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The Net Assets podcast delves into the most pressing issues in independent school business and operations. Delivered by NBOA, the only national nonprofit membership association focused exclusively on fostering financial and operational excellence among independent PK-12 schools, each episode is based on a popular article in NBOA’s Net Assets magazine. Chief financial and operational officers alongside other leaders of school business share what inspires and challenges them as well as their approaches to problem solving and innovation. In each lively exchange, host Jeff Shields, NBOA president and CEO, teases out the human stories behind the printed story.
I think I learned very quickly that as the head of school, especially in a community this size, you are in people's family lives. When you start getting a call over the summer from someone letting you know that, like, Joe's grandmother passed away and
Speaker 2:they just wanted you to know, you realize that you are really in their lives in a very profound way. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Net Assets Podcast. This is Jeff Shields. I'm MBOA president and CEO coming to you from Washington DC.
Speaker 2:Our guest today in preparing for the call was telling me about a recent trip he made to Washington DC to the African American Museum, and it reminds me these conversations I have with folks. When they find out I live in Washington DC. I always remind them, come to Washington DC. There's so much to do that is free, that is available to you as a taxpayer. So I guess I'm doing the work at the top of this podcast for the Washington Convention and Visitors Bureau, but our zoo is free.
Speaker 2:The Smithsonians are free. Please take advantage of this wonderful if you could tell, I'm a fan of Washington DC, but take advantage of your nation's capital. There's so much to do, see, and learn while you're here. And I'm very appreciative that my guest today, Josh Abrams, head of school at Meridian Academy in Boston, reminded me of that to welcome our listeners to the show. And now I'm gonna welcome Josh to the show who's a really interesting and exciting guest today.
Speaker 2:I'm really glad that you're listening to it. He has taught in settings, get ready for this, from prisons to suburban day schools. He's been involved in the model UN, the math club, and even juggling. And if that's not enough, in 1998, he was a recipient of the presidential award for excellence in the teaching of mathematics from president Clinton. And to add to that, if you're not excited yet, which I can't believe you're not, we're gonna be spending most of our time talking about Josh's role as head of school of Meridian Academy for the past twenty years, a school he founded.
Speaker 2:So welcome to the Net Assets Podcast, Josh. I'm so glad you're with us.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, Jeff. I'm really excited to be with you here. I'm a big NBA fan, and this is a real treat.
Speaker 2:There's so much to talk to you about. What an interesting background, which is why you're here. I would love to talk about juggling, something I've never been able to do. I would love to spend our time there, but I think the best way to start our conversation is to tell me a little bit about Meridian Academy and your professional journey to creating this school and being its head for the last twenty years.
Speaker 1:Sure. I'll start with Meridian's elevator description. Right? Sounds good. Which is that we are an intentionally small, economically diverse, project based, interdisciplinary secondary school here in Boston.
Speaker 1:So that is us in a adjectival nutshell. I have been a teacher. I am a teacher. I never stopped teaching during my twenty years running Meridian, and I'm the head of school by accident. So I love being at a school for a long time, but I found when I was a younger teacher, as a math teacher in particular, a discipline that is not taught thoughtfully or in most schools.
Speaker 1:No offense, folks. But, if you ever look at what they say about math in TV and movies, you'll know everyone agrees that it's not a great experience for many, that there were lots of things I started to sense kids needed as an educator that I wouldn't be able to do at a school. So I'd moved to another school where I could push the boundaries a little. And then in my forties, I ran out of places to move to, and I'm very tethered to Massachusetts and the Boston area where I live with my wife and family. Started to think about starting a school.
Speaker 1:And I had no administrative ambition whatsoever. I love being in the classroom. The highest I'd moved up was being a department head in an independent school. They had offered me dean of faculty, and I turned it down because I didn't wanna leave the classroom. When I started Meridian, part of the interesting challenge was running a school and also continuing to teach, which I do till just through this morning even.
Speaker 1:I was in teaching classes. So my friends described as my midlife crisis. I think it was just an act of hope that there had to be ways that I could pull together what I had learned from the different schools I'd been at and pull it together in some cohesive, more exciting whole. So we're a school where there aren't letter or number grades, where kids really work for all the intrinsic reasons that most of us who love learning, where there's a lot of mixed age academic and social interaction, where there's just tremendous nimbleness. So we're small enough for many reasons, but one reason we're small, which is 90 kids, is so that we can use the community, so we can walk out of the school on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:So our schedule is very flexible and changes literally every week.
