When faculty and staff call each other “family,” what do they mean? In my experience, they are referring to feeling comfortable and “at home” when they’re working. They have relationships that feed them. They look forward to going to work, and they are satisfied with what they do once they arrive. They also have certain expectations that the school, as an institution, will be there for them through life’s ups and downs.However, families are complicated, messy units that don’t often look like the Leave It to Beaver reruns I watched in the ‘70s. Honesty and candor are not typically top family values. There’s text and subtext—some topics are easier to speak about than others. Families have misfortunes, missteps, and mistakes that are often swept under the rug.
Being like a family in the school setting is appealing in its promise of familiarity and stability. However, the more we unpack it, the more it seems like a disappointing myth. Family systems are complex and intricate. The power—rules, resources, and the source of love and attention—rests with the authority figures. It doesn’t promote a culture of stretching, growing, and changing to meet our 21st century challenges. The biggest obstacle the family paradigm presents is how it makes truth-telling difficult because sometimes the truth upends long-established norms.
But truth-telling is the only path for our schools, especially as we navigate a challenging financial landscape. We can keep presenting all kinds of rosy data—from demographic to financial—to our constituencies as we bumble along, an ailing 20th-century school model brightened up in a new layer of paint. But paint chips and fades, and the ugly reality will eventually appear. As head of school, my job is to be the truth-teller-in-chief. It isn’t always the “best year ever.” And yet I can still love and believe in the school with every fiber of my being. Honesty and loyalty can coexist. A head must articulate that the mission is enduring, relevant, and eternal while the business model might be very broken. And while it is much easier to transform a business model than a mission, it can be hard to separate the two because the business model is represented by the students and families who come through the door every September. Many school leaders fall into the trap that school loyalty means only talking about victories and successes rather than speaking about the truly complicated reality most schools face.
That’s why four years ago, in my first faculty address at Westover School (CT), I told faculty members I wanted to consciously move away from calling our school a family, explaining that a family is something you have no choice over; good, bad, or indifferent, you are born into it. Instead, we’d be a community, which is something you opt into every day. Values would be visible, overt, and acknowledged, and if people don’t agree with the community’s values, they are free to leave. Community members are empowered, and they hold the choice—and the truth.
Shifting the Paradigm
I thought it might be puzzling for Westover faculty—which has little turnover—to understand why I wanted to call our school a community. But it is how I have led throughout my career and will continue to lead, so it was important for me to make this explicit. But much to my surprise, I also learned that a number of faculty members quietly rejoiced at this statement, as they welcomed more transparency and consistency. I make it a point at the beginning of every school year to remind everyone: We are not stuck with each other, and we don’t owe each other unconditional acceptance. We are here for the students and the mission. There are boundaries; there is accountability. There is also joy, strong relationships, personal growth, professional reward, and achievement. I believe every decision, especially those that relate to the financial sustainability of our school, ultimately flows from explicitly and specifically establishing the community paradigm.When I started at Westover in 2015, I inherited an exceptional institution; I also inherited a school with grave trouble finding its footing in a quickly changing world. I had to get clear about where we were in relation to the changing landscape. It took two years to understand the reality of the school’s real financial situation (the deficit, the costs of running each department and the school). For example, we gave out professional development funds but had no clear budget line for professional development. The chief operating officer, director of enrollment management, and I also had to accurately identify the number of students enrolled who paid tuition versus students attending tuition-free as part of international “sister school” exchanges versus faculty/staff remission students; the opening of school enrollment numbers appeared much more impressive than was evidenced by our cash flow. We also had to get clear about financial aid—what we were spending in endowed funds, what amount of tuition wasn’t being collected because of our discount rate, and how our values informed—or didn’t—our financial-aid policies and procedures.
Gaining this clarity and delivering these truths to the board and the school community was the most difficult task of my career. As heads, we want to be seen as our school’s greatest cheerleader, not the biggest whistleblower.
