October 1, 2020

The 2021 - 2022 School Year

Last month's edition contained a piece on budget planning for the 2021 - 2022 school year, an activity that most independent school boards will complete in about 9 weeks. Having only recently thanked the gods for the surge of late summer enrollments, school leaders are now wondering how many of those students they'll retain. The made-for-TV version of retention in independent schools goes something like this:  we're certain that the sheer brilliance of everything we do here will win them over. Of course, retention is a much more complicated matter than that, and retaining families who enrolled in late summer at least in part because your school offered in person instruction poses a greater challenge if public schools return to business as usual next fall.  

In this month's edition, I describe how late summer enrollments played out in independent schools across the country and how schools are creating specific plans to retain those families and recapture the continuing and prospective parents they lost this year because of COVID concerns. I also advocate for a separate kind of planning for elementary school life next year. Middle and high school teachers have plenty to glean from their crash course in remote learning, but elementary teachers have mostly tallied what was lost when they couldn't be together in person with their students. Elementary school teachers will prioritize face time and community building next year.