Strategy 1: Determine and pursue the appropriate balance within the School’s student body with regard to academic achievement, extra-curricular talent, gender, and socioeconomic, international, racial, and geographic diversity.
Approach: Action items include exploring ways to identify prospective students who are likely to fully embrace their EHS experience, establishing a target enrollment of 50 percent boys 50 percent girls, while maintaining the current size of the student body, and exploring and articulating the experience of international students at Episcopal. In addition, the School will make full and thoughtful allocation of the need-based and merit-aid budgets to support pursuit of the desired student body composition, maintain a 20 percent of tuition discount for financial aid as a minimum, and seek to increase the percentage to 25 through completion of the Middle-Income Financial Aid Initiative and other newly endowed funds.
Strategy 2: Refine and communicate the core strengths and distinctive qualities of EHS, increasing the emphasis on exceptional academics.
Approach:
The School will develop and promote a message of academic excellence through enhanced communications, refinement of the revisit day program, and emphasis on the advantage of Episcopal’s proximity to Washington, D.C. In addition, the School will employ mechanisms to measure the accuracy of our messaging, "Are we who we say we are?"
Strategy 3: Increase the breadth and depth of the EHS admissions pool.
Approach:
The School will approach this strategy on a number of fronts, beginning with sustaining a personal interest in each applicant throughout the application process in which all interactions with prospective families are warm, gracious, and responsive to the interests and priorities of the applicant. Other action items include enhanced efforts in Episcopal’s top markets to add depth and increase interest, and identification of one new market annually. The School will research rural markets where there are few or no day school options, while seeking to increase penetration of markets that are traditionally day school markets, where families have the ability to pay for – but are not currently inclined to consider – boarding school.
Strategy 4: Develop a stronger, more informed network of local parents and alumni to support the Admissions Office.
Approach:
The School will expand opportunities for volunteers to both help market EHS as well as maximize yield as admissions decisions are made. Efforts will also be made to increase the structure of volunteer efforts and enhance volunteer education with regard to EHS facts, values, and distinctive qualities, and clarify boundaries of their involvement.