Sun. 1pm-10pm

Bonjour.  I live in a bilingual country and that’s all the French I know.  Shame on me.  Well, I do know a few other key survival words: champagne, croissant, brie, quiche!  So it’s about time I learned French and so I now own the complete Rosetta Stone French programme.

My package arrived last Friday and on Saturday I went to install the software on my computer.  Being somewhat of a tech idiot, I, to no surprise, had problems.  No worries.  There’s a 1-800 support number I can call.  I called it.  They were closed.  You feel my pain.  You, like I did, think I’m doomed to wait until Monday. 

Think again.

Rosetta Stone tech support is closed on Saturdays but open from 1pm to 10pm on Sundays.  I just had to wait 24 hours.  I spent those 24 hours being very curious about these odd hours.  So once I called tech support and got my issue resolved (shocking: I was inserting the dvd’s in the wrong sequence, despite their being clearly labeled!), I inquired about their support schedule. 

You know where this is going: people buy the software while running errands on the weekends and then attempt installation on Sunday afternoon.  So 5pm on Sunday and not 9am on Saturday is when RS support is needed and so that’s when they’re available!

When are we needed?  It was something we discussed at this year’s Essex Institute.  Shouldn’t day schools have evening open houses for busy two-income parents?  Maybe even interviews a few times at night during the busy season to accommodate those parents?  Boarding schools work with students from around the world and from many time zones.  Why do we force them all into our 9am to 5pm workday?  Or maybe we don’t and we’re losing families because we’re not available to support them when they need us.  Is it so crazy to ask a staff member to take a 4pm to midnight shift once and a while to be available on the phone or maybe an online chat?

I read something related just recently about social media.  (I apologize I don’t recall the source but I fully confess this isn’t my own idea.)  The advice was to look and see when our blogs and Facebook accounts are the most active and to post then.  Not to do so during our own 9am to 5pm work hours when our prospective students are in school.  Like good teaching, we have to meet them where they are.

My last post was about thinking what’s at the center of our offices.  I guess this one asks us to think about what time to be there.

Au Revoir!

At the center

 

Living in Canada, it’s been a while since I was in a Barnes& Noble.  And given with what haste big bookstores are closing, it’s no surprise.  They’re not easy to find.  But what was a surprise was when I walked in and found that the Nook display and sales area had taken over the center of the floor, replacing what had traditionally been the spot for Barnes & Noble customer service.

You remember customer service, right?  Helpful folks who would look up books for you and then walk with you into the stacks to find the book, as though you couldn’t manage the convoluted alpha-by-author’s-last-name filing system of Barnes & Noble.  Those friendly book geeks were eventually supplemented by kiosks, on which you could look up your own book, thank you very much.  But if you waited just a moment, someone would be right back from helping a customer over in 14^th Century Danish War and Religion and be able to help you next.  Amazon couldn’t touch this!

So imagine my surprise when there was no longer a customer service center in the middle of the store.  I write this as I head off to the Essex Institute for Enrollment Management.  I’ve lost track of how many years I have gone. 12?  14 maybe?  But I am suddenly remembering a conversation from last year’s meeting.  We were looking at school taglines or admissions mottos and were challenged to ask ourselves if the mottos were about the school or the student.  Where was your focus?  It was an insightful, interesting exercise and conversation.

Essentially, it asked what we had at the center of our schools: the school itself or the students?  Nooks or customers?

And this reminded me of an early post by Fran Ryan, Assistant Headmaster at Rumsey Hall School, on SSATB’s “Right On Time: the ALCBlog”.  Fran is a veteran at helping families navigate the waters of secondary school admissions but has recently had to “self-navigate” his family as they went through the process for his son.

Fran challenges us from his new perspective by stating, “In schools, admission processes seem to generally serve the efficient running of the office. That does not necessarily translate into creating a meaningful experience for a family examining a school.  Make sure that your process makes sense for your prospective families. Make sure that it is efficient and easy to manage, which is different from being easy.”

