Board Reports

Spring sports, AP exams, flowering trees, and the final Board of Trustees meeting: the close of the school year is rapidly approaching.  What do you report; what do you share?  There are many factors, including the leadership and goals of your head, the culture of your board, and the health of your enrollment.  There is no simple formula but there are several things to consider.

Let’s start with Stephen Covey’s famous quote from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.”  When training tour guides, we talk about the goal for the tour before it even starts.  What do we want the family to walk away with?  What are the key messages we want a family to receive?  And then plan the tour accordingly.  You should be thinking similarly about your board report.  This might even be a good question for your head as you prepare, “When I walk out of the Board meeting, what do want me to have accomplished, what message should I have delivered?”

For me, my “end in mind” for any board meeting can be summed up in one word: confidence.  When I leave the room, I want my board to feel confident that the enrollment of our school is safe in my hands.  And then when I might need something from them or have a crazy idea for consideration or even—gasp—stumble, they will embrace it all because I have given them confidence in me, my staff, my direction, and my strategy.  What and how I present is all decided based on leaving them confident in the school’s admissions operation.  And by doing so, I take one more possible headache off the desk of my head and hopefully make him look good and feel proud.  After all, I work for him but he works for them.

Second, it’s important to remember the role of the board.  It serves a strategic, long-term function, not a day-to-day, management function.  As noted in NAIS’s Trustee Handbook, trustees, “…plan for the future of the school for which you care.”  Our role, as Leo Marshall of the Webb Schools wrote on this ALC blog last month, is to provide, “information that will help them make important strategic decisions.”  If all we are doing this month is giving a historical report of the past with a pile of statistics, then we are failing to fulfill our responsibility.  As Tommy Adams, Assistant Head of School for Enrollment at Mercersburg Academy says, “In order to be sustainable over the long haul, we must be strategic.”  What you should do with your historical data, is use it to inform trends and thinking that you should be engaging with your board.  Use what has happened in the past to help you understand what might happen in the future.  You best serve your board and your head if you can address where your admission is headed and where it should be headed. (Admittedly, not always the same thing!)

Finally, in considering your board report and presentation, consider your audience.  A good resource for this (and for all our work in admissions, actually) is Michael Thompson’s Understanding Independent School Parents.  While many on your board may not be current parents, in my experience many of them will nonetheless have the same profile: highly successful, well-educated, wealthy, and others often defer or report to them.  Thompson offers some great insights and some great suggestions.  It’s a good read.  This isn’t addressing the faculty or an open house group.  This isn’t speaking with your staff or meeting with your administrative colleagues.  Know and understand your audience and plan your presentation and messaging accordingly.

Your final board report of the year is your opportunity to tell the admissions narrative of the year just finishing and to show your expertise and competence in helping the board think strategically about your school’s enrollment, appreciate your and your department’s accomplishments, and understand the importance of your work.  Engage them professionally and thoughtfully and you will be valued and taken seriously.

Parents

A number of years ago at NAIS, I paid to attend one of those pre-conference workshops.  Actually, my school paid.  Michael Thompson was the presenter and I think he is simply amazing.  I have heard him numerous times; you may have, too.  You probably know the name: he’s a guru in the independent school world and a god in the boys’ school world for his expertise as a school psychologist. 

His workshop was aimed at teachers about how best to understand and work with independent school parents, particularly around the all-important parent/teacher conference.  I assumed there was something I could extrapolate to our world and to the all-important parent/admissions meeting and relationship.  It was excellent!  23 years in education and it remains one of the best things I have ever attended.

For all of you who haven’t heard Thompson speak about this, he has now co-authored with Alison Mazzola a small book on this very topic: Understanding Independent School Parents.  It’s less than 100 pages with big font and I read it cover-to-cover in less time than it took to fly from London to Moscow.  I highly recommend it and now the entire administrative team at my school is reading it.

The book is in roughly three sections.  1. Understanding independent school parents.  2.  Working with the 95% who are sane and rational.  3.  Tips for working with the insane and irrational!  I think it behooves all of us and our offices to understand in particular who are our parents and what is their perspective.  Less helpful but still worth the read is the strategies for working with them.  Teachers simply have different relationships than we do with parents. 

So, some highlights:

Thompson reminds us that our parents make up the smallest, wealthiest, most successful people in America.  They are highly educated and one, if not both, is highly successful.  They exercise a great deal of control, are often the smartest person in the room, and others typically report to them or defer to them. 

And then they show up at our schools.  And on the topic of children, education, developmental readiness, and curriculum, they are no longer the smartest person in the room, we are in control, and they must defer to us to help them understand their child in the context of education.  This is unfamiliar territory for them, they can easily become uncomfortable, and they may struggle with news or decisions they don’t like (e.g. denied admission, doing poorly in school).

What can we do?

Thompson recommends three steps for the 95%.  1. Engage them about their child.  Ask them about their hopes and fears and then be a good listener.  If you invite them and successfully get them to speak intimately with you about their child, you will create a bond and forever alter the dynamic of your relationship with them.  2. “Claim the child.”  As we all know from the research of NAIS, a good deal of the value added independent schools provide is that each child is “known”.  Demonstrate that you have read the application and supporting documents and that to you their child is a person and you “know them” (as best you can at this point), not just another applicant or a number in your database.  3.  Be professional.  These parents are professionals and so are you so don’t let them forget it.  Just because they may make exponentially more money, doesn’t make you less a professional.  Start and end on time, be prepared, and follow up as needed.  For Lower School admissions folks or teachers, Thompson goes so far as to suggest you be sure to dress the part of a professional and not like someone who spends their day sitting on the floor leading reading circles or playing with dragons.  (Again, that was Thompson, not me!, saying that, dear Lower School admissions colleagues.)

At the end of the day, Thompson reminds us that these are parents we want: they have chosen to allocate their resources for their child’s education.  We have all worked with wealthy parents who could afford our schools but who won’t give up the shore house or the boat or the annual family ski trip to Switzerland and their kids remain in public school. 

Our parents made a different choice, a better choice.