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No matter if you’re a School Head, Admission Director, Development Director, Board member, or any other private school administrator—Ideas & Perspectives®, ISM’s premier private school publication, has strategic solutions for the pervasive problems you face.
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- Enrollment dropping off? Discover how to implement the right admission and enrollment management strategies that engage your community—and fill your classrooms.
- Trouble retaining teachers? Learn how you can best support your teachers using ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development framework. Your faculty members will become more enthusiastic about their roles—which ultimately improves student outcomes.
- Fundraising campaigns not as successful as you’d hoped? Implement ISM’s practical advice and guidance to build a thriving annual fund, construct an effective capital campaign, and secure major donors—no matter your community size or location.
- Not sure how to provide professional development—for you and your staff? Learn ways to develop and fund a successful professional development strategy. You can improve teacher-centered satisfaction and growth, which in turn strengthens student-centered learning.
- Problematic schedule? You can master the challenges of scheduling with the help of ISM’s practical advice, based on our experience with hundreds of schools and our time-tested theories.
- And so much more.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
Attracting and Retaining the Best Faculty
Volume 43 No. 7 // June 4, 2018
Every independent school must hire, develop, and retain the best faculty to deliver upon its mission and the Portrait of the Graduate. You need qualified teachers who are committed to your mission, can connect with your students, and contribute positively to the faculty culture. You hold tight to those pied piper teachers that embody the school’s Characteristics of Professional Excellence. How do you attract and retain such teachers?
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Admission Practices With Siblings
Volume 43 No. 7 // June 4, 2018
Your current students’ brothers and sisters can make ideal additions to your student body. Their families are mission-appropriate and already committed to your school. When parents enroll another child, they are making an obvious and powerful endorsement of your school.
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Maintain a Complete and Accurate Head’s File
Volume 43 No. 6 // May 15, 2018
With any employer-employee relationship, your school must maintain paper and electronic files. Just as your school should have a policy on what is contained in an employee’s file and who will keep it, your Board must do the same for its sole employee—the School Head. Basic documents on payroll and benefits should be kept by the Business Office. However, the Head’s contracts, evaluations, and supporting documents (and other employment-related correspondence) should not be accessible to anyone in the school. Only the Board should see this confidential information. (Access to health records should be limited even further—perhaps only to the Board President.)
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Enhance the Effectiveness of Your Financial Aid Committee
Volume 43 No. 6 // May 15, 2018
The Financial Aid Committee plays an integral role in your school’s strategic enrollment management operation. Taking a best practices approach ensures your financial aid decision-making strengthens (rather than undermines) your school’s fiscal position—and your ability to sustain mission excellence over time. When managed strategically, your financial aid process and decisions enhance the mission experience of every student enrolled at your school.
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Create a Rich Inbound Marketing Strategy to Increase Website Traffic and Inquiries
Volume 43 No. 6 // May 15, 2018
Standing out in the “virtual” crowd is becoming more difficult as families are overloaded with in-your-face marketing tactics and spam. Therefore, it’s important to create content that not only attracts mission-appropriate families, but also converts them into qualified leads.
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The ISM X: The Fifth Iteration of the Stability Markers
Volume 43 No. 6 // May 15, 2018
The fifth iteration of the ISM Stability Markers® has generated small—but necessary—alterations in the graphic representation (shown below), the ISM X™. These alterations center around changes in the scoring of the Strategic Board Assessment, which has become the Strategic Board Assessment II,2 the outcome of a two-year ISM study. This 15-item (Board self-scored) instrument, previously comprising four six-point Stability Markers (Letters A, B, C, and D) in the fourth iteration, has been transformed into a single 24-point Stability Marker in the fifth.
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New-Trustee Orientation
Volume 43 No. 5 // April 16, 2018
Your annual orientation session for the new Trustee should be grounded in your governance-level mission statement. ISM has for decades suggested that Boards of Trustees create a governance-level mission statement—a mission statement for the Board itself, not to be confused with the institutional mission statement. Such a governance-level statement, ISM has suggested, should read approximately as follows.
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How to Recognize and Handle Personally Identifiable Student Information
Volume 43 No. 5 // April 16, 2018
The debate about personal “protected data” continues, in large part due to the explosion in the availability and sharing of electronic data. Much has been written about this issue, and laws have been passed to mitigate the problem. Private schools must be vigilant. Our focus in this article is on what and how schools access and handle student information.
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The Whys and Hows of Implementing a Crisis Communication Plan
Volume 43 No. 5 // April 16, 2018
Thanks to smartphones, the Internet, and social media, the news cycle is now 24-7-365. Being prepared to communicate and respond during a crisis is more critical than ever. While most schools have adopted a Crisis Management Plan, far fewer have taken their preparedness to the next level—creating a Crisis Communication Plan. Although having both plans may seem redundant or unnecessary, there is an important difference between the two.
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The ISM Stability Markers: The Fifth Iteration
Volume 43 No. 4 // April 11, 2018
The fourth iteration of the ISM Stability Markers® comprised 18 variables, each of which, according to ISM’s internal reviews, correlated with private-independent schools’ ability to sustain excellence over time. In the fifth iteration shown following, our revised perspectives have resulted in 15 Stability Markers. Benchmarks, weighting, points of reference, and methods of calculation have been updated to conform to ISM’s current position on each marker.
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