Top Five Ways to Retain Current Students

It takes a village, it starts at the top and it's "doable"

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Welcome to Top Five Tuesdays, a new feature for premium (i.e. paying) Talking Out of School subscribers!

Why Top Five Tuesdays?

Top Five Tuesday posts are on topics that aren’t big enough for a longer article and are designed to be brief, easy to read, helpful and (hopefully!) much of the time, fun.

But first - I need your input!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “management training” and why it’s a term completely missing from the independent school world.

For those of you who’ve been TOOS readers for a while, you know of my deep admiration for the Raw Signal Group’s World’s Best Newsletter - management advice goodness 2x per months. RSG does management training for the tech world - that’s their whole gig.

In the IS world, we ask employees to manage other people as soon as they become department heads and even though there are many transferable skills from managing a class of kids to managing adults, of course it’s different! And in development, there’s an old saw that either someone is good office manager or a good fundraiser but it’s a unicorn who can do both. And CFOs - phew, they have a lot of people streaming in and out of their offices, often with hard questions.

I’m contemplating starting some small management training programs for specific cohorts and wondering where the biggest needs are in terms of learning more skills for people management. I’d love your input and this survey will take just a minute or two!

On to the topic of the day…

I know I will soon sound like a broken record but I think so much of independent schools’ struggles in a 2025 context really boil down to moving from an underlying attitude of, “you’re lucky to be here” to “we’re lucky to have you.”

I loved Brendan Schnieder’s commentary on “The Day We Killed Our Open Houses” in his School Marketing Insider newsletter yesterday - about why moving away from open houses helped some schools increase enrollment. We keep yelling into the void what we think people want to hear or what we see as long held strengths. And sometimes it’s a fear response to our perception of how our school may be perceived in the market, often based on misperceptions about the current market and current competitors. Some schools perceive, at an existential level, beliefs about market conditions and a tight competition between certain other schools when in fact those conditions and that competition ceased long, long ago.

We need to keep honing our curiosity and our listening skills and we need to come from a genuine place of wondering how we can best serve families today. I know long-time admissions folks who are convinced that the downward trend in open house events is the problem and if only we did it like we used to, things would go back to 2002. I’m not anti-open house but every school has to weigh the effort and cost versus the outcome. Read Brendan’s post!

You may think your open house is communicating “we’re lucky to have you” but by dictating the date, time, events, structure, interactions, etc - what you might be saying is, “you’re so lucky to be here.”

Top Five Ways To Retain Current Students and Families

Some years it’s smooth sailing and it seems nearly everyone comes back, with the exception of a few who have changes in circumstance you really can’t do much about. Other years, it feels like the ship sprung a leak. There’s nothing worse than hearing about an issue you could have easily attended to when a family is about to walk out the door.

Don’t panic, be proactive.

And it is absolutely the lowest of low hanging fruit to support enrollment numbers.

ONE

The head of school sets the tone

Student retention is not the admission office’s job. Of course, the admission office (hopefully!) has great relationships with the families they’ve brought into the school. But they have a lot on their plate between now and mid-April. The head of school needs to