As an academic administrator, you can’t expect to eliminate all the stress in your school. However, you can certainly take steps to ensure that your school structure causes as little stress as possible, and is set up to best support faculty, staff, and students.

There are many audiences you want to reach when marketing your school. And while every audience has unique needs, a main component of your marketing messages must remain consistent—students are the heart of your mission and your school. Therefore, all marketing must be unequivocally student-centered.

When prospective families consider your school, they want to make sure the programs and services you offer meet their needs and standards. But they also want more. Parents want a sense of validation that your school’s mission meets their desires for their children, and will help mold them into capable citizens of the world. They want to feel confident in the quality, benefits, and value that your school offers.

Parent-teacher conferences occur a few times each year at your school. These meetings give parents and teachers an important opportunity to talk about each student’s progress, while discussing any issues and setting a course for future success. While these meetings fall into the purview of your faculty, division heads, and possibly department chairs, the School Head also has an important role to play during parent-teacher conferences. It’s vital that you express excitement for these critical, relationship-establishing encounters, and help facilitate them.

We’re no strangers to the fact that screen time use is on the rise among students. This increase in students’ media exposure can impact many areas of school operations, including policies surrounding student device use, how students complete homework and other tasks at home, and how faculty and staff can best relate to and support students.

Being part of your school’s Leadership Team is a valued role, one that serves your students, parents, and broader community. There’s also no denying that it can a stressful job—one where you’re expected to take on various tasks to support the school. Often times, job descriptions don’t exist, or don’t fully outline all the duties you are ultimately responsible for managing.

Your website is your school’s outward reflection of its mission, culture, and of course, its story. This is how your community connects with everything happening on your campus and where they can inquire about enrollment—often one of your primary goals for prospective families. Because your site’s main focus is to capture the hearts of potential families, it’s important that your site doesn’t drive users away after a few seconds.

A summer program offers numerous benefits to your students, parents, faculty, staff, and community. If you don’t currently provide a summer program, or feel your offerings aren’t as strong as they could be, there are many ways to create a quality summer program that supports your school’s mission.

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.