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St. George’s Independent School
St. George’s Independent School was a suburban Episcopal lower school until the mid 1990s. The board of trustees decided to expand by adding both a middle/high school and a second, inner city, lower school. The vision of the board was to nurture an inner city population receiving substantial scholarship assistance and join it with a typical suburban independent school population, creating a single community. Inherent in this vision was the understanding that a commitment to excellence and a thorough preparation for a life of learning and meaningful contribution necessitates an environment enriched by racial and socio-economic diversity. With the creation of St. George’s Memphis in 2001 and St. George’s Collierville in 2002, the need was clear for a long range plan to guide the growth and development of each of the three St. George’s campuses and to bring them together into one school. In 2005 St. George’s retained Synthesis Partnership to guide the planning process. We worked with senior staff and a board committee to develop a detailed and ambitious plan that addressed the distinctive needs of this unique school. The plan draws much of its strength from the deep commitment and extraordinary efforts of the planning committee, its subcommittees, and the staff and board leadership. Synthesis Partnership provided expertise and guidance, facilitated two retreats and three parent meetings, and conducted a survey, but the majority of the planning work was done by the school itself. This approach developed staff and board knowledge of and experience in strategy, which will serve them well in implementing and renewing the plan. The school has now grown from 384 students to over 1200, and has launched its second major capital campaign to fully realize its vision.
Moses Brown School, a Quaker school founded in 1784, is the largest and dominant school in its market. In 2006 the Board of Overseers determined that it was time to engage in a strategic planning process, in part to address some specific issues, but largely to pull the school’s constituencies together into a productive discussion. The board and the faculty engaged in separate processes of strategic and academic planning. Through surveys of current parents, alumni, parents of alumni, faculty and students, and focus groups with parents, much was learned about varying perspectives on and levels of understanding of the school and its mission. The process identified areas where parents needed to be better informed, and some consistent perceptions from parents were helpful in offering the faculty new insights about their own work. In one sign of effective consensus, the mission statement was reduced from 137 words that tried to include all of the school’s catchphrases to a powerful, compelling, and memorable 24 words. The new statement encapsulates the mission of the school and focuses attention on the essence of the school’s commitment to its community. The Quaker commitment to consensus did not slow down the planning process, which was completed on schedule. Instead, it reinforced the Synthesis Partnership definition of strategic planning: the development, through inclusive engagement of all constituencies, of awareness and consensus around mission.
The Winston School is a small school for students with language-based learning disabilities, founded in 1981. The level of demand for its services has increased to the point that its current facility is inadequate. The school retained Synthesis Partnership to guide it through a process of integrated planning in preparation for acquisition of a new facility that will accommodate a doubling of the school population. The planning process included a strategic plan, an academic plan, a business plan and a financial model to aid in decision-making. Synthesis Partnership also worked with the board of trustees on board development and with the faculty on an accreditation self-study. We continue to work on issues surrounding acquisition and development of a new facility.
