Maintaining appropriate communication with parents, faculty, and the Management Team can help ease the pressure on Trustees to share what has occurred during a meeting. Board members are often bombarded in the school parking lot, grocery store, or even online to divulge information they may not be at liberty to discuss. When constituents know that they will be provided with reliable, relevant information on a consistent basis, they are less likely to probe the Board members one-to-one.
The Board’s Role in the School Head’s Personnel Decisions
School Heads must make unavoidable decisions about the renewal of teacher contracts. Often teachers react as a “family” when one of their members is caught in the crosshairs—even if that individual has been deemed ineffective or undesirable by some colleagues. The mere threat of dismissal or nonrenewal can polarize faculty, administrators, influential parents, and Trustees.
The Board’s Role in Faculty Culture
Board-level strategic support of a healthy, growth-oriented faculty culture is critical for your school to sustain long-term programmatic excellence. The outcome of a healthy faculty culture is sustained/enhanced student performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction.
The faculty is, however, an operational responsibility and you, as a Trustee, should not interfere in teachers’ daily work. So, what are the strategic ways in which you can aid the School Head and Management Team in ensuring a healthy culture? What resources can you, as a Trustee, provide? Here are four key variables for your consideration.
Debt Management: A Cautionary Approach
Since the economic collapse of 2008, money has been cheap. This is not the first time this has been so, but it is unusual that interest rates have remained low for so long. This has led school leaders—School Heads, Business Managers, and Trustees—to consider long-term financing to move their schools ahead, typically within the context of buildings and renovations. While tempting, we urge caution around debt financing.
Sustainability, Pricing, and Inflation
Private-independent school leaders have experienced considerable discomfort at the oft-heard contention—by no means a new one—that tuitions have (a) increased faster than inflation and (b) increased faster than the growth of family incomes. A common conclusion from these paired facts—and they are facts—is that this cannot be sustainable. You, in your role as School Head or Business Manager, may never become comfortable dealing with these facts and with the (sustainability-related) conclusion.1 But four of ISM’s continually researched perspectives can assist you in preparing to deal with your constituents on this topic.
Must Tuition Outpace Inflation?
Boards often confront the issue of sustainability of private-independent schools, now and in the future. One common concern is that private school tuitions have historically outpaced inflation—a well-documented truth. The real question is whether this leads to the demise of private schools. To answer this question, we’ll need to explore several factors.
School Administrators at Board Meetings: Who, When, and Why
Should school administrators besides the School Head routinely—or ever—attend Board meetings? Are there times when the Board ought to meet without the School Head? Don’t allow these seemingly small questions to become issues of contention. Put the following guidelines, observations, and recommendations to work.
The ISM X and the Fourth Iteration of the Stability Markers
The ISM X™ is a geometrical arrangement of the ISM Stability Markers® that comprise the Fourth Iteration. The ISM X shows how the 18 Stability Markers relate to each other and how they combine to produce two critical outcome variables—(1) the interrelation of cash reserves, debt, endowment; and (2) enrollment demand in excess of supply. As School Head, you may wish to become conversant with this teaching tool as a means of communicating more effectively your school’s efforts to position itself strategically in your marketplace.
Board Committee Chairs: Prevent Having Your Work Second-Guessed
Effective Board committee work can be torpedoed by a Board that listens to a committee’s proposal—and then proceeds to alter or redo the work. As the Chair of a committee, you can envision the damage that results. Your committee members are frustrated—as are the other Trustees who feel that your group did not do its work well enough.
An Enhanced Agenda for the Strategic Board
A typical Board meeting at many schools is based on a standard format primarily structured around reports from the School Head and various committees. This type of meeting often fosters results that call for little or no action. When trapped in such routine agendas with no true focal points, many Board meetings simply “go through the motions.”