ISM’s long-standing recommendation is that the Board President annually form a Head Support and Evaluation Committee (HSEC) to work with the School Head to: create a list of major School Head goals at the start of each year; identify or develop an array of data bearing on each goal; support the Head throughout the year in analyzing the data and introducing, as needed, midcourse corrections; and produce at year-end a summary/critique pertinent to each goal for presentation to the Board President.

By accepting the role of Chair of your Board’s Committee on Trustees (COT), you have accepted leadership of a committee that ISM regards as one of the Board’s most critical for the strategic success of the school you serve: that is, success as a viable and sustainable institution for the long term. Aside from your everyday, year-round task of providing as-needed assistance to the Board President—partnering with her or him to insure the smooth, strategically focused operations of the Board—you will find there is a predictable cycle of tasks the COT can expect to undertake in most years. (“Most years” refers to the fact that Boards occasionally face tasks of such magnitude that a standard Board calendar cannot realistically be followed, such as a year in which the search for a new School Head is conducted.)

There is a close relationship between the quality of your Board-meeting agenda and your Board meeting minutes. If one of those is done in a perfunctory or unfocused manner, so, often, is the other. Frequently the Board meeting agenda is, in fact, merely a generic meeting outline that is retained for meeting after meeting with little attention given to it from one session to the next. That being the case, the meetings themselves may become formless discussions of whatever topics come to mind, a meandering process that will sometimes be reflected in formless, meandering Board meeting minutes.

Each fall, ISM publishes a set of conversion factors to facilitate recasting previous tuitions into current dollars. (See the accompanying table.) We continue to use the Urban Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). However, we also realize the CPI-U does not reflect expenses in private-independent schools; it can only serve as a base figure. There are compelling arguments for adjusting your tuition at a rate 2% above the overall inflation rate.1

Once the Board passes the annual budget, in conformity with the strategic financial plan numbers on Line 6 (hard income profit and loss)and Line 7 (the percent of operating expense covered by total hard income), the Head controls Line 5 (operating expense). He or she determines the best ways to spend those funds. Typical Line 5 headings include compensation, instructional expenses, advancement, technology, administration, operations and maintenance, and athletics and student services. Discussion of these lines is never a Board agenda item. They are undoubtedly part of the conversation for the Finance Committee where the details of the budget are hashed out. But, even then, the conversation is far more about the realism behind numbers (e.g., the inevitable increase in health costs or increase in faculty compensation) than it is about whether this or that should be done. That is an operations responsibility.

As Chair of the Committee on Trustees (COT), you will want your committee to rewrite your Board Profile at least as often as your Board creates a fresh strategic plan/strategic financial plan. (ISM recommends a three- or four-year cycle for this.) You profile your Board to execute your strategic plan/strategic financial plan with the greatest distinction. While the Board Profile focuses foremost on those individual characteristics most obviously related to your planning document—e.g., nonprofit marketing expert or land developer—a general set of behaviors and attitudes, each of which can be placed under the general heading of “due diligence,” should undergird any Board Profile and be prominently listed in a special section of your profile document.