ISM has written at length on the virtues of strategic planning and strategic financial planning. While the strategic plan can be aspirational and embody the vision of the school, the strategic financial plan (SFP) is the voice of reason enforcing discipline and patience on the School Head and the Board of Trustees. When implementing the SFP, the Business Manager is stereotypically cast as the grounded person who will not allow the school to be at risk, being both financial manager and risk manager. However, the Business Manager (in partnership with the School Head) also has a real opportunity to be a proactive change agent. The strategic financial plan, while conservative and ensuring the school is not in jeopardy, is also a proactive change instrument that provides an opportunity to innovate and enrich. ISM’s Stability Markers, scored over its 18 metrics, places the school in one of four categories. Using these categories, the Business Manager, with the support of the School Head, can influence strategic planning, using the SFP, to make significant change.

The words “strategic” and “academic” are not comfortable partners. Academics is, by definition, an operations responsibility and rightly the province of the School Head. Strategic implies the Board is involved and has a hand in direction and planning. Still, since 2014, schools have been thinking divergently about academics and asked ISM to assist with and partner in developing strategic academic plans, and the demand for this is growing. Placing the words “strategic” and “academic” in juxtaposition could suggest that ISM’s long-held position about separating strategic and operations is compromised. In the 20th century, that would indeed have been true. Then, academics was a fairly straightforward pursuit that required schools to choose between textbooks printed in Ontario, Texas, and California and ensure that teachers were competent to use them in the classroom. The word itself had a limited reach, being typically applied to the disciplines of math, English, social studies, and science, with foreign language included as a suspicious addition. The arts were clearly not academic, and athletics were not connected to academic pursuits although there was obeisance paid to the scholar-athlete (the two words appearing in opposition to each other). In this world, teachers were polite to one another, but rarely worked together outside their silos—whether by grade or discipline. Budgets were based on last year’s expenditures. Curriculum review was incremental. Students were usually the object, not the subject, of the sentence. Rocking the boat was considered both unnecessary and opposed to tradition.

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.