“The Patriot” will break down the Board of Trustees’ history, role, importance, and goals over the coming weeks.
President Richard O’Hara said, “There is always a need in schools to demystify the Board and their role and purposes. The Board at John Carroll functions very well. They are thoughtful of what their role is compared to the role of the administration.”
However, much of the work of the Board is unknown to students as part of a more general policy. “If you’re having big Board problems and it’s in the news, that’s really not good. Whether it’s a business institution or a school, if we’re doing our job, it will be under the radar,” said Rachael Rice, class of ’88.
The Board is divided into eight standing committees that meet monthly: institutional advancement (set goals with donors and the capital campaign), finance (develop a budget, recommend tuition rates, financial aid, etc.), Catholic mission (dealing with how the school stays true to its Catholic identity), trusteeship (finding and recruiting new members), facilities (planning and maintaining campus), marketing (branding audit of every publication), strategic planning, and metrics (complies and interprets data).
In reference to marketing’s goals this year, Director of Communications Sue Cathell said, “When I first started on the committee, we were charged with developing a strategic marketing plan. What we ran into almost immediately was we didn’t know how to define John Carroll. We wanted to be able to say in one concise statement what our brand is. Now that we have the brand, [the question is] what will we focus our advertising on, how will we market ourselves to different constituents.”
In addition, Rice, chairperson of the marketing committee, has long term goals for her time on the Board. “Personally, I want to leave the Board and see that my peers are sending their kids to John Carroll and not even questioning that they’re going to do it. I want us to tell the good news about the school. It will mean we’ve done our job and created that steady stream of customers.”
Vice Chair John Karas, who also serves as chairman of the Catholic mission committee, said about the work of his committee, “We recently completed the Catholic mission statement for the school. We’re waiting for the completion of the strategic plan because it has very specific avenues that the Catholic missions committee will follow.”
The institutional advancement committee, co-chaired by Larry Burton, class of ’80, and Mike Boyle, class of ’94, meets “about every six weeks” and “tries to look at what is being done to raise funds through the annual campaign fund. We’d like to have a broad program and obviously have a lot of different activities, but it takes money to support them,” said Burton.
His ultimate goal for the committee “is to help raise funds.” Burton added, “I’d like to see in my time on the Board us raise sufficient funds to be able to execute all of the master facilities plan. It’s a pretty grand vision, but that would be my ultimate goal, to spur alumni, corporations, foundations to help pay for this next generation school that we’re hoping to construct.”
Currently the committee is looking in to how to raise the funds. Burton said, “We are actually right now in the early stages of exploring. At this point, we’re just trying to get handle on how much money we think we can raise over the next three to five years and what that will allow us to do in terms of the large overall master facilities plan.”
However, the goals of the committees change over time. According to trustee emeritus Gus Brown, institutional advancement’s focus has shifted.
“It depended on what the financial needs of the school were at the time. When I first came on the Board, we had just built the Fine Arts wing and raising sufficient funding to pay it off was an important goal. It was also an important goal to do everything that we could to make the campus attractive with limited funds. It then became our goal to build the practice gym, the weight room, and to refurbish the main gym, with HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning],” said Brown.
The finance committee “works with facilities and development [institutional advancement]” said Director of Finance Kay Nichols, as well as “overseeing the finances of the school, setting investment policies, and approving the budget.” In addition, the Board creates ad hoc committees as issues arise. An example is the right size committee, created in the late spring of 2007. This was created to assist the master facilities plan, finding out how to “make some of those decisions about what do you want to build and modernize, you have to say how big of a school do we want to plan around,” said Burton.
Because Burton works at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, he was responsible for gathering much of the data. The committee “determined that while there would be an influx of students, the current demographics in Harford County show that there’s a decline in the students in 6th, 7th grade. BRAC would basically offset any natural losses in the demographics.” The “right size” of the school was determined to be 800 to 900 students.
The general Board meetings are held in September, November, January, February, March, and May, with one meeting as an “all day Board retreat, although not in the sense of a spiritual retreat. It’s planning time,” said Sr. Beirne.
The “development and beginning implementation of the 2009 strategic plan,” according to O’Hara, is one of the two key focuses of the Board this year, although every committee has their own individual set of goals. The other is planning for the adaption of the master facilities plan.
Kate Froehlich can be reached for comment at [email protected].