In other words, make sure that service, and not sales, is in the center of your “store”.

Electronic Toolbox

I have a meeting with the Board of Governors in less than hour.  Why wouldn’t I be working on a blog post??  Well, frankly, my head and my notebook are so full of stats, charts, quaint stories, tales of woe, and predictions for the future that my brain needs a rest before I go in the big room.  But one of the things I will be addressing today is our plan to step back and do a serious communications audit this summer.

We have certainly jumped with reckless abandon onto the social media and in-bound marketing wagon.  In the last two years we have launched a very active Facebook and Twitter account.  They are updated almost daily.  We have launched a new website, built for maximum SEO.  We have an equally active blog up and running and we have over 100 videos on our YouTube Channel.  We even have a full-time employee dedicated to the maintenance of all these media.  Our proverbial toolbox is full.  Our proverbial cup overfloweth.

But two statements in the last month have been ricocheting around in my head.  The first comes from the famous columnist Peggy Noonan.  Whether or not you agree with her politics, she is a brilliant writer and her books are wonderful.  The other comes from my dear friend JT Hanley at Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, California.  He does not have the fame of Peggy Noonan but he should.  He is an educator and a coach without peer.

Talking about President Obama and how his campaign has become expert at mining the internet and the data to be found therein, Noonan, who is not a fan of the president, asks in this column, “If you have fabulous new ways to reach everyone in the world but you have little to say, does that really help you?”  And then my friend JT, speaking on a topic I honestly don’t remember (we were a few martinis and glasses of wine into dinner at that point!), asked, “If you don’t have focus, isn’t your camera just a plastic box?” 

All this got me thinking of our electronic arsenal.  Now that we have built up these resources and filled our toolbox, what do we do next?  We have spent the last two years creating and staffing for this 21st century world of recruitment in which we must be successful but I will admit we have not figured out exactly what to do with it now that we have it.  Or more accurately, we have not figured out the best use of what to do with it.  How do we harness their power, craft the messages, maximize the potential, and build a strategy?

Ask me in September what we accomplished this summer.

Relationships.

I had the personal and professional pleasure to have dinner with a favourite consultant at IECA this month. The real treat was she invited me to dinner—what an honour. You would know her. We all know her. And we all love her. She is kind, patient and has immeasurable time for all of us, all while running her own practice and helping mentor new consultants in the profession.

Around April 10th when we all constantly vacillate between celebration and frustration, I lost one kid each from two key feeder schools to the same boarding school. I’d heard of this boarding school but, frankly, it wasn’t on my radar and I never had reason to think it was in the same league. (To be honest, I knew so little of it, I didn’t have any reason to think it wasn’t in the same league either.) So, I told this to our consultant friend and asked her what she knew of the school.

She loves the school. She has sent a number of clients there over the years. She had great things to say about it and said her clients had all been quite happy there. She respected their mission and felt they held true to who they were, something very important to her. No complaints.

But then the admissions director left.

And she’s sent nobody since.

She doesn’t know the new admissions director. She doesn’t have a contact, doesn’t have someone with whom she can have a frank conversation about a client, someone with whom she can test the waters. There is nobody at that school who will roll out the red carpet for her clients when they visit, nobody to give them an extra bit of attention and to recognize who sent them. She still thinks very highly of the school but her relationships are the key to her confidence in recommending a school. And she has none there now.

