Does Your School Keep Its Promises?

Schools make all kinds of promises.  They are embedded in your mission statement, your strategic plan, your website, your admission brochures, your student handbook, your syllabi, your enrollment agreement, the signage on your playing fields, your faculty and staff handbook, your faculty recruiting materials, the conversations you have with the local town manager or police department chief.  Some promises are explicit and some are implicit. People rely on your promises.  

Great schools care if there is a gap between what they say and what they do.  

Great schools actively look for gaps.

When there is a gap, there can be a wide array of implications.  Some are legal.  Others have to do with morale.  Student morale.  Faculty morale.  Family morale.  While still others have to do with the erosion of your brand.  Over promising and under delivering is a much bigger problem than overdelivering.  If you aren’t regularly reviewing how you deliver on your promises, then you can’t be sure that you are doing so. 

Here are a few examples of typical promises schools make to families.

“We know each child well.”  

This means there is a common understanding of what it means to “know a child well.”  If you haven’t clearly articulated what this means at your school, then no doubt you have 20 people interpreting it 20 different ways.  It’s important that faculty understand what this means and in turn you convey the same to parents.  For example, “knowing a child well” implies an advising system that allows teachers to have the time to actually know their students.  This has scheduling implications.  If the schedule is actually preventing knowing students then you need a new schedule.

“We offer an engaging and innovative curriculum.”

Have you landed on what you mean by engagement?  Are you assessing it?   (There are a variety of ways to look at engagement.)  Innovative doesn’t necessarily imply cutting-edge, but it does imply that you are regularly reviewing your curriculum and updating it taking into account new research on learning, new discoveries in science, psychology, and other fields, as well as ensuring you are continuing to meet the evolving academic needs of students.  (We’ll be profiling some curricular change processes used at different schools in an upcoming edition of The Propeller.)

Safety is Our Highest Priority

Safety is a nebulous term.  For some it centers around physical security and stopping intruders.  For others it is making sure that students are well supervised on the playground, in the dining hall, or on school trips. For others it goes to safeguarding feelings and the emotional life of children. It can mean cybersecurity.  It can mean resolving physical plant issues such as mold or poor HVAC functioning.  There is no issue that causes more anxiety on the part of parents than questions about safety. 

Be Careful What You Promise:  Legal Implications

I used to be at a school that had two campuses five miles apart.  There was a bus that ran between the two, but not all students wanted to take the bus. So some rode their bikes between the campuses, which were joined by a state highway.  Not every student wore a helmet and there was a growing call from the faculty to make wearing a helmet a rule.  

When consulted on such a rule the school attorney responded with something along the lines of, “So as faculty are driving their cars between campuses and they see a student on bike without a helmet, are they going to be required to stop and make the student get off the bike?  Because if you aren’t going to require that, and faculty won’t consistently comply, it’s a problem.  You will be making a promise to students and parents that you will be enforcing the rule. That has legal implications. A student gets a head injury from riding their bike between campuses and the family’s legal counsel shows that the rule is inconsistently enforced, the school could be liable.  If you don’t think faculty will always stop students, then you are better off strongly recommending that they wear helmets, but don’t make it a rule.”  Suffice it to say that there was no belief that faculty would consistently stop students not wearing helmets and therefore no new rule made it into the books.

Broken Promises or Poor Communication?

Sometimes schools assume that there is universal understanding of the promises they are making. No one wants to live in a school community where every promise is parsed as though it were a legal agreement with a missing comma potentially upending a contract.  But a school that assumes common understanding without ensuring such a thing actually exists invites cynicism, discord and conflict.  Once those are activated in the community, they lead to disengagement and withdrawal on the part of students, families and faculty.  Often the gap between what you say and what you do starts with lack of clarity and ambiguity in communication.

The Benefits of Keeping Your Promises

The benefit of keeping your promises is that it builds trust and a positive culture.  It creates clear and easy to see boundaries for students, parents, and faculty.  Keeping your promises allows you to put things in the bank for harder times.  Families will extend the benefit of the doubt.  You reduce your exposure to lawsuits. 

Keeping your promises is one of the foundational elements of building loyalty. That’s important because in a world where loyalty is rare, a school that has built a loyal following is a school that has a much better chance of weathering the volatility and uncertainty that lie ahead. 

Note: Searching for gaps, reducing ambiguity, identifying and overcoming obstacles, these are just a few of the things we’ll be working on during our Leadership Studio:  Vision Driven, Outcome Focused at the Collegiate School (Richmond, VA), June 11 to 13, 2025.