Speaker 2:So for most people, they buy a convertible or some sort of car for their midlife crisis. You took it in a whole different direction. Yeah. And you started a school. You might be the most unique person I've ever met.
Speaker 2:So that's great. One of the things that I find so interesting in your background, the school's intentionally small. You wear many hats as the head of school, but you do a lot of the administrative work. And I'll tell you, that's an area that a lot of our primary members within NBOA can really relate to. So how do you balance both the academic leader and the business leader of Meridian?
Speaker 1:I work eighty hours a week for the
Speaker 2:last Oh three my goodness. I believe you. I believe you. But I'm hoping there's some nuggets in there we can carve out.
Speaker 1:So I do think that the way I constructed being a head of school is really distinctive. If I talk to heads of school at larger institutions and more financially robust institutions, it's not the same job. Like, I, for example, have never set aside my own office. I'm currently speaking to you from our music room. My desk is in the faculty room, so I believe in being incredibly accessible in a way that would make most heads of schools scream because they wouldn't be able to do their job.
Speaker 1:So I feel like most heads of school are in many ways they're institutional leaders, but they're also business leaders in a really different way than Amit
Speaker 2:agree with you. On that.
Speaker 1:I was our bookkeeper for about a year. That was a terrible job for me, and I was very happy the first time we hired a bookkeeper. But I've still I'm the person who puts together our budgets. We have a staff accountant now. We've made progress, and she's amazing.
Speaker 1:But I'm still the one who's made a lot of the business decisions and more importantly, developed the model. Among other hats, and I think juggling is it, I'm our director of admissions. Our custodian comes in at five. So you know that if the urinal's flooding, who do they go to? It's not my teacher's jobs to clean up the bathroom.
Speaker 1:And my fellow admin people and I have the same attitude, which is small schools heads group. My favorite definition that someone came up of what qualifies a school as a small school is if the head of school is at least second on the list of who shovels when it snows. And so you have to be someone who's willing to pitch in and make it happen no matter what. And for me, that was particularly important because I mentioned we're an economically diverse school. So one thing to note is that this year, we're at 38% of our budget dedicated to financial aid, which we call matched tuition for other reasons.
Speaker 1:And the only way I know how to do that, because I don't know millionaires who is who are gonna fund my school, is to do the work of many and keep our overhead down. But I've learned about lots of things I never thought I'd learn about that I've loved.
Speaker 2:You sound like a business leader. You sound like a lot of MBOA members where they pitch in, they do what needs to be done, etcetera, etcetera. So, definitely, I can see a lot of commonalities in how you're describing your unique work and many of our members. I can't help but ask, you were started out as a teacher, and I consider teaching a vocation. And I think once you're a teacher, you really always have the heart of a teacher.
Speaker 2:So because you're so immersed in the business, finance, and operations of Meridian School, what are some things you've learned along the way that you would want academic leaders at other schools to you wish they knew more about or areas of the business that you think would really help them in their role as academic leaders, in their role as faculty? What are the some of those things that come to mind?
Speaker 1:So I guess one thing is connecting those two things. I am a teacher. I like it's not what I do. It's who I am. And I run an extremely transparent organization.
Speaker 1:So for example, our budget is open not only to faculty to see, but to students to see. We have a class on education, and I'm brought in as a guest presenter to to show our budget, to talk about public school education funding and our funding. So one of the things I really try and do is help all of my colleagues understand what we're doing and why we're doing it from a financial and HR benefit standpoint. I'm stepping down at the end of this year, and our assistant head of school is gonna be the new head of school. And that's something I'm very excited about because I think that gives you continuity.
Speaker 1:And I've been working with her and her soon to be assistant head of school for years on everything. I don't make decisions unilaterally because I want everyone to be in training, and I want people who didn't maybe think that being a leader in a school was exciting to understand how exciting it can be. One thing I
Speaker 2:just wanna leap on, which I think you offered it as almost a philosophy, but I think it's so critical. You said you described the what and the why. And I find that when leaders inform others of the why, they get a lot more buy in, and there's a lot more understanding. And I really wanna point to that as a real valuable skill for business leaders within independent schools to remember. It's not just the what, It's the why.
Speaker 2:Was that a natural inclination for you? Have you seen the value in informing folks of the why?
Speaker 1:Sure. Because I was a teacher for twenty years before into I this enterprise, and I was in the dark. Like, didn't know why administrators were doing what they were doing. I was a department head at a local independent school, and we were just given a budget. And everyone I've ever talked to, it's the same thing.
