The Key School
Identifying strategies to ensure a dynamic future.
The Key School, based in Annapolis, Maryland, was founded in 1958 upon the conviction that children are innately curious about themselves and the world. It remains the school’s mission to nourish and guide this natural exuberance so that each student embraces lifelong learning and develops into an informed, thoughtful, and constructive member of society. The Key School is endowed with numerous assets including a unique outdoor education program, rigorous academics, and a community that was robust in its support for the school’s mission, culture, and values.
The school was also facing challenges. Demographics were not supportive, with the population in its traditional catchment declining due to a falling birth rate and stagnant job market. Enrollment had decreased and tuition rates were at the high end of the local market, limiting the ability to impact revenue streams through additional increases. Approaching the end of its current strategic plan, the school needed to establish a guiding framework for the future. Committed to maintaining its existing culture and values, and recognizing the importance of adapting to a changing environment and the changing needs of its students, Key School was seeking a partner who could confidently guide them through this critical process.
Working with the school’s board and leadership team, Triangle Associates developed a strategic design process that “cut through the noise” to identify the opportunities Key needed to pursue, the threats it needed to mitigate, and the bets it needed to place on its future. Triangle Associates was intimately involved with the Key School community throughout the process, utilizing campus visits, listening sessions, one-to-one interviews, and stakeholder surveys to ‘mine’ the community for