NBOA President and CEO
A critical role for a national association like NBOA is to ensure that its mission is married to the needs of its members. The pace of change for independent schools never slows, and NBOA prioritizes understanding what’s most important to school business officers and other financial and operational leaders. We do this by conducting comprehensive member needs assessments, paying close attention to the discussions on NBOA Connect, and connecting with members through programs, webinars and online courses (and then carefully reviewing your evaluations).
Above all, we strive to understand what is on your minds as it relates to your schools’ financial health. To support that goal, three times each year the NBOA Board of Directors assembles to govern and oversee the business of NBOA. An enlightening part of each meeting is a “member scan,” in which each director takes two minutes to share an issue related to his or her school, the profession or the independent school community. Here are the top issues we heard about last week during the 2017 Fall Board of Directors Meeting.
- New construction/facility expansions: Business officers discussed various degrees of construction taking place on their campuses. These ranged from renovations to one school's development of a freestanding preschool to another school’s purchase and subsequent demolition of an adjacent shopping center to expand the school’s program. Plant-related efforts may be among the most resource-intensive activities a school may undertake, placing significant demands on the business officer. How do you balance your everyday responsibilities while meeting with architects, reviewing traffic studies and helping to ensure that the project is on time and on budget? It seems that you are not daunted by these pressures, as we have observed a building boom among NBOA member schools for the past several years.
- Capital campaigns: If buildings are going up, where is the money coming from? Many schools reported conducting feasibility studies and holding active campaigns to acquire the resources to remodel, construct and maintain world-class facilities. At a time when many new preK-12 competitors are entering our space with little to no facilities investments (instead, leasing or occupying virtual spaces online), our schools continue to invest in their facilities. Many report their new capital campaigns are the largest in their schools’ histories.
“While we have been good at cultivating donors, we have not been good at cultivating community relationships.”
- Community relations: Perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of school construction is the need to engage with the community to help ensure a project’s success. Whether asking for support or permission, business officers have been finding themselves at city council meetings discussing traffic, conditional use permits, evacuation plans and (in some cases) increases to enrollment caps. As one of your colleagues put it, “While we have been good at cultivating donors, we have not been good at cultivating community relationships.” As a parent and trustee at my daughter’s school, I often think that a community can have far worse neighbors than an independent school. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that a school can be a lightning rod and that school leaders, including business officers, must work hard to keep these relationships from becoming expensive and time-consuming barriers to mission fulfillment.
- Enrollment and millennial parents: Many board members are concerned about how the prospective generation of parents values an independent school education compared to tuition costs. Regardless of whether your school is fully enrolled, young parents’ perceptions will challenge schools to engage with them successfully. Have you identified your school’s unique value proposition as compared to the alternatives, and positioned it as an innovator in education rather than stuck in a traditional past? It’s clear that business officers and enrollment managers must engage in these inquiries together.
Every tool we use to keep our fingers on the pulse of independent schools is uniquely valuable to the work of NBOA. As the association commences upon a new strategic planning process, you can be sure that our takeaways will be front and center as we work with all of you — as a national community — in addressing challenges, exchanging solutions and ensuring the success of our schools.