Speaker 1:Your department and they say, your budget for this year is $12.17. And they never come to you and ask, what is your department doing and what do you need? So as a math department head, I was just given a number. And so my colleagues, I asked them, like, what do you need? And then I put what they need in the budget, not the other way around.
Speaker 1:And so they're much more involved in the decision making, and they're much more appreciative, I think, of the nuance and the trade offs. I think we're an extremely ethical organization. I think we do things for all the right things that are tied to our very specific and clear mission. But there are still things around why are salaries going up? Why are they going up this much?
Speaker 1:What is the bigger picture of our economic decision making? And when they know that part of what they are doing, of course, is very mission driven too, a school which we started at 33% in our first year of our budget being financial aid. We've crept up to 38%. And to other people, that may not sound like a lot, but I'm sure all of our business colleagues understand, like, getting up 5% even over twenty years is a Herculean effort. You need everybody on board.
Speaker 1:So I think people have to appreciate the why. Otherwise, they're just suspicious and confused. Right? So being a teacher who never knew what was going on or why didn't feel good.
Speaker 2:That's such a great nugget to take away, Josh. And one of the other really neat things that I wanna get into with you in our limited time together is you did something really creative. Faculty recruitment and retention is on the top of mind of really any every school. It's not just an independent school issue. It's a public school issue.
Speaker 2:And one of the things you did at Meridian is really create a program to help teachers live closer to campus even in a housing market as competitive as Boston. Can you tell me more about that program?
Speaker 1:Sure. And just in general, I wanna say that we try and have a remarkably rich benefits package for a tiny school, and I've I'm really pleased with what we've accomplished. So before I mention, I'll just say so everyone gets health care, of course, but it's a 100% for an individual. My father was an accountant, he always told me, don't give people money with one hand and then take it back with the other. Just it's about transparency.
Speaker 1:Right? Here's what your salary is gonna be. It's really gonna be your salary. We're not gonna take about this. So just thinking flexibly.
Speaker 1:So a few years ago, about six weeks apart, two of my younger colleagues, not in a planned way, each had almost identical conversations with me. They came to me in turn and said, I think Meridian pays me enough so that I could afford to live in a studio or one bedroom, but I'm currently living much more like a college student, and I can't get out of that situation because I can't afford the following five costs. Broker's fee, first month, last month, security deposit, and the cost of the move. So that's basically five months of rent. And both were tearing up.
Speaker 1:Like, really you could have hit record and play, and the meetings were almost identical. And so I said, okay. I really appreciate you sharing this with me. I understand you're not wanting to live with three other people in a one bathroom apartment or something, and I'll get back to you, but I will work on this. And so I put out a call to NIS Heads and said, I know that many of you are in cities like Boston.
Speaker 1:It's extremely expensive to live. What are you doing about this? And no one had anything. There was one school that very strangely decided a loan program. We're not banks, folks.
Speaker 1:Don't get into the banking business. And they discovered that themselves and stopped it after an awkward few years. And other people said, let us know what you find out, what you come up with. And I kept thinking, but we don't have any money. Can't you can't you guys come up with something?
Speaker 1:And what I came up with was a housing bonus that you can do once in your time here. You have to be at Meridian at least two years, and you have to promise to come back for at least one year. And it's just $6,000. And you give us some receipts, not very picky about what they are, and we write you a check for $6,000, which in Boston covers at least maybe you're getting a $2,000 a month apartment. That covers just three months.
Speaker 1:You can cover the move, whatever, but we're basically handing you three months of rent for free. And there's no strings attached other than you can't move out to Amherst, Massachusetts or somewhere that's so far away. You can do it the of a house. You can do it towards rent. And I brought this to the board.
Speaker 1:I showed them a model of what it's likely to cost us over time, which is not a lot. One, because it's a onetime only deal. Two, because a lot of our folks are settled. They're in homes that they're comfortable with. And three, because if people can't afford to stay, and I think we would have lost both of these teachers almost immediately if they really had to keep living that way.
Speaker 1:The fee I pay when I'm hiring, the the to Carney Sando or someone else, is more than $6. Right? So it's really a cost saver, and it's a benefit that people really were struck by. You're just gonna give me $6 more than you would have given me.
Speaker 2:Tell me about the impact. What's reaction from your community, and how often have people come to you taking advantage of the program?
