A parent registering their food allergic child has a ton of worries. They fear for their child’s safety, they fear about him/her having an episode of anaphylaxis as result of an accidental contact, and they fear how the school’s faculty and staff will react in the event of an allergic reaction. There is nothing more frightening than the fear of their child’s life being threatened. As Admission Director, you have a responsibility to assure these parents of their child’s safety—and have policies in place to enforce your word.

Medical acronyms are confusing for those of us who aren’t involved with insurance procedures, claims, and policies on a daily basis. They can even be confusing for some of us who are involved regularly! Stress no more! Here's the skinny on what is what to better enable you to chose a product that works best for your school's mission—or, to help you chose what plan you should invest in for you and your family.

It’s time to start thinking about your outdoor space again. Whether you’re a home gardener or volunteer time in your school’s garden, organic gardening tips can really help boost your patch’s volume. Here are a few tips for maintaining organic beds.

Q: We’re preparing for our upcoming recertification visit and are trying to tidy up our personnel files. What documents should and shouldn’t be in our personnel files?

If lack of familiarity with financial plans or fear of becoming involved are among the reasons you avoid retirement planning, this article will give you some encouragement to help your employees and yourself plan for the future.

ISM recently published a new teacher evaluation model for private-independent schools. In that same vein, today’s lead article summarizes the key elements of teacher evaluation from ISM’s view. In many schools (and most other organizations, as well), performance evaluations are considered a waste of time or a meaningless bureaucratic exercise. What if evaluations could be used to actually increase performance—to help average teachers become excellent, and excellent teachers become even more outstanding? This can be achieved if the right things are being evaluated—and if the evaluation is communicated to the teacher in a way that helps them grow and develop.

Blogs, forums, chat rooms, listservs—the list goes on and on. These can be valuable resources for finding alternative opinions and information about almost anything. From HR concerns to just needing a quick laugh to fuel the rest of your day, blogs can remind you that you're not alone in the all-too often chaotic world of private-independent education.

In 2011, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received 99,947 charges of employment discrimination. In any given year, as many as 25% of schools might experience an employment-related claim against their Directors and Officers/Employment Practices Liability (D&O/EPL) insurance policy. An individual claim might result in judgments of hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more.

The National Center for Education Statistics recently released its report America’s Youth: Transitions to Adulthood, which examines numerous aspects of the lives of youth and young adults, ages 14 to 24, in the United States over the last several decades. The report features status and trend data from multiple surveys on the distribution of youth and their family structure; on school-, employment-, and health-related factors; and on future plans.

ISM believes that the primary responsibility of an academic administrator is to develop the capacity of faculty to deliver the mission with excellence. Here’s the rub: Most academic leaders entered the education field because they love helping children learn, grow, and develop. At a certain point, though, you switched over from teaching to administration, whereby you traded one constituency (children) for another (faculty). In doing so, you are still responsible for helping people learn, grow, and develop—the only difference is, now the people you are directly helping to grow are adults, who in turn help develop the children. These are very different jobs. Both are very important; you just need to be sure that you’re doing the one that you really want to do.