Your strategic financial plan (SFP) grounds your strategic plan by calculating a realistic cost for each planning objective and accommodating the operational aspects of that cost within a conservative six-year budget format. Your SFP should be developed at the same time as your strategic plan. These are two sides of a single coin. Unless every proposed item in your new plan is tested for its cost-effectiveness (by converting its cost into its tuition impact), your plan is no more than a nicely packaged wish list.
Acquiring Enough Land, Part One
To maintain the trust, your Board must ensure the school can fulfill its mission and meet its goals without having land values and the lack of space limit program or planning decisions—not just now, but 100 years in the future! If your school does not have a land-acquisition plan. Now is the time to develop one. Acquiring land now that you may need in the future is of strategic importance to your school.
With this in mind, you must (1) determine your school’s needs, and (2) take action if necessary. In this article, we will discuss how to ascertain your school’s needs. In the next issue, we will discuss how to move forward if you decide more land is required.
Classroom Apps, Technology, and Privacy Concerns
As classroom technology becomes more prevalent, especially with teachers using computer apps to track student performance, student privacy issues also become a concern. Teachers are now integrating interactive whiteboards, tablets or electronic readers, and even handheld devices like smart phones in their lesson plans. This does not come without risks, however. Providers of online educational services and apps can “harvest” personal student information (email addresses, phone numbers, and numerous other data points) that can be used for marketing and analysis, or even shared and used inappropriately.
The School Head’s File: Keeping Tabs on Your Employee
With any employer/employee relationship, there are paper and electronic files that must be maintained. Just as your school should have a policy on what is contained in an employee’s file and who will maintain it, your Board must do the same for its sole employee—the School Head.
Teach Trustees About Your School’s Educational Programs
The Board must not be involved in your school’s educational program, either as individuals or as a group. Discussions and decisions about the program are not appropriate topics for Trustees. The Board has hired the School Head to orchestrate the curriculum and programs, and supervise their delivery.
However, that does not excuse Trustees from knowing how your mission is fulfilled and being able to effectively describe the excellence that occurs on your campus to community members and prospective families. Trustees must possess accurate information about your educational programs. What they describe must match what people see and experience in their associations with the school. The School Head must provide Board members compelling information that they can share. Consider employing the following strategies in education your school’s Board.
The Board and Employment Practices Liability Insurance
While the School Head and Management Team ensure that policies and procedures are in place and implemented, the Board must ensure that your school insurance includes employment practices liability (EPL), to cover any legal costs it may incur if a case is brought against it.
The Dynamics of Flattened Tuition Gradients: Endowments and Other Revenue Won’t Help
ISM recently published: “The notion that tuition gradients must never again exceed inflationary projections poses, in itself, one of the greatest threats to private-independent school financial and organizational health.” Let’s unpack this comment in more detail.
Some schools, fearing “unaffordability,” have begun to take a price-averse approach to tuition (i.e., artificially setting tuition flat or below inflation). Schools turn to the teachers to “pay” for this approach and maintain program. Schools freeze salaries or flatten their increases, reduce benefits, cut professional development budgets, and increase teacher workloads/class sizes. Schools know these approaches are only impactful in the short run—they are left to consider how their annual fund, endowments, and other revenue sources can help them flatten tuition. Here we demonstrate, through a simple equation, how these tactics to flatten tuition gradients are unlikely to be sustainable.
The Role of the Strategic Board in the Advancement Model
When you look at the Comprehensive Advancement Model (see the graphic in the accompanying article), “Strategic Board” forms the base. Simply stated, the effectiveness of your advancement program is inextricably linked to your school’s overall stability, and the Board is the guarantor of stability. When the Board operates strategically—focusing on sustaining financial viability and excellence for future generations of students—every aspect of school operations performs at a higher level, including advancement efforts.
Advancement: From Values to Results
Advancement integrates your admission, development, and marketing communications programs at the service of your school’s mission. It is important to collaborate among these three areas. When you do, you impact student recruitment and re-recruitment, aid your school in its strategic direction, and encourage philanthropic giving. ISM now offers a way to measure the effectiveness of your advancement efforts.
While the Comprehensive Advancement Model illustrates the key relationships that exist among these areas of advancement, metrics are appropriately seen as important in measuring results. To develop these metrics, we offer ISM’s Advancement Core Values and Standards, including an assessment tool to bridge the gap between values and results.1
The Role of the Board’s Buildings and Grounds Committee
Rather like the Finance Committee, it is hard to imagine a school that would not have a Buildings and Grounds Committee. Its role is complementary to the Finance Committee, caring for the current facility (including grounds) and planning for the facility’s development, reinvention, and sometimes expansion into the future. A metric in the Fourth Iteration of the ISM Stability Markers® (Stability Marker K, “Quality of Facilities,” and Marker L,1 “Master Property/Facilities Plan”) provides the role of the Buildings and Grounds Committee. This article will fully articulate what that metric includes.