In the first article in this series, we emphasized the importance of the leadership funnel in ensuring leadership continuity through the inevitable personnel changes implicit in a volunteer leadership structure. As Chair of the COT, you already know that excellent people are the precondition for excellent performance. However, they are not sufficient. Determining what “excellent performance” is (execution) and holding committee members and Trustees accountable to that performance is equally important. This recognizes the reality that the school’s volunteer leaders have a limited amount of time to carry out their responsibilities—maybe 60–80 hours a year for a complex task. We recommend that you lead the Committee on Trustees in carrying out four tasks: self-monitoring, reminding, measuring, and maintaining accountability.

In January 2015, BoardSource published Leading with Intent, a report self-described as “a comprehensive scan of nonprofit board practices, policies, and performance.” While the report is built on “data collected and analyzed dating back to 1994,” the new release is the result of a 2014 survey of more than 800 nonprofit organizations. BoardSource’s summary conclusions are succinct.

Each fall, ISM publishes a set of conversion factors to simplify recasting previous tuitions into current dollars. (See the accompanying table.) We continue to use the Urban Consumer Price Index (CPI-U).1 However, we also realize the CPI-U does not reflect expenditures in private-independent schools. It can only serve as a base figure. There are compelling arguments for adjusting your tuition at a rate of at least 2% above the overall inflation rate. The CPI has a built-in “productivity factor.” It assumes the workforce is increasingly productive as technology and other laborsaving developments provide greater output with fewer personnel. The more efficient a business becomes, the more it can stabilize or reduce the impact of inflation. Education, however, differs from industries in that it is people-intensive and not truly “product”-driven. Education cannot offset the effects of inflation by increased efficiency—the classroom still basically consists of a teacher and a group of students. If more students enroll, we create more sections with more teachers. Even as the demand for additional programs (and teachers) occurs, schools often refuse to remove any standing programs to lessen the budgetary crunch. Costs go up even as productivity remains static.

As Chair of your school’s Board of Trustees or its Committee on Trustees, you regularly attend to the content of meetings of the full Board and also monitor the quality of the processes through which the Board does its work. The participants in this process include a mix of Trustees who have been carefully and intentionally cultivated, elected, and oriented so as to be strategically focused members of a strategically focused team.

ISM has long urged private-independent school leaders to agree among themselves that their school operates—or intends to operate—with one of three marketplace focuses: price/value, best-product, or best-process. This article updates this concept and, in the process, provides a number of modifications and clarifications.

Strategic Boards are critical to the success of today’s private-independent schools in a highly competitive educational environment and a time of constant adaptation. They have demonstrated their capacity to lift School Heads and their schools to great heights. They have also demonstrated that they can be highly destructive, undermining the School Head, interfering in the operations of the school, and significantly diminishing a school’s viability. As Board President or School Head, you have a vested interest in ensuring that the health of the Board is optimal from year to year.

As you, the School Head, move year by year through your strategic plan and its accompanying strategic financial plan, you may find your Board of Trustees focusing annually on the enrollment line (line 1A in the “Sample Strategic Financial Plan” on page 31 of this issue), the net tuition revenue line (line 2), the expense line (line 5), or other meaningful lines within the spreadsheet’s 13-line basic format. We suggest you be most proactive, however, in teaching and re-teaching the overriding importance of line 6 (hard income P&L), the line that tells the most comprehensive and accurate story regarding your success in moving the school forward in ways fully consonant with your six-year planning document.