Independent School Moonshot Podcast

A quick note before you press play. I first shared this conversation back in January, and it has stayed with me. I've had more conversations about this topic than I ever expected, and school leaders keep leaning in, so it felt like the right one to bring back this summer. If you missed it the first time, this one is for you. In this episode, I sit down with business coach Amol Tripathi of Focal Po...

What if the most powerful thing an independent school can offer is the one thing modern life is working hardest to eliminate? Jonathan Strecker, Head of School at Valley School of Ligonier and author of Emergence: How Modern Convenience Is Dumbing Down Our Children , makes a compelling case that friction, the productive struggle children experience when things are genuinely hard, is not a design f...

What does a truly high-functioning board look like, and how does a school get there? In this episode, Staci Williams Seeley, Principal at DRG Talent , brings 35 years of experience as a faculty member, senior administrator, board trustee, board chair, and leadership search consultant to a conversation that is as clarifying as it is energizing. She walks through what governance actually requires of...

When someone burns out in a school, the instinct is to look inward -- at resilience, habits, self-care. Dr. Derek Porter invites a different question: What if the structure around them is the real source of the strain? In this episode, Dr. Derek Porter, Assistant Head of Middle School at Green Hill Schoo l in Dallas, Texas, explores the critical intersections of leadership, culture, and organizati...

What if the traditional "hire for every need" model is quietly costing your school more than it saves? Pete Moore, Head of School at Oak Hill School in Eugene, Oregon, didn't set out to build an unconventional staffing model. He arrived at a school with limited resources and a clear mandate to build something better. What he found was that the answer wasn't just working harder or cutting deeper. I...

What does it actually cost a school when student life is treated as overhead instead of infrastructure? Bridget Johnson, founder of Dean's Roundtable , returns to the podcast to make a case that most school leaders have not fully reckoned with: student life is not a support function sitting beneath academics and operations. It is the connective tissue that holds a school's culture, community, and...

What does it look like to run a school with a truly diversified revenue model? In this conversation, Gardner Barrier, founder of Gardner Barrier Consulting, breaks down the difference between viewing spending as an expense and as an investment, and why that shift opens an entirely different set of financial decisions for school leaders and boards. The conversation covers how to identify and activa...

Independent school marketing teams are some of the most stretched professionals in the building. They write the newsletter, manage the website, support admissions, serve the alumni office, handle crisis communications, and field requests from every corner of the school, often with a team of one or two. In that environment, strategy is not something people avoid. It is something the structure makes...

Effective school leadership is often built on the premise that competence requires a mask of total certainty. However, sustainable growth for both the individual and the institution actually happens at the edge, the uncomfortable space between the safety of the known and the paralysis of the unknown. In this episode, Kirk Wheeler, former head of school and founder of Kirk Wheeler Coaching and Cons...

The independent school sector is facing a quiet but compounding crisis: the teacher pipeline is thinning just as the demands of the profession are expanding. Beth Owen, founder of Searchality , joins the podcast to unpack the structural shifts making recruitment more difficult and why traditional hiring nets are often too tight for today’s workforce. Beth digs into the data behind the 35% decline...

For years, high-performing student-athletes have been handed a choice: pursue elite-level training or pursue rigorous academics. Schools have largely treated that tension as an unavoidable fact of life. Masters Academy International was built on the premise that this trade-off is false, and it never had to exist in the first place. In this episode, Andy Williams, Head of School at Masters Academy...

What if the enrollment challenge your school is facing isn't a temporary dip but a structural signal that the old playbook no longer applies? Tom Sheppard, founder of 20 More Students , brings a clear-eyed perspective to one of the most pressing questions in independent school leadership right now: why ninth-grade applicants from tuition-capable families are quietly disappearing, even in markets w...

In a market where families have more options than ever, the schools that will win are the ones willing to ask hard questions about who they are, who they serve, and what they will stop doing. In this conversation, Peter Baron and David Hanson, founder of Winthrop and Associates , dig into what it actually takes to build a strategy that wins your market. Winning requires starting in the right place...

