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.

Demand & Reward

At SSATB this week, Pat Bassett, President of NAIS had some interesting things to say. He always does. I like to hear him speak. But, then again, so did the person who introduced him!*

Among the many interesting things he had to say, he said our schools really needed to wrestle with what are the skills and values that the 21st Century will demand and reward. I love that question and I would love to think about it and wrestle with it. I would love to have my school consider it and make it the topic of a faculty roundtable. It challenges our pasts and makes us ponder the future.

But, unfortunately, it is the wrong question.

Sad as it may be, our colleagues in the university admissions offices sit squarely between what programs and experiences we choose to offer and the very skills and values that the 21st Century will demand and reward. The reality those of us in school administration must face (versus those in school classrooms or those big thinkers like Pat) is that at the end of the day, the vast (vast!) majority of parents are not shelling out independent school tuition to a school without an impressive and mission-appropriate university placement list. Until the likes of the universities our parents envision for their children start to demand and reward those 21st Century skills and values in the admission selection processes, we will not be teaching or nurturing them, lest we do so at our peril.

This whole line of thought is similar to the one I had when NAIS was in Boston a number of years ago. Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University (the first African-American named president of an Ivy League institution), charged us with what we should be doing to prepare students for the likes of Brown and all of higher education. She spoke so passionately and interestingly about diversity (in all its forms) that I raced back to my hotel room and logged onto the Brown University website. I was so excited and curious to see their application materials and how the criteria and questions therein reflected this important skill set and perspective their president valued. Call me an admissions geek.

Crushing disappointment followed by anger were my emotions as I noticed that standardized test scores, generic college essay questions, class rank, and gpa’s were still all of import to Brown University’s admissions committee. Nothing on their website or in their materials asked applicants about their experience with diversity, contributions they have made, lessons they have learned, perspectives they would bring to the Brown community. I actually sent her a letter. I never heard back.

We know the world is a changing place and whether you work with kindergarten or upper school candidates for admission, we can’t imagine the demands that will be placed on them or the life they will inhabit. We want to give them all that we can to make them the best prepared they can be, as has always been our tradition in independent schools. It’s a good and noble and valuable tradition.

But it comes with a high price tag, particularly in this economy. And unfortunately, it leaves us having to instead ask ourselves what are the skills and values that the 21st Century university admissions office will demand and reward.

Sad.



*If you weren’t at SSATB, I had the honour of introducing Pat. My remarks included a porn reference. I'll leave it at that.

Welcome, Heather!

So Heather Hoerle at NAIS is our new leader of SSATB. Congratulations to the search committee. None of these volunteers imagined the firestorm of this fall when they kindly agreed to serve on the board of our professional organization. They have all put in more hours than they ever planned or desired. No good deed goes unpunished, right?

I imagine this will be like taking the cork off the bottle that holds hostage the genie. Or I hope it is. Heather has been the lone voice crying in the admissions wilderness at NAIS, an organization that gives little regard to our industry or the work we do. (Do you know, for example, that in its training for new heads, NAIS provides no time for admissions but two days for development??)

It is a challenging time in our business. Some smaller schools are closing due to decreasing enrolments and medium-sized schools are scrambling, with immeasurable pressure on the admissions office but little additional resources or manpower to deliver. Meanwhile, we are top-heavy with a number of senior members of our fraternity recently retired, announcing retirement this year, or contemplating retirement. And/or wishing the balance in their TIAA-CREF accounts would have let them retired when they had planned.

Demands for financial aid are growing, technology makes us feel like the hamster running on the wheel to nowhere, and everyone at our school looks to us to save the financial day. In my two decades in admissions there has never been a greater need for national leadership and voice for our work and our people. Let us hope that unshackled from NAIS that Heather can be just that beacon.

Welcome, Heather. We have been waiting for you.

Long-Term Investment

We are to the point whereby the sound of airplane wheels touching down on terra firma is almost drown out by the deafening sound of Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids, etc. simultaneously clicking on and the rings, chirps and bells of missed texts, calls, and emails filling the cabin. How can we have gone so long (even on the ½ hour USAirways Shuttle flight from Reagan to LaGuardia!) without contact, without being in the know? We must catch up immediately—we must know what we have missed!

The 21st Century has ushered in an era of constant contact and immediate gratification, and the demand for convenience and speed has never been greater. Do any of the following sound familiar to you? Or about you?! You find it unreasonable that it takes the microwave 3-5 minutes to accomplish certain things. You can’t believe how endless is the wait in the Starbuck’s drive-thru lane. You think downloading a full-length feature movie from iTunes is simply exhausting. And let’s not even get started that FedEx can’t promise anything earlier than 8am the next morning to rural Africa!

That’s our life, right? The “new reality”. We adapt. What’s the big deal? Well, the potential big deal is an article from last week’s New York Times sent to me by Kristin Dabney (whose daughters attend James River Day School), in which the chairman of the economics department at Brigham Young University proclaims the price tag of elite education a long-term investment. His study—and the related newspaper article—is focused on elite higher education but I don’t think it’s a stretch to extrapolate that to elite independent school education.

His study makes the case for paying for just such an elite education (future earnings, graduate school admissions, etc.) but he does specify that families must be willing to think this way and to see the future benefit and payoff from today’s investment in tuition. Are we in the same boat? Not entirely. I think that some benefits of an independent school education are more immediate, more obvious, and more measurable. TABS has done an excellent job of providing proof points for boarding schools and NAIS to a lesser degree for the larger industry.

But what about YOUR school? Once a family wraps their head around paying independent school tuition, what proof points can you offer from your own school that are evidence of long-term payoffs for the investment as well as feed the beast that is parental immediate gratification? What is your school’s evidence?

Don’t leave the beast hungry, as it won’t wait long before it goes down the road to another school for what it needs. It is, after all, in a hurry.

Merry Christmas!

$300 Wine

The families who pay the full tuition at our schools make up the wealthiest citizens. NAIS places them around the top 3% income earners in the country. While they have also had their share of impact from the current economic crisis, it is relative. So if they still have the money, then how has the economy impacted their thinking, their choices?

I have had the opportunity in the last couple of weeks to speak with some very wealthy folks. We’ve discussed how spending and decision-making has changed. In a word: value. They still have the money to spend and they are still willing to spend it but they are more thoughtful about their choices. What can they get for their dollars? Like before, they are willing to drop $300 on a bottle of wine at dinner. The difference? They now want to spend $300 on a bottle that is actually worth $400. An article in the recent Conde Nast Traveller magazine mirrored this mindset. This demographic is still willing to pay $800 per night at a resort but now they want daily complimentary breakfast, pick-up from the airport, and a spa credit. Now they want value.

When families look at our schools, they assume certain things. They imagine good teachers and superior academics. Right? When were you last asked about the hiring process for teachers or about their professional development? They expect we are thoughtful in our hiring and in our admissions. They assume cutting-edge technology, the safety of their child, and a commitment to excellence. And before they were willing if not happy to pay for that.

But where is the value we can offer now? What can we offer that is not found at other schools…or at least at other schools they may typically consider? What value can we offer so they feel as they are getting a $60,000 experience and education for their child while only paying $45,000? These folks didn’t become the country’s top earners without being smart and savvy.

It may be exhausting if not annoying (or insulting or frustrating...) to think we need to find something to offer more than an excellent education for their child that sets them up for life but if we want to have the edge in challenging economic times with these important families who pay full tuition we better figure out what value we offer.