Speaker 1:So again, it's cost us very little, Jeff, right, because people who are stable and steady, older folks I'm not moving, and I wouldn't take it anyway. I don't take any of those benefits. But my colleagues, it's really a younger person, more transitory kind of person who's just settling into Boston, they got one bedroom and a bunch of things. But also as another colleague, she and her wife bought a house, and that helped them with, I guess, legal fees, some small piece of the whole thing. But I do think the message was I actually listen.
Speaker 1:We're gonna problem solve because your personal life matters to us, and your happiness not living in a under the staircase like Harry Potter matters. And so we're gonna do what we can. And I think that when I'm doing a new hire pitch, we love you. We want you to come here and hear our benefits. That's an hour long conversation about the school, but the benefits piece takes a long time because it's a long list of great professional development benefits and technology benefits and, just funding in other ways.
Speaker 1:My colleagues get everything they need for the classroom. They all have Amazon accounts. They just buy what they want, and they can't believe it because if you've been to any other school, that's just not how it works. I will tell you, so just when you think about advice to other school leaders and business folks around budgeting, I think schools are penny wise and pound foolish. Right?
Speaker 1:We spend a lot of money on our facilities on our certainly on staff and benefits and everything. Then we don't give people the flexibility to get what they need for their classrooms. It ends up being a tiny fraction of it. All my essays, all my colleagues just basically get whatever they want for their classrooms. It's such a minute fraction of our annual budget, and it's just a rounding error compared to salaries and rent and other things.
Speaker 1:One of my colleagues said, Josh, for professional development, I wanted to read this $50 physics book. Would that be okay for a summer? Like, I'm sending people to Senegal for the summer. Yes. $50 books are fine, but they don't have to ask.
Speaker 1:Honestly, he could have just put that into his normal Amazon account, but he thought it was a big deal to get a fancy $50 book. Right? People do feel spoiled in ways. It's teachers are easy to spoil. Let's be clear.
Speaker 1:They really are.
Speaker 2:And it's so consistent with it's never really about the pencils and paper. It's not. Financials, sustainability, financial health, it's not about that. And there's a lot of research actually, Josh, about the impact it has when individuals, any type of employee don't feel like they have the tools that they need to be successful to do their job. Do you have incredibly high retention?
Speaker 2:I'm just No. Really?
Speaker 1:So we're losing a colleague right now because her husband needs to take a job in down south. And we're losing another colleague because she has one family member basically in The US, and they're in California. Right? So young people, they're in transition. So our younger staff tends to have some level of churn, and our more 40 year old folks tend to be more like lifers, but it's a blend.
Speaker 1:Because of the nature of our teaching, being a really rich investigation and research based school, a lot of folks who have years and years of teaching have, to be frank, sometimes been practicing what we consider to be the wrong thing, and so we'd be paying a lot of money for someone who has been too focused on lecture and test kind of teaching, And so our sweet spot is someone with about three years of teaching. Interesting. They figured out class management. They've learned more about the discipline they teach. I can tell you I knew a lot more math after three years of high school math teaching than I did because you understand it at a different level and you understand what kids understand.
Speaker 1:So three years is great, and then we can turn them into really rich mentors and project based teachers. But because we're hiring at that age often, we're getting people who stay a few years, but then take their skill sets elsewhere for more personal reasons usually.
Speaker 2:Josh, you mentioned trade offs earlier, and I really wanna dig into some of those trade offs, especially for a small school. No one's resources are infinite. Right? So they're always finite in some way. But what are some of those trade offs that you've experienced at Meridian, and what are some trade offs that you've avoided having to make at Meridian because of the resources you're working with, particularly at a small school?
Speaker 2:Let's dig into that.
Speaker 1:So the challenges, and I often say that if I had started a school in Iowa, I would have needed a really different model, is think about how you can provide the sort of tuition level and tuition support that we do. We have students who pay $0 in tuition through people who pay about $39 right now. How you do that but still feel resource rich. Right? The standard model is you build an enormous fancy hermetically sealed campus where everything happens and everything is great.
Speaker 1:Right? We are in former Catholic elementary school building. I am deeply appreciative of our space. We have beautiful huge classrooms, and we are, like, three blocks from the Orange Line t stop in in Boston. Right?
Speaker 1:So our structure for avoiding some of those trade offs is to not be house poor. Our accommodations are very affordable. We rent them from the archdiocese, and it's still shared Sunday school classroom space, so we get it at quite a discount. So we don't spend much on space. We spend a lot on our stuff, but not on space.
