In a previous piece I said that independent school enrollment directors should make their plans with the most complicated new families as their default audience. I believe this is the "divided family," that is, one parent a strong independent school advocate, perhaps even an alumnus of your school, the other aligned with another kind of schooling. For good measure, throw in involved grandparents with corresponding allegiances, perhaps a few nieces and nephews already happily ensconced in the public schools or the third generation of the family at St. Aloysius. In this situation, the enrollment director not only plays the role of school gatekeeper but also marriage counselor and arbiter of extended family peace. My contention is that if you're consistently winning over these families, you're going to be killing it with less complicated families.
To divided families, the wreckage of the future differs from other families only in degree and looks like this:
Too expensive, including the suspicion that, if the rumors are true, the steep tuition comes with a yearlong barrage of upsells and hidden costs.
Value barely nets in the black, a codicil of the first. The school will be good but not better enough than the other, more affordable options, the ones with a clearer path to extended-family peace.
We won't belong. These may not be our people, and they probably feel the same way about us.
All of these dynamics play out most intensely in the first 90 days of school, a stretch that contains the critical period of first impressions, the honeymoon (ideally), and the family's first unavoidable disappointment with the school. Sometimes these disappointments are emergent, an event or a miscommunication. Typically, these are easier to address. More complicated are the snowballing disappointments, and as Jill Goodman points out in her outstanding piece Six Components of Parent Retention, a problem left unresolved with a school family for more than 4 months usually inspires that family to begin looking for another option for next year, if not earlier. These families are almost impossible to retrieve, and in exit interviews, they often reveal that the school began a pattern of self-sabotaging carelessness soon after enrollment, when the host family never reached out, or perhaps worse, made a baldly perfunctory attempt to connect, the used uniform sale came and went without an alert, the beginning of school year packet contained information for some other kid named James Callahan, and their child was the only one in his classroom not in school spirit wear on First Friday, the secret handshake name for a celebration that no one took the time to translate for them, and for which the only remedy was an emergency $200 shakedown at the school swag shop. The next week, the annual fund appeal arrived in the mail.
The solution for this tale of institutional failure is partly practical. It includes a fanatical commitment to accuracy, to close collaboration between the enrollment team and all other operational partners, to triple checking, to tenacious feedback collection. The missing used uniform sale alert is almost certainly someone's failure to flip the database switch that moves prospective families onto the active roster, the First Friday snafu the failure of the communication director to insist that new families be the default audience for all parent newsletters. These are practical, sometimes tiny actions (or inactions) with huge effects. Other solutions rely more directly on the enrollment director's discernment and leadership. Host family programs are a particularly good example. The concept is powerful--new families building school relationships before the school year begins, continuing families renewing their loyalty to the school through volunteerism, etc.--but identifying great host families is complicated. From a purely practical standpoint, they are families that spend most of the summer in town, families in which at least one partner is a high empathy, high follow-through connector, and committed to the school's insistence on simple, modest new family interactions. To find these people, the enrollment director must employ diplomacy and spend down a little political capital to redirect volunteers who have a track record of poor follow through or who simply can't bring themselves (or don't know how) to do things modestly.
The second part of the remedy is something that I describe in greater detail in this piece about the shoe leather leadership that the enrollment director and her team must use to steward relationships with colleagues and with existing and new families. In the first 30 days in particular while the enrollment team is transitioning new families into the care of teachers, division directors and other support staff, the enrollment team must keep a highly sensitive finger on the pulse of each new family's emerging experience. They do this by being present at the front door, in classrooms, at dismissal, by calling or talking to parents of new students multiple times in the first weeks of the school year, by introducing them to other families, and by collaborating with and guiding teachers, advisors and division directors on all of this communication.
There will be a time later in the fall for collecting information from new families that will help the enrollment team refine their work, but the attention I describe here is entirely about each new family and their own personal experience. A strong start to the school year for new families is a priceless and one-time-only retention effort, by which I mean that once missed, it can never be made up. It's an institution wide collaboration choreographed by the director of enrollment that has to be stellar.
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