Strategy Update: What’s Happened, What’s Happening, and What to Expect

In December 2025, I provided an update on our strategy-making process, which you can find here. Since that time, our 35 member Task Force has completed five reports that have been sent to the CAIS Board of Trustees for the next steps. I described the process by which these reports were developed in the December newsletter, which can be visually represented as follows:

Community Surveys
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Community Focus Groups
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Task Force Analysis of Community Input
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Task Force Discussion, Organization, And Value Add
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Next Steps, Board of Trustees

First and foremost, I’d like to thank our Task Force members again for the time, effort, and intelligence they have dedicated to their work.

So, what exactly are the Board of Trustees’ next steps? As Trustees, their responsibility is to hold the school in trust and devote their work to securing the School’s future. To that end, they have established a number of critical lenses through which to assess the recommendations in the Task Force reports. These lenses are organized around three questions:

1. Is this recommendation aligned with who we are? This question prioritizes alignment with our School’s mission and core values.
2. Does this initiative address broader societal trends? This question looks at phenomena such as the so-called “post knowledge economy,” the structural talent crisis, the time-scarcity of family life, geopolitical and societal realities, and the strain on an enrollment-based school financial model
3. Can we do it? This question considers such factors as financial sustainability, operational feasibility, and new Head of School realities, especially in the short term.

The Board’s process will also be inductive—the Task Force has made many specific, operational, and sometimes granular recommendations. Out of the specifics, the Board must extract larger themes that leave room for flexibility. While not every suggestion offered by the community will find its way into a high level Strategic Vision, fidelity to ideas with broad consensus among our stakeholders will be evident.

Finally, it is important for everyone in the community to understand the critical distinction between strategy and operational imperative. Strategy involves a choice, and the choice should differentiate our School from other schools. Educational thinker Moira Kelly has written that “a strategy choice is one for which the opposite is not stupid on its face.” For instance, the opposite of acquiring, renovating, and moving into a new campus, would have been to remain in Hayes Valley. That would actually have been a viable choice (and is, in fact, similar to the decision that many space-constrained schools in the City made when they passed on the opportunity to acquire 19th Avenue). CAIS’s choice was a differentiator, as evidenced by much of the content in this newsletter—new programs, new positions, increased enrollment demand. On the other hand, the opposite of “attract, develop, reward and retain outstanding educators” is not a fathomable choice. It is not a strategy choice to develop an outstanding faculty, it’s operationally imperative. Moira Kelly calls this “table stakes”—in order to even be in the game, a school must do certain things. Safety is not a differentiating strategy, it’s imperative. An intellectually challenging learning and teaching program is not strategic, it’s imperative. And so on.

So if your favorite initiative is not evident in a strategic vision, that is not necessarily because the school has not chosen it, it may be because it is table stakes for staying in the Bay Area independent school game. Through this process, we’ve learned a great deal about how our community feels about table stakes, and we have collected some great ideas about how to proceed with these operational imperatives—thank you!