In March 1995 the Board of Trustees of the Wheeler School in Providence voted to explore a capital campaign. The school had almost doubled in size since its transformation in the late 1970s from a girls’ boarding school to a co-educational day school, and some facilities were strikingly inadequate. Synthesis Partnership was retained in June to guide the analysis of needs, development of strategies, and implementation of solutions. We formed a Working Committee to examine the school’s physical plant, maintenance budget, space needs, and program objectives, and designed a process that framed capital expenditures in terms of institutional goals and a long term budget. Synthesis Partnership guided the committee through issues of planning, programming, and design, and integrated them with market research and business planning for extended after-school and summer program offerings. (New programs would not only expand services to the Wheeler community, but also provide revenue enhancement to enlarge the project scope well beyond the original ambitions of the campaign.) In parallel to the Working Committee we assembled an Advisory Committee–alumni, trustees, parents and faculty as both a sounding board and a constituency-builder. When it came time to select and direct an architect and landscape architect, the Working Committee was enlarged to include majority representation from the Board of Trustees, so that both continuity and governance could be accommodated effectively. At this point there was already a clear idea of program, budget, and design constraints. The selection committee was thus able to ask the most appropriate questions and make decisions with a clear understanding of the process that would follow. This approach allowed the school to draw on the foresight of talented designers while also ensuring that the agenda remained defined from within. By the time the Board of Trustees was asked for a definitive vote on the Capital Campaign, a compelling, well-documented plan had been developed, with ambitious goals embodied within a flexible, conservative financial agenda. A three-year Capital Campaign (net for projects less than $4,000,000) had been transformed into a comprehensive Ten-Year Plan of $8,500,000 in capital construction. Perhaps equally rewarding, the process that was used to transform the Board-driven idea of a Capital Campaign into an integrated, participatory Ten-Year Plan has had additional fallout. Faculty in the sciences and the arts worked with the landscape architects to develop a comprehensive master plan for the 120-acre Wheeler Farm, owned by the school for 75 years, but recently used almost exclusively for its athletic fields. This plan, and the facilities that resulted from it, extended the benefits of the campaign far beyond the expansion of athletic facilities. In 2001 the school asked Synthesis Partnership to guide a development of a strategic master plan for its Providence campus. We worked with the governing board, administrative leadership and faculty to articulate the values, goals, curricular needs and optimum enrollment levels that would drive any changes in physical facilities. Once the needs were established, we framed the facilities requirements in quantitative and qualitative terms. We then developed budgets, a timeline and a financial model to establish, in conjunction with a fundraising consultant, the logistics and fundraising parameters over a 15-year period. In 2007 we were asked to assist the school in developing and negotiating a client favorable contract for the architecture firm the scholl would be using for the next phase of implementation of the campus master plan.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Northwood School had been rescued from severe financial difficulties by a resourceful headmaster who kept the institution going and even managed to develop a modest endowment. By the mid-1990s, different approaches were required to address new problems. A senior trustee read about the work of Synthesis Partnership and insisted that the new head and board chair meet with us. In the summer of 1998 we conducted a six-week study of the school’s situation, issues, resources, and needs. We found that the new leadership had made many significant remedial and normative changes in its first year. It was apparent, however, that the next set of tasks would require strategic integration of more areas of expertise, coordination of complex planning, and inclusion of faculty, students, parents and alumni. Synthesis Partnership interviewed representatives of all of the school’s constituencies. We collected and reviewed data from comparable competitors, and assembled comparative data on enrollment, retention, financial aid, endowment, and fundraising. We identified and analyzed several interrelated critical areas in which the school needed to improve its performance to compete effectively, especially in the vital cycle of student retention, alumni loyalty, alumni giving, financial aid, and student recruitment. Our findings guided the governing board in developing their understanding of the school and its competitive context. Our strategic overview made it clear that the school’s intended first-ever capital campaign would need to focus on financial aid and endowment as well as facilities. We set up a series of interviews with fund-raising consultants both to inform the leadership of the nature and value of such assistance, and to initiate a consulting relationship. In the fall of 2000, Northwood School re-engaged Synthesis Partnership to plan and facilitate a year-long long-range planning process. The resulting plan updated the earlier research, set goals and actions within the strategic areas of governance and management, external relations, and internal concerns, and established a solid institutional plan of action. The implementation section of the plan provided cost and revenue parameters, a timeline, and a detailed set of annual milestones for each action item. The plan was followed carefully by the governing board, and over a five-year period most of its objectives were achieved. Over the past five years Northwood School has revamped its curriculum, made substantial strides in technology, dramatically refreshed its facilities and communications, made progress in student retention, and used its strategic self-awareness effectively in both capital and annual fundraising. The two rounds of planning have rallied the board around a consensus on the critical issues and made them alert to the necessity for, and difficulties of, change. In 2005 Northwood asked Synthesis Partnership to facilitate new round of planning, including board assessment and development, and a survey of parents, alumni, and parents of alumni to strengthen the Northwood community as a whole, and to move the school to its next plateau.
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