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.

The D-Word

Friends were visiting from Washington, D.C. this weekend. Actually, it was my first admissions boss ever and her husband although she long ago stopped being my boss but thankfully has remained my good friend. But you can still feel free to blame her for my presence in our profession—she encouraged me!

This was their first visit and so I took them on the obligatory tour of campus—after, of course, the obligatory visit to Niagara Falls. While touring, she commented on the stately grandeur of our d*rms (see, I can’t even type it out!). It was at this point that I struck with the precision of a rattle snake and corrected the error of her ways. “They’re houses,” I exclaimed, and went on to explain Ridley’s residential commitment and philosophy as the largest boarding programme in the province. Being a true and traditional boarding school, you approach your residential program with the utmost seriousness.

Now my friend has since left the world of admissions (it IS possible apparently) and is in project management for a real estate development corporation. Part of her work involves overseeing apartment complexes throughout the mid-Atlantic. As we continued on our tour of Ridley she explained to me that her company is very clear on their expectation that those who live in the apartments are considered residents, not tenants (the T-word). In doing so, they send a message, if only a reinforcing one amongst themselves, about how they do business and how they treat and engage their customers.

These little rules might seem silly or trivial but, in my experience, they aid in creating a mindset and an approach to our work that helps dictate our actions and priorities. At a previous school where I was director, we implemented an internal office motto of “Families First” to remind ourselves that walk-ins, late arriving appointments, and telephone calls were all our top priority and not an interruption to our day or our duties. Our enrollment did not allow us to roll our eyes at any of these people and instead we needed to embrace them. And from my perspective as the objective outsider who had joined this office, it worked. I saw a decidedly different—and better—outlook from the staff and how they approached some of our more challenging prospective families. And, even more importantly, it was reflected in the numbers.

The famous organizational guru Stephen Covey and author of the The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People coined the phrase, “Start with the end in mind.” If we think houses not d*orms, and residents not tenants, then we just may shape the thinking of our staffs and our colleagues towards our enrollments ends.

And wouldn’t our schools (if not the world) be a better place if everyone thought as we did??