Assistant Director of Admission and Multicultural Outreach

Leadership Opportunity

Assistant Director of Admission and Multicultural Outreach

Shady Hill School

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Shady Hill School, a progressive, culturally diverse co-educational pre-kindergarten through eighth grade independent school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeks an engaging and collaborative Assistant Director of Admission and Multicultural Outreach to help lead its admissions and outreach efforts.  Led by Mark Stanek, only the 6^th Head in the school’s 104-year history, Shady Hill continues its venerable legacy of excellence, both in teaching and learning.

This is an opportunity for a leader to help shape the direction and vision of the Admission Office, and Shady Hill School. As Shady Hill matures and moves through the DEI continuum, it seeks a highly skilled admission professional with deep interest and capacity in community-based relationship building, to engage other departments and actualize these goals.

The School

Founded in 1915 by Cambridge educators, the school is now comprised of approximately 35% children of color and 18% faculty of color from 10 towns surrounding the greater Boston area. The student population also includes racially blended families, adoptive families, and those with gay and lesbian and/or single parents. The 11-acre campus in Cambridge provides an ideal environment for learning and teaching both inside and outside the classroom. 

In sustaining Shady Hill’s mission, the school “challenges prejudice, respects differences and recognizes that multiple perspectives inform human experience.” Shady Hill’s commitment to the work of diversity and inclusion in the areas of race, ethnicity, family structure, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, and socio-economic background spans over six decades. Building in the long-standing commitment to prepare graduates for success in a multicultural world, the school continues to hone the skills of students and adults in cultural competency.

Opportunities for the Assistant Director of Admission and Multicultural Outreach

The Assistant Director of Admission is an integral part of the Admission team with shared responsibilities for all the office’s activities during the year. Shady Hill’s Admission Office welcomes hundreds of families every year during the admission season, processes applications for these families, and is the first and most extensive point of contact for many people’s experience with Shady Hill. As a key member of the Admission team, this position will play a central role in the recruitment, selection and ongoing engagement and success of a diverse student population as outlined by the School’s Diversity Mission Statement. The position will also have a focus on the engagement of prospective and current families from underrepresented populations.  The Assistant Director’s duties include a wide array of tasks and management for all the varying aspects of the Admission cycle.

Strategic Priorities

Shady Hill has a long history and tradition of centering equity in its practice and setting expectations of inclusion in its community. The school, deeply ingrained with professional development and multicultural practice, uses the language of “diversity” in its broadest sense. As education, and the country, change at a break-neck pace, all schools face the need to maximize applied effort to ensure that their rhetoric matches the hard work needed to make change. In this way Shady Hill is inaugurating this Assistant Directorship with an integral element of leadership in multicultural outreach.

Every constituent in the Shady Hill community is engaged with equity work: with a board that is 50% trustees of color, a strong representation of women of color in leadership, and 18% faculty of color- Shady Hill recognizes its role among independent schools taking leadership in equity work. From DASH (Diversity at Shady Hill) to affinity groups for both students and for faculty, to the Senior Leadership Team attending this summer’s inaugural White Responsibility Conference 2019, SHS is continuing to embark on the journey of deep reflection moving towards veritable action.

Moreover, its legacies of embracing students of color in the 1930’s, establishing a scholarship trust for economic diversity in the 1940’s, admitting some of the US’s first teachers of color, as apprentices in a diverse setting, and deep expansion of multicultural curricular emphasis in the 1950’s, provide the necessary strong foundation to move forward boldly.

 Essential Functions:

• Managing all advertising and media communications for the Admission Office
• Assist in developing and organizing the recruitment, enrollment and success of students from diverse and underrepresented populations
• Assisting the Director of Admission in managing the Tour Guide Program, specifically: preparing materials for tour guide training, annual revisions to the tour guide scripts, daily management of volunteers and tour adjustments
• Assisting the Director of Admission in managing the office’s interviewers, specifically: preparing materials for interviewing training, collation and entry into Portal of interview notes
• Interviewing prospective families
• Assisting the Director of Admission in preparing for Beginner (pre-k) and Kindergarten screening days, specifically: arranging for staffing, review of files for special circumstances, preparing paperwork for the events, coordination of parent volunteers
• Assisting the Director of Admission in preparing for Admissions Day (AD), specifically: formation of all AD teams, coordination with Division Heads regarding staffing, coordination with teachers in creating assessment packages and preparation of same, management of all documentation resulting from AD
• Coordination of student visits for sixth grade applicants
• Shared responsibility for attending and follow-up from all pre-school fairs, diversity fairs and other outreach events
• Preparation for Lower School and Middle School Open Houses
• Review of Middle School files and participation on Admission Committees for each grade
• Drafting of decision letters
• Coordination of summer mailings to incoming students and families
• Annual review and updating of the FAQ booklet for visiting families

Fast Facts about Shady Hill School

Shady Hill is an independent, coeducational day school located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• Founded: 1915. There are over 3,500 alumni.
• Accreditation: Member of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) and the Association of Independent Schools of New England (AISNE).
• Location: Eleven acres with tree-lined paths, wetlands, and grassy areas in a quiet Cambridge neighborhood.
• Campus: Eighteen buildings, including an art, woodshop, and music center; the Beehive, which houses our library, world language, and our technology lab. The new HUB building houses state of the art science labs, math classrooms and the Maker Space; a gymnasium; an assembly hall; and several child-scaled classroom buildings.
• Students: Approximately 515 boys and girls in pre-Kindergarten ("Beginners" or 4-year-olds) through Grade 8. Students come from about 40 different communities, the majority from Cambridge and Boston.
• Faculty: 90 full and part-time faculty, and 91% of Shady Hill teachers hold advanced degrees.
• Student/Teacher Ratio: 8/1 overall. Class sizes are limited.
• Students of Color: Students of color represent 35% of our enrollment.
• Financial Aid: Shady Hill's financial aid budget totals over $2.7 million. Tuition grants range from a few hundred dollars to almost the entire tuition. All assistance is based on a family's ability to pay. The number of families receiving aid has ranged from18% to 21% in recent years.
• Governance: Every parent is a member of the not-for-profit corporation, presided over by the Board of Trustees. The school’s Head of School supervises the faculty and oversees the educational program.

Geography

Cambridge, MA is a vibrant city of over 100,000 outside of Boston. In many ways it is seen as an intellectual center of the Northeast, housing MIT, TUFTS and Harvard.  It boasts an array of arts and recreation activities for the many young professionals, getting an A for diversity and being “good for families.”

Procedure to Apply

Interested candidates should submit the following materials confidentially as separate PDF attachments in one email:

• Cover letter expressing interest in the position
• Current resume
• Statement of educational philosophy and practice
• Three letters of recommendation

Email to Orpheus Crutchfield orpheus@strategenius.org, and Mary Rose Fernandez Maryrose@strategenius.org, with the subject line: “Shady Hill School—Assistant Director of Admission and Multicultural Outreach.”

Search Calendar

Application Deadline:                         July 20

Semifinalists interviews:                    Week of July 22nd

Finalists interviews:                           Week of July 28th

Hiring announcement:                       Week of August 4th

Start Date:                                        August 11 or as soon as possible for start of school year 2019-2020