Member Voices: A Q&A with Nancy Lang

Head of School
The New School
Fayetteville, Arkansas

 

This is an excerpt from the NAIS Member Voices podcast.

You’ve been at The New School for five years. Aside from the challenges inherent in the first-year adjustment period, what’s been the biggest challenge you’ve dealt with? 

I love my school and I love my job, but I also value my sanity and health, so there isn’t much that keeps me up at night in terms of work. But the thing that’s really present for me is that this school has a tremendous history, and to keep doing the work that we’re going to do, we’ve got to have financial sustainability, and we need to be sensitive to our market. And we saw an opportunity a few years ago to make an adjustment within our market and to try to build trust through it. Walking into that was one of the biggest challenges.

That opportunity was a tuition reset? Tell us about it. 

Yes. We’re a day school with about 450 students, serving 1-year-olds through 12th graders, and we’re in a market that is not particularly familiar with independent schools. We’re not hugely different from a number of our schools in NAIS around the country, but what challenged us from a tuition and compensation standpoint is that we started as an early childhood program and built on it, one grade at a time. And then, soon after we started our upper school, we experienced some significant turnover. 

When I arrived, we had a director of enrollment who had only been there for a year, and his assessment was that we might be outpricing our families. There also had been a big leadership turnover that resulted in a significant amount of attrition. 

So, we did exit surveys with families, and I did a very structured listening tour. There was a combination of frustration with the cost of tuition and an erosion of trust within the community. At the time, I didn’t see those two things as intermingled. I thought, “Wow, these are two big challenges we need to tackle.” So that year, we said we’re going to increase tuition by 1%. We didn’t want to do too much, but we needed to get through the year.

Then COVID-19 hit, and it negatively impacted our enrollment. But in the 2020–2021 school year, we opened campus and built some trust. Then right away that year, the director of enrollment, the CFO, and I started meeting weekly to consider a new tuition model. We looked at financial assistance as a percentage of tuition revenue. We looked at net tuition revenue. We looked at enrollment fluctuations with the changes in tuition. We looked at how much financial aid we were awarding per division. We looked at NAIS’s Market View tool to help us better understand our community. 

We examined several scenarios. A small increase? A tuition freeze? Do we level it? We had different tuitions at different grade levels. As all those things came up, I kept the board chair involved, and then, when the time was right, we engaged the full board. They dug into the details, and, ultimately, we landed on a full tuition reset, where we reduced tuition across the board, and then we leveled it so that our early childhood program has one tuition and our K–12 has one tuition. We wanted families to be able to project what their tuition increases would be over time. 

How much was the reduction?

We decreased tuition by about 13.5%, and our net tuition revenue increased almost 12% that school year. Our enrollment increased almost 20% in that year. I think that went a long way toward inspiring some trust with families. 

How did you communicate the reset and build that trust?

We partnered with Schoolcraft Digital to create a nine-week digital marketing strategy. We did a tiered announcement within our community. First, we talked to faculty and staff. We assured them that even with the tuition reset, they would get a compensation increase. We spoke to the community about the importance of diversity and that we wanted to give more children in our area access to our education. 

Then after we reduced tuition that first year, we froze tuition the next year. We delivered a very strong message that we can’t do this forever but we realize we’re coming out of a tough economic time for people. And that going forward, they should anticipate cost-of-living type tuition increases each year. In that freeze year, we again increased enrollment and revenue. 

What factors do you think are critical to make this work?

The health of the board was critical. This wouldn’t have worked if the board hadn’t been able to dig into these conversations in a rich, curious way to understand that this was the right thing for the school. If this had been pushed through by a small group, we would not have been set up for success. The other thing present was a hunger for community—people wanted to belong. People wanted to be a part of something. 

Also at this time, we were preparing for accreditation. We were in a pause mode on strategic planning, and we wanted to get going on that. So, we were talking about the strategy, the future of the school, and the vision for the school while we were talking about financial sustainability. Coming out of all of that was a vision and strategic plan and strategic priorities. It all worked together, and it always felt like we had a common purpose. Had we made this only about financial sustainability, it wouldn’t have been as compelling for families. This was about the education of their children, of our children.

Were there key pieces of advice you got along the way?

We looked at some higher education institutions and independent schools that had reset tuition. They told us that you only get one shot at this. You don’t get a redo if you do it wrong. If we did not have that advice, I’m not sure we would have enlisted the support of Schoolcraft. We realized we needed a little more expertise to handle the marketing and communications. I think we would have had messaging fatigue had we done it in house. Our messaging was very woven into our mission and values. And they were able to help us craft the message in a way that felt authentic.

What’s next on the journey of financial sustainability?

We’ve got a great problem now: Enrollment is at capacity at some levels. We need to think about how to grow enrollment when we see demand. So, we will be doing some strategic work around enrollment and fundraising. In terms of tuition, I want to hold true to the promise we made to our families—tuition should be something they can predict. 

Reflecting on your personal journey, what has been your greatest achievement so far? 

I’m truly proud of the moments when I’ve shown up well—the moments when I’ve been a good coach or a good teacher, a good mother, a good partner, a good friend. That’s how I want to show up every day. But how do you stay that way? How do you inspire yourself to do that? You can look around to other people, but I like to push myself to tackle some hard challenges. I love Glennon Doyle’s quote, “We can do hard things.” Sometimes if I'm facing something, I can look at it and go, “If I can run 100 miles—which I did and it was hard—I can do this.” Whatever this is, I can do this.