then can the Board determine what adjustments are needed to ensure that the school compensates competitively to retain the Head or enhance its ability to be competitive in its next Head search. Trustees must educate themselves about the marketplace and understand the complexities of the School Head’s job. ISM surveyed a random sample of I&P subscriber schools concerning compensation for faculty and administrators. This article focuses on the survey results regarding the salaries of School Heads at our participating day schools.

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More than 30 years ago, ISM published a seminal article concerning the wrongful thinking often used when setting tuition. The article intended to help school leaders understand that pricing included a complex array of decision points, and that much of the “common wisdom” concerning tuition was incorrect. School leaders—notably the Board, School Head, and Management Team—must understand these variables to safeguard the school’s value proposition. Let’s re-examine four of the most prevalent erroneous premises.

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The private-independent school in 2013 is, in its context, radically different from the same school 20 years earlier in 1993. We note just some of those differences. Today, competition is fierce with public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, and other private-independent schools, with all touting their march to excellence. We have just gone through the second most severe recession in the last 100 years. Facebook and other social media networks exist. The smart phone exists. Free courses from Harvard, McGill, and Oxford are now available online. Private-independent school parents are of the Y Generation.

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The schedule is important as a reflection and “interpreter” of your mission.1 It determines what is deemed important, decides who is important, reflects the power structures of the school, forces actions by students and adults whether desired or not, influences issues of discipline, can mitigate or exacerbate stress, and enhances or detracts from academic performance. Its importance has been underestimated, and thus its change power not clearly understood. That power relates to the school’s mission, to the school’s strategic direction, to the school’s 21st century character, and to its influence on student and faculty culture.

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To establish institutional commitment to—and authenticity about—diversity, be sure to clarify and formalize the school's "case" by crafting a Statement on Diversity. This statement complements your school mission statement, especially by providing language to describe the kind of human community that distinguishes your school and supports its educational purposes.

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In a recent article on faculty as leaders, ISM identified four actions that faculty leaders take—they assume control of their own growth and renewal, take control of their own curricula and assessment, use time to define and improve their work, and strive to be paid according to the merit of the work they do. This article takes another step further by examining the qualities of leadership and the qualities of teaching to see how the former might be enhanced.

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Schools use a variety of discount strategies, including tuition remission, sibling discounts, and full-pay discounts. ISM refers to these as category discounts, meaning that, because an enrolling student falls into a predetermined category, the discount is automatically awarded. This strategy can needlessly reduce net revenue per student and is a practice that should be reconsidered by most independent school leaders.

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Coaching is a career-long conversation between teachers and their individual coaches about the high-order professional/technical understandings and behaviors that collectively become difference-makers in the lives of students. In a previous article on distributed leadership, ISM identified coaching as a key skill for school leaders. Coaching is intrinsic to faculty evaluation as we have described it in ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development Model™. Coaching is also clearly implied for School Heads in the School Leadership Points of Emphasis. In this article, we outline the ISM Relational Coaching Model. While coaching is a form of communication, it is a specialized subset that requires training and practice.

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