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.

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.

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?

The main means of enhancing your advisory program will be through the advisers themselves. Formal solicitation of their assessment of the program provides evaluative data while confirming the high value you place on this program.

Whether your advisory program emphasizes one-to-one advising or group advisory (or probably some of both), the intended beneficiaries of these services are your school’s students. While advisers’ impressions about students’ individual and/or collective engagement in advisory are helpful in gauging the successes of the program, they are not a substitute for well-conceived, formal surveying of students themselves as a resource for enhancing your program.

As you develop or enhance your disaster plan, take time to review your insurance policy with your agent to ensure that your school is adequately covered, beyond your basic flood and fire insurance, for any type of disaster or emergency situation. Coverage in the following areas is often far less than recommended, or may even be excluded, in typical policies. To determine if your risk factors are high in any of these areas, discuss them with your agent and consider increasing your coverage or adding riders if necessary.

In early fall of the 2004-05 school year, ISM conducted a study of School Head leadership to determine those characteristics most closely associated with strong faculty cultures (the criterion variable in the study). That variable—the faculty culture—had been chosen as the study’s anchor in view of two earlier ISM studies.

Many private-independent schools, especially those without high schools, find themselves on small parcels of land with little hope of purchasing contiguous acreage. Their leaders, searching for additional classroom space and buildings, are often staggered by the costs of buying land for a completely new (or second) campus. They are financially and emotionally defeated by the apparent alternative: relocating the school for a year or more, razing the buildings, and then returning to a campus that is fresh, exciting, and more functional.

How do you, as School Head or Division Head, get buy-in from “entrenched faculty” when you are anticipating an initiative? And what does the word entrenched mean? Assuming that these teachers are not toxic (those who drag down the faculty by their cynicism), you might describe them as rigid, fixed in their ways, unwilling to cooperate, skeptical about any kind of change, or always ready to oppose.

A recent draft report, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” commissioned by the U.S. Education Department, concludes that, while far too little is known about the prevalence of sexual misconduct by school employees, likely millions of children—including those in private institutions—are being affected by such abuse during their school years. Although critics of the report say the numbers may be “a bit extreme,” the author maintains the report’s credibility, stressing that at the very least, the report shows that further study is needed, and that the issue of sexual abuse in schools cannot be taken lightly. ISM has long recommended that schools take clear steps toward preventing sexual abuse—both for the sake of their students and the long-term well-being of their institutions