Speaker 1:When you look at school budgets in a pie chart, our space wedge is a lot smaller than your typical independent school Sounds like affidavit. Right? But we have some of the best resources imaginable. We're a hop, skip, and a jump to the Copley Library in Boston, which is a stunning library. It's beautiful, and it's super well run.
Speaker 1:And if you call ahead and said, we're bringing 20 American history students down on next Thursday for three hours, they say, great. We'll have two librarians ready for you. So our model is let the world provide. Don't build it. Don't buy it.
Speaker 1:Don't pay for it. Just let Boston with its incredible resources and the partners you can develop with museums and universities and also, by the way, the natural resources. Our eighth graders do a whole study of the Charles River over six weeks. We're really fortunate to have woods and waterways and cultural institutions and historic landmarks everywhere. So the model we built is one where some of those trade offs aren't necessary because we're in the heart of Boston.
Speaker 2:That's really powerful stuff. And as our time is coming to a close, twenty years, Josh, and you're gonna turn the page. What reflections do you have on this part of your career, and do you have a plan for the next chapter? I'd love to know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, a, it's just deeply moving. I think I learned very quickly that as the head of school, especially in a community this size, you are in people's family lives. When you start getting a call over the summer from someone letting you know that, like, Joe's grandmother passed away and they just wanted you to know, you realize that you are really in their lives in a very profound way. So it has been a joyous twenty years.
Speaker 1:Right? Just extraordinarily grateful to get to know the people I've known, to get to collaborate and problem solve, and deal with all the ups and downs of life with all these wonderful kids and teachers and parents. I love having learned how to run a business. And my father was, as I mentioned, an accountant. I never had any interest in business.
Speaker 1:I'm a mathy guy, but to me, I associated business with for profit. But running a not for profit, which my wife also does, and my son runs for profits. He's a kind of startup entrepreneur. My whole family talks business and HR and everything else together. I love it.
Speaker 1:So we're we're really business nerds as a family in a way that my wife or I would have ever expected. So it's been extraordinary. And as I said, I've continued to teach. Right? I really have not let go.
Speaker 1:And so finally, this was my letting go. I couldn't let go of any of the pieces, so I'm just stepping away. And I'm really excited. I'm gonna focus on curriculum development. As I mentioned, I'm not a fan of how math is taught.
Speaker 1:The reality is I think most math teachers don't even know what's done with math. They don't know about applied mathematics particularly, and they don't put kids in the game as either theoretical or applied mathematicians. And I will say any discipline you teach, those are the only two reasons for doing it. Like, why do you study history? Because it helps you understand your world, and it helps you understand wonderful exciting past things that have happened.
Speaker 1:And when it's just about names and dates, no good. When math is just about algebra and symbol pushing, but they never know why they would write an equation or why they care what the answer was, That's pointless. Our courses are just not like that. They're incredibly rich intellectual applied domains. I've done a lot of writing up of curriculum.
Speaker 1:I wanna have time to really do more of that and to work with teachers and help more math teachers and more teachers do the kind of work we do. We have about a 100 teachers a year visiting Meridian from literally all over the world. We've had just in the last couple of months people from India, from Spain, and from locally. So, anyway, I'm just excited to get to be just focused as a teacher and teacher for the and I'm about to become a grandparent for the first time in
Speaker 2:late Congratulations.
Speaker 1:And my head is exploding with excitement about that.
Speaker 2:The work continues, it sounds, even in retirement. In my
Speaker 1:letter to the community, when I announced my imminent departure, I said, I am
Speaker 2:not retiring. I'm rewiring. Rewiring. I like that. But I am so grateful that we had this chance to connect.
Speaker 2:I learned a lot about you. I've learned a lot from you, and I bet a lot of folks listening have as well. Thank you so much, Josh, for being a guest on the Net Assets Podcast. And if our paths don't cross again soon, my best of luck with your rewiring.
Speaker 1:Thank you, and thank you to NBOA. I can't tell you how much I sing the praises of this organization. I think they're phenomenal, and they have really helped me inordinately over the years. It's just a dynamic collegial community. I'm so appreciative.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for saying that. And that's it for this episode of the Net Assets Podcast. Join us each month as we continue our conversation with business leaders and key voices who are shaping independent school business, finance, and operations. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. For more information on MBOA, visit us online at mboa.org.
Speaker 2:I'm Jeff Shields, MBOA President and CEO and your NetAssets Podcast host. Tune in next time.