 Four days later I had the professional privilege to stand next to Pat Gimbel from Deerfield at a fair in California. Pat has been doing this forever and is a role model and mentor to so many of us. And if you haven’t heard, she’s retiring next year. What a loss for us. But Pat and I got chatting, making note of who was attending the fair. Directors? Other staff? Local parent or alumni volunteers? I noted with admiration and congratulations that she’s enrolled five kids from this prestigious feeder school out of 13 graduates who were continuing onto boarding school. We then talked about the importance of relationships and why someone of her stature from a school like hers still hits the road and travels the world. Pat doesn’t pawn off Asia on someone else. She’s there in the trenches in Korea like the rest of us. And after a grueling admissions year, just weeks after April 10th, she was on that long 6 ½ flight from Boston to San Francisco to attend this fair, at this school where Deerfield is so beloved that they got over 33% of the boarding-bound graduates. She was on the 6am flight back to Boston the next morning to get back to her office. Why does she do this? To maintain her ties and relationships. They are key to her and to her success.

As she prepares to walk out the door, Pat still teaches us by her words and deeds that it is still all about the relationships.

International versus Global

So if you’re one of the original readers of my blog—and Bless You! if you are—you might remember I’ve written on the movie “The Blind Side” before, here. Now, picture it: the Sunday before the return to school after March break. I’ve got about four loads of unfolded laundry piled on the bed. I turn on the television in the bedroom for some background entertainment while I fold, sort, and put away. I happen upon the opening scene of “The Blind Side” and three hours later the laundry is folded, sorted, put away, and I’ve accomplished nothing else whilst I watched this entire movie…yet again. And the irony is I own the DVD so I don’t have to watch it on television, where it gets dragged out almost an hour longer due to commercials. But I do.

If you’ve seen the movie, now picture this scene: Leanne is at lunch with the other “mothers who lunch”. We know the type: our schools are filled with them. And thank goodness, as they’re not the ones asking about financial aid. She has shared with her shocked friends the tales of taking in Big Mike and giving him a home. One of them says, “Why Leanne, you have changed this boy’s life.” She replies, “No. He has changed our lives.”

I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural TABS Global Symposium over March break. More than the pleasure of attending, I had the privilege of helping think about its creation. It involved mostly schools from the USA but there was certainly a respectable representation from other countries, especially for the first time attempt.

In my mind (although I don’t attempt to speak for TABS), this was about the transition I think is necessary of taking American schools with international students and turning them into global schools with global student bodies. I have been at this a long time and I certainly remember and perpetuated the idea of bringing international students to the USA so that we could change them, help them become and understand and appreciate and embrace American values and education. And then help them into American universities. Isn't that their goal and dream? After all, if that wasn’t what they wanted, they shouldn’t have chosen us. "They" could have gone anywhere else instead.

But I think the symposium as well as 21st century schools are about tearing down the “us” and “they” concepts. Like Big Mike and Leanne, they are no longer about the international student being changed by being in our schools but, rather, about our schools open to being changed by the presence of our international students. It's not unlike the movement of the 1990's to change the curricular/departmental title from "foreign" languages (implying an "otherness" to the primacy of English) to modern and classical languages. Or just, simply, languages.

In my free time (as if—ha!), there’s a longer paper in me to write on this topic. My perspective has certainly changed greatly by being in Canada and by observing America and American education from over the border. No matter how long I’m here, that change will be permanent and I will be forever grateful for it. But for now, I’m honored to have played the smallest of roles in thinking about this topic and having participated in TABS’s effort to bring it to the forefront of our collective conscious.

It’s a big idea and a big topic to wrestle to the ground and it means fundamental changes in essentially very traditional and change-averse institutions in how we view our schools, how we view education, how we view our role on the world stage. It’s not easy but I’ve been impressed by those I have seen tackling the concept.

But isn’t that what the 21st century calls and encourages and challenges us to do?

Lessons from Mary

NOTE: this post is based in politics but is not political. Please continue to read without fear of partisanship. As well, no animals were harmed in the production of this post!

Question: what is more entertaining than Mary Matalin? Well, Mary Matalin when she appears with her husband, James Carville. But this past weekend on “This Week” it was just Mary. Being the Republican talking head that she is, she was sharing the many reasons why she believes that President Obama will lose and the public will choose the yet undetermined alternative, whoever he might be.