What would it mean for your school to actually have a compensation system rather than just a collection of decisions made under pressure? Cliff Kling has spent two years at Mission & Data helping independent schools answer that question, and before that, 24 years inside schools as CFO, general counsel, and president. His vantage point is rare: he has lived the problem from the inside and now h...

Most schools spend years refining their mission, their pedagogy, and their program. But when families arrive on campus for the first time and can't find the parking lot, the work doesn't matter. Suzette Parlevliet and David Willows of Yellow Car return to the podcast to make the case that experience strategy is not a nice-to-have add-on to enrollment work. It is the enrollment work. In this conver...

For many boards and heads, the word "merger" enters the conversation far too late, loaded with fear, myth, and misunderstanding. In this episode, Kevin Ruth, Executive Director of NJAIS and a certified M&A adviso r, pulls back the curtain on what mergers actually look like in the independent school world, and why the schools that navigate them best are the ones that start the conversation befo...

Can a head of school truly lead a school without also leading a business? In this episode, Gardner Barrier, founder of Gardner Barrier Consulting and former Head of School at Forsyth Country Day School, explores the intersection of pedagogical excellence and business discipline. Drawing on experience as an MBA and adjunct finance professor, Gardner explains how “both-and” thinking helps a school r...

Is your school treating marketing as a vital engine for growth, or as a discretionary line item that is easy to pause when budgets get tight? In this episode, Penny Abrahams, founder of Penny Abrahams Consulting , makes the case for staying invested in your brand during periods of financial or enrollment pressure. Drawing on experience as a school administrator, trustee, and consultant, Penny expl...

Is your school's schedule a strategic asset or a house of cards held together by band-aid solutions? In this episode, Meera Shah and Rob MacDonald of Trey Education challenge the idea that scheduling is simply a technical jigsaw puzzle. They reveal how the master schedule expresses a school's values, determining whether initiatives like student wellness and interdisciplinary learning take root or...

International schools are growing fast. But this episode isn’t just about numbers. It’s about what that growth reveals. In just two decades, the number of international schools worldwide has expanded from roughly 2,000 to around 14,000. What was once a niche expat market has become a sophisticated global system of private education, complete with tiered pricing models, private equity-backed school...

What actually separates schools that adapt from schools that slowly slide backward? And why do so many well-run institutions struggle to see it happening in real time? In this episode of The Independent School Moonshot Podcast, Ian Symmonds, founder of Ian Symmonds and Associates , unpacks his Strategy Continuum and what it reveals about how schools think, behave, and change. Drawing on decades of...

What if generational tension in the workforce isn't a problem to solve but a resource we're failing to use well? In this episode of The Independent School Moonshot Podcast, we sit down with  Megan Gerhardt ,  professor at  Miami University  and co-author of  Gentelligence , to unpack why so many leaders misunderstand generational dynamics at work. Rather than framing schoo...

This episode of the Independent School Moonshot Podcast is sponsored by Searchality . Designed exclusively for K-12 education, Searchality makes hiring easier for schools and job searches smoother for teachers, both in the US and internationally. What does it actually take to be ready for headship in today's independent schools, especially when the job increasingly focuses on running a complex bus...

This episode of the Independent School Moonshot Podcast is sponsored by  Searchality . Designed exclusively for K-12 education, Searchality makes hiring easier for schools and job searches smoother for teachers, both in the US and internationally. What if the greatest challenge facing high-achieving students is not rigor, pressure, or competition, but a lack of inner skills to navigate it all...

This episode of the Independent School Moonshot Podcast is sponsored by Searchality. Designed exclusively for K-12 education, Searchality makes hiring easier for schools and job searches smoother for teachers, both in the US and internationally. Visit https://searchality.com/ to learn more! What if the real risk facing independent schools isn't disruption itself, but how we respond to it? In this...