As Board President, make sure your Board isn’t “spinning”—from its own or the school community’s perspective—and that you have the right number of Trustees to accomplish your school’s goals.

Trustees are busy people. Many feel that the time given to committee and full-Board meetings satisfies their commitment to the school. However, those who don’t consider visits to campus and attendance at school events a part of Board membership leave out a very important component of their responsibilities.

Your school’s daily schedule is an incredibly important aspect of how you deliver your mission to students. It defines how long students spend on each subject, with each teacher, and in each classroom. It can enhance academic performance or become a source of stress for students and faculty. That’s why it’s important to hold an annual strategic scheduling meeting to assess what’s working and what isn’t within your school schedule.

Your parent education program aims to engage your students’ families and help them feel like true members of your community. Your school puts hard work into holding events and creating materials, so it can be disappointing if only a small percentage of your families participate on a regular basis.

Many schools focus on cultivating an extraordinary major gifts program. No matter your school size, a successful major gifts strategy requires careful planning, research, and execution.

Creating a safe school environment for students, faculty, and staff is no simple endeavor in today’s world. Addressing both physical and psychological safety is a complex undertaking and requires care and attention to many facets of school operations.

Summer programs are distinctly different from your school-year offerings—and they propose different risks. The Business Office, along with the Summer Program Director and School Head, will need to consider how to approach your summer program.

The beginning of the school year adds many duties and tasks to your to-do list—welcoming students and families back to campus, hosting Back to School Night and other events, ramping up classes, and much more. This is also when the School Head begins planning the year’s professional development for faculty and administrators. Quality professional development that’s carefully planned and focused can directly correlate to higher levels of student engagement, satisfaction, and performance.

You make important decisions every day in your school. From deciding what actions will support the strategic plan to creating a quality experience for students, families, and employees, you want to truly understand what your constituencies want before implementing any new initiatives.

Summer 2018 saw student visa denials—nonimmigrant F-1, M-1 and J-1— like never before. Scores of schools and international students reported this phenomenon and it will likely impact 2018–19 overall enrollment numbers.