What are the signs of the operationally underpowered school?
For one school, the symptoms could be seen in a number of areas: finances under strain, high-conflict parent situations becoming more frequent, significant student attrition, declining new student enrollment, faculty turnover accelerating, and deferred maintenance piling up.
From the outside, the school looked much like it always had. Classrooms were filled with learning, the lawns and fields were mowed, and the rhythm of the school year continued much the same way as it had done for years.
But upon closer look you'd see the signs: dropped communication with parents, grumbling conversations in the parking lot between faculty and parents, small things not getting fixed, problems accumulating at the margins.
From the inside, it felt like fighting fires with no time to fix what kept starting them.
The root cause wasn't a lack of commitment or talent. It was infrastructure – or the lack of it. There was no clarity around who was responsible for what or who decided what. While some data existed it wasn't accessible for decisions, while other data was never collected. Communication was reactive and fragmented. Management systems were informal at best. Leadership was concentrated rather than distributed. The school was running twenty-first century programs on operational infrastructure designed for a different era – an era of greater predictability, slower change, and lower complexity.
The previous Head had served the school well for a long time. The management approach that worked for years – when schools faced less complexity and slower change – had reached a point where it was simply overmatched by the current environment. This wasn't a failure of character or competence. It's what happens when the operating system can't keep pace with what it's being asked to run.
Eventually, the school got a new Head and new board leadership. What happened in the very first year is instructive: dramatic infrastructure changes became visible. Clear, transparent, and shared goals from the board writ large, to every board committee, to the head, to each member of senior leadership. Clear communication protocols. Regularly updated dashboards. Distributed leadership with explicit roles and decision making processes. Project management discipline. The result wasn’t just organizational, it was cultural. There's now less frustration, more energy, and genuine hope rooted not in wishful thinking but in tangible operational improvement.
The school is well on its way to a bright future.
My point isn't that every struggling school needs a leadership change. My point is that infrastructure rewiring doesn't have to take years. It can happen faster than most schools think if they're willing to treat operational infrastructure as the priority it actually is.
Independent schools are facing complexity and pressure unmatched in their modern history. The business model is strained. Recruiting and retaining faculty has become dramatically harder. AI is reshaping not only how students learn but what they'll need to know. Young people's social and emotional needs are intensifying. Families are more anxious and more demanding. Competition continues to diversify – microschools, online academies, homeschool collaboratives, and specialized programs. Physical plant needs are mounting. And the demographic headwinds are real: birthrates have fallen and they've fallen most sharply among affluent families, precisely those most likely to consider independent schools and the capacity to pay full-tuition.
The infrastructure of too many schools was built for an environment that no longer exists.
I sometimes think of schools like old houses – at some point they need renovation. Assuming the bones are good, you want to keep the character of the old house while bringing in the systems needed for modern living.
In old houses that haven’t had an upgrade, the knob and tube electrical system once worked well enough. It powered the essentials. It got the job done. But you weren't running twenty-first century appliances on it.
Now you are.
So for those unfamiliar with knob and tube wiring, what is it? It was an early electrical system used in homes from the 1880s through the 1940s, back when households powered only a handful of simple appliances – lighting, maybe a radio, and a few small devices. Electricity ran through copper wires strung through walls and ceilings, supported by ceramic knobs and threaded through ceramic tubes to keep them from touching wood framing.
It worked fine for its era, but it was never designed for the electrical demands of modern life. As homes added more outlets, and more and larger appliances, knob-and-tube systems became badly outmatched. Insulation around the wires has a tendency to degrade, connections loosen, and the circuits lack a grounding wire that modern electrical systems rely on for safety.
Today, houses that still rely on knob-and-tube wiring are considered at high risk for overheating, short circuits, and electrical fires. It's an outdated infrastructure that simply can't keep up with today’s environment.
And it’s an eerily appropriate metaphor for the situations in which many schools currently find themselves.
When I talk about infrastructure, I mean two distinct but interconnected systems:
Capacity infrastructure is what gives the school the ability to make decisions, implement change, and adapt to new challenges. I like to think of it like the electrical system – the power that enables action. It includes:
Process infrastructure is what keeps daily operations running efficiently. One way to think about it like HVAC – the systems that maintain a functional and comfortable environment day to day. It includes:
Many schools have legacy systems in both areas – capacity infrastructure that can't support modern decision-making demands, and process infrastructure that's quite inefficient. Both are expensive problems, but in different ways.
Weak capacity infrastructure means the school can't act – can't make decisions quickly, can't implement well, can't adapt to change. If it’s not buried in paralysis, it’s at best lumbering.
Weak process infrastructure means enormous energy gets wasted on inefficiency. The school can move, but it expends far too much effort in the form of miscommunication, turnover, decision bottlenecks, and meetings that produce little action.
This is expensive culturally, financially, and personally.