But one of her arguments was a very clear articulation of the concern I have been expressing for the last three years during our post-Lehman Brothers collapse economy. Her point: the voter in the election booth this fall won’t care about the employment rate, the participation rate in the national labor force, the stock market, or the growth of the GDP over the last three quarters. They will care about what is in their checking account, whether there’s money leftover at the end of the month, and their anxiety over every bill that arrives in the mail.

Her visual: the mom at the gas pump with the SUV watching the pump and the price escalate and escalate. As she talked about this mom, the admissions professional in me saw car seats in the back and lacrosse equipment in the cargo area. She maybe had one of those round, white stickers on her back window and she could be on her way to the meeting of the volunteer parent auction committee. She’s not voting on 8.8% versus 8.3% unemployment. She’s voting on the fact that the pump now reads $84 to fill her SUV’s tank and she knows it won’t be her only visit to the gas station this week.

And those are our parents and our worries. As inflation goes up around 1% and our tuition rates go up 3-6%, we have to worry about those prospective families with their SUVs. They aren’t choosing an independent school because the market recently closed up over 13,000 points or because unemployment has come down slightly. Whether or not they can comfortably afford our schools is determined by what’s in the bank, what’s in the checkbook, and what bills show up near the end of the month. It’s determined by what it costs to fill the SUV and what it costs at the grocery store to fill the family at dinner.

Until any recovery trickles down into the bank accounts of the individual citizen, we are going to have to factor in their daily reality and not the national trends. After all, they pay their tuition from their checkbook, not from the 12 month trailing average of national import/export ratios.

It’s a great and comforting thing to see the economy slowly—oh so very slowly—recovering but it’s not trickling down into the checkbooks. Not yet. Like it or not, like her or not, there’s a few things Mary can teach us about consumer behavior and consumer reality. We should listen.

Starting from scratch

Through a professional connection from my friend Sam Herrick at Live Oak School in San Francisco, I was introduced to the East Bay School for Boys, also known as e.b.s.b.. (And, yes, their graphic is done with that e.e. cummings look.) This is a brand new, single-sex middle school. They opened last year with 17 students; this year they have 90. And as of my visit earlier this month, they were investigating new, larger facilities to meet the continued demand they foresee.

What really struck me about my visit is the incredible thought that went into the design of this school. I had a wonderful tour from the head of school, Jason Baeten, who shared with me the considerations, thoughts, and ideas behind every bit of the space, program, curriculum, philosophy and even their motto: empowering the engaged, thoughtful and courageous men of tomorrow…. We had a great exchange about their choice of “courageous” and he told me about the other words with which they wrestled and why they landed on courageous.

It was a real privilege to think and hear about how a 21st century school was carefully crafted from scratch, how nothing was taken for granted or done “because it’d always been done that way”. They were unencumbered in their construction of this new school, limited by only their imaginations. How daunting. But how exciting!

And then I returned from my trip to the disappointing news that I was losing my wonderful assistant director. With her pending departure this summer and a year-long maternity leave I need to fill in the next six weeks (you read that right: maternity leaves are a year up here!), that’s half the Upper School recruitment team of four! If anyone from the Lower School office or my support staff tells me they’re also leaving, I just may lose my marbles!

But then I thought of e.b.s.b. and paused. They inspire me. And as I type this, I am giving serious consideration to what a 21st century admissions team and office might look like. How has our practice and profession evolved? How, what and why should we be doing things differently than we did ten years ago, fifteen years ago? Two years ago? While staff changes are never easy and the process of hiring is arduous and takes up a tremendous amount of time and energy, when will I next have the gift of considering two full-time positions at once and designing how I might re-allocate those 80 hours a week?

I don’t have any answers yet and I certainly welcome anybody’s input. In the meantime, I’m going to try and tackle this living up to the inspiring and challenging ideals of e.b.s.b.: engaged, thoughtful and courageous….