As I continued to seek the truths of our school, my openness and honesty had the unexpected benefit of attracting an incredibly talented team of senior leaders. In nearly all the finalist interviews for the positions I’ve hired—a chief financial officer, a director of enrollment management, and a director of development—candidates would comment that they appreciated how up front I was about the challenges ahead. In fact, they were rather stunned.
Facing the Financial Model
We need human capital to help us provide what our websites tout. And we need more and more well-educated, reasonably compensated human capital to ensure quality as kids’ needs increase: social-emotional wellness, counseling, team sports, arts centers, global citizenship, makerspaces, experiential learning, and more. Meanwhile, schools must keep up with the latest in educational practices to attract students. There are very high, built-in costs to providing the amazing student experience our constituents have come to expect. Very few schools have tuitions that cover the full cost of what it takes to educate a student. We can’t downsize or cut our way out of this, or reasonably expect people to pay more and want less. Each year, tuition creeps higher than inflation because technology doesn’t help our industry cut costs.At Westover, an all-girls upper school, we use a net tuition revenue (NTR) model, and although I pay keen attention to any article or workshop describing other models, they all seem to be essentially driving toward the same result—attracting great kids and families yet charging different amounts for the same product based on individual financial circumstances. How does the NTR model, or similar models, relate to how we evaluate our applicants? What does the system itself incentivize? I will posit that most 13-year-old girls could benefit enormously from a Westover education. It begins to feel strange to then be parsing who should be here and who should not, and deciding in the most ethical way how ability to pay figures into this picture. We all have thorough and thoughtful admission teams who work with rubrics to rate our applicants to find the best mission-aligned fit, but still. It bothers me we can’t offer more girls access.
So we have an expensive product as well as a commitment to equity and inclusion. We all know that learning improves in a diverse environment and that we need every type of diversity in our student body to best deliver on our missions. Unless an institution is blessed with an incredibly generous endowment, I would say the vast majority of schools are in a position where it is impossible to both sustainably underwrite the cost of the product as well as serve our missions. These needs, in fact, are in direct conflict. But as heads of school, we have the obligation and the opportunity to further the missions of our schools. And to do that most effectively, we need to speak the truth and question the fundamentals of the system itself. A school can only do this as a community, not a family. Families don’t generally make it a practice to step back and question the underpinnings of its own structure.
Leading Amid Change
We can acknowledge we are powerless before demographic shifts. We are powerless before a rapidly changing culture and a rising wave of technology that permeates every aspect of our lives. We are powerless before giant global shifts in politics and economics. However, we do have power over the relationship paradigm we use to lead our schools. As a community, we need to ask what does the future look like? How do we acknowledge the baked-in flaws of our model and shape institutions that can truly be flexible, build on strengths, and most importantly, serve kids who will shape our collective fate?And as a result of four years of discipline, staying consistent to the commitment toward living as a community, Westover went from a significant deficit to a surplus, and just completed two multimillion-dollar renovation projects on time and under budget. The annual fund went from missing its goal in fiscal year 2016 to coming in 15% over goal in 2019. Enrollment numbers are up by every measure, and we are expanding our market reach. We codified our core values and refocused the mission statement, and now we are beginning a pivotal strategic planning process. And, despite the paradigm shift, we continue to have very low faculty turnover.
As we begin strategic planning, we are asking the key questions: What is our business? Are we in the high school diploma granting business? The college placement business? I would argue, according to our refocused mission statement, Westover is in the business of “empower[ing] young women to lead lives of consequence.” And that opens up vast horizons on program offerings and how we can make Westover accessible for many girls, whether it be for a summer program, a year’s exchange, a gap year, or for the full four-year experience. We received a traditional E.E. Ford grant that will help us implement girls empowerment programming and become a center for women’s empowerment work. I want Westover to empower as many girls and women as we possibly can each year.
Westover is stable but still vulnerable to economic and geopolitical shifts. We are managing debt. Like many schools, we are facing fundamental changes on the horizon in our donor pool. Truth-telling has helped solidify the kind of foundation that will help our school navigate these changes and support girls experiencing Westover for years to come.
This work requires relentless honesty—we owe it to our schools, to our students, and to 21st century education.