Independent schools have always been resilient, resourceful institutions. But the challenges of today are ever growing and more complex than in the past. What's needed for many schools is a strategic overhaul of operating infrastructure, not an incremental tune-up.
The core problem: Schools were built with assumptions of stability. They now must operate in a landscape defined by volatility, complexity, and accelerating change.
The core opportunity: Rewiring both capacity and process infrastructure gives the school what it needs most – the ability to act quickly, adapt intelligently, pursue strategy with discipline, and do so without burning people out.
Without that, even the best strategy is irrelevant. A brilliant strategic plan plugged into knob-and-tube wiring will not illuminate the institution.
Below are five practical areas where school leaders and boards can begin, addressing both capacity infrastructure (enabling better decisions) and process infrastructure (making operations more efficient).
Leadership teams may function more like committees than execution engines, with meetings that report rather than decide. Further, senior leaders have titles, but may not have the responsibility and authority that go with those titles. Sometimes heads won't delegate; sometimes structure prevents it. The result: a leadership bottleneck where too many day to day decisions need to be signed off by the head of school.
What to Invest In:
This isn't "corporatizing” your school, it's professionalizing leadership capacity for a complex organization.
Faculty staffing models designed 30 years ago don't align with today's needs. Teachers are now expected to differentiate instruction more than was done in the past, integrate technology, support mental health, communicate with parents, and assist with enrollment all while teaching loads remain unchanged. Meanwhile, teachers have more career options outside traditional schools – career options that pay more and are less stressful.
Practical moves:
Strong people systems reduce turnover. Weak ones bleed talent and institutional knowledge.
Most schools have abundant data but lack decision-ready information. Data sits in scattered systems, forcing leaders to rely on anecdotes because coherent information requires too much manual work. The objective here is not that the data will tell you what to do, but good data will help you make more informed decisions.
Modernizing means:
Better-informed decisions improve programs, resource allocation, and early problem identification.
Before adopting AI tools, schools must clarify their purpose: how AI can strengthen their operational capacity and enable staff and faculty to focus on their core mission. In a world where AI can handle routine administrative work, what will distinguish high-functioning schools is their ability to deploy these tools strategically while preserving institutional culture and professional judgment.
AI can manage substantial portions of routine operational work – data analysis, communication drafting, scheduling, records management, reporting compliance, and information synthesis – freeing administrators and faculty to focus on relationships, strategic decision-making, and mission-critical work that requires human judgment.
Schools need clarity on:
These aren't merely IT questions. They require rethinking workflows, professional roles, and the school's operational model. Thriving schools will have the clearest answers to how technology serves human capacity rather than replacing it.
Many boards toggle between micromanagement and detachment, uncertain where their work ends and the Head's begins and too often don't fly at the right altitude.
A rewired board:
Boards are part of the operating system. When they function well, they provide essential capacity for long-term thinking. When they don't, they drain an overloaded system.
A rewiring effort can feel overwhelming. But it becomes manageable when broken into stages.
Conduct an operational audit. Not a comprehensive review of everything, but a targeted look at:
Identify the overloaded circuits – the bottlenecks, burnout points, and inefficiencies that drain the most energy and cause the most frustration. Determine whether you're facing primarily a capacity problem (can't decide, can't execute) or a process problem (too much waste and inefficiency), or both.
Choose three system upgrades with the highest short-term leverage. Not everything needs fixing at once. What would create the most immediate capacity or efficiency?
Just as importantly: stop or streamline projects that diffuse focus. Many schools are running too many initiatives simultaneously, ensuring that none get the attention needed to succeed.
Allocate real dollars. Not huge amounts necessarily, but real ones.
Budget for professional learning, external expertise, program evaluations, coaching, or new tools. Recognize that infrastructure improvement is an investment, not an expense.
Most critically: protect time for leaders to work on the system, not just in it. Without dedicated time, operational infrastructure never improves because the urgent always crowds out the important.
This is where change actually sticks.
New systems often fail not because they're poorly designed, but because old habits reassert themselves. Building new habits requires discipline and repetition.
Community trust grows when leaders frame infrastructure upgrades as acts of stewardship, not administrative expansion.
Parents don't wake up excited about improved HR systems. But they do care about teacher retention, program quality, and institutional stability. Help them see the connection.
Faculty don't get energized by new project management tools. But they do care about reduced meeting burdens, clearer expectations, and better support. Show them how infrastructure improvements serve those goals.
Be honest about what you're doing and why. "We're investing in our operational capacity so we can deliver on our mission more effectively" is a compelling message when delivered with conviction.
Independent schools cannot adequately address their enrollment, people, financial, or competitive pressures unless they have the operational strength to meet the moment.
Rewiring is not glamorous work. It doesn't result in ribbon-cuttings or glossy brochures. But it creates the conditions under which everything else becomes possible:
The schools that thrive over the next decade will be the ones that invest not just in what they offer, but in how they operate.
The ones that rewire the house – before the lights go out.