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).1 However, we also realize the CPI-U does not completely 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 2% above the overall inflation rate. The CPI has a built-in “productivity factor.” It assumes the workforce is increasingly productive as computers, streamlined mechanical devices, and other laborsaving developments provide greater output with fewer personnel. Education, however, differs from industries in that it is people-intensive and not truly “product”-driven. Education cannot offset the total true 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. Furthermore, even as the demand for additional programs (and teachers) occurs, schools tend not to remove any of the standing programs to lessen the budgetary crunch. Costs go up even as productivity remains static.

A sequence of qualified, effective Heads who stay six years or more—with a series of orderly transitions—is the best-case scenario for any private-independent school. However, in given situations, a temporary replacement can be necessary, appropriate, and advantageous. In the most common circumstance, the school faces a vacancy relatively late in the school year, leaving insufficient time to conduct a careful search for a permanent Head. In other instances, the Board may have conducted a Head search without reaching a clear decision or identifying a need for a hiatus between permanent Heads. Perhaps the Board has decided to postpone an all-out search to test the qualities of an administrator already at the school.

If you, as Board President, are confident that your current strategic plan/strategic financial plan meets the criteria spelled out in the No. 2-ranking marker in the ISM Stability Markers®, revisit your Committee on Trustees’ structure and function to determine whether this crucial committee needs revitalization. If you seek to lead your Board forward as a truly strategic entity—one focused upon long-term financial and organizational stability—then the Committee on Trustees (COT), your Board’s “most strategic” committee, must be appropriately staffed and charged.

How much land is enough? ISM has long recommended that schools acquire a minimum of 40 acres (and ideally 100+ acres). This is particularly true where the school is (or includes) an upper school with its enormous athletic needs. In all our work with schools, ISM has not encountered one that complained of owning too much land, but has found many that regret not acquiring land when they had the opportunity. Today, of course, land is so much more than athletic fields. Schools see the importance of outdoor classrooms, adventure playgrounds, organic gardens, ecological preserves, wetland conservation, and so on.

The third iteration of ISM Stability Markers® comprised 18 variables, each of which, according to ISM’s internal reviews, correlated strongly with a private-independent school’s ability to sustain excellence over time. In the fourth iteration, no additions or subtractions have been made to the 18 third-iteration Stability Markers themselves. The new scoring structure does, however, better align with ISM’s Success Predictors™. Benchmarks, weighting, points of reference, and/or methods of calculation have been updated to conform to ISM’s current perspectives on each. And one of these updates can be considered major: the movement of two first-tier markers (No. 5 and No. 6) to the second tier, replaced in the first tier by two previously second-tier items.

Private-independent school Board Presidents often ask, “What is the right size Board for a school with our enrollment and grade configuration?” For those Board Presidents seeking to implement ISM’s “strategic Board” concepts and practices, our standard answers include the following. There is little relationship between school enrollment and school grade-configuration, on the one hand, and the number of Trustees needed to do the work of the Board, on the other. Board structure and function are factors almost entirely independent of school size and student age-range. That said, ISM’s second-level answer to the question is this: The work of the Board normally requires about 15 to 20 people annually immersed in “doing governance.”

Your Board’s committee structure, far from set in stone, should be flexible and emanate from the school’s quadrennial strategic plan. Some committees—such as the Finance Committee—will always have tasks to accomplish. The strategic concept, however, is that there are few standing committees in the old sense of being listed in bylaws as necessarily in operation indefinitely, with a permanent set of responsibilities listed in the bylaws committee-by-committee. The extreme codification of Board structure is a poor fit for ISM’s “strategic Board” concept, in which most Board committees’ tasks are delineated annually and, as a rule, have their antecedents in the school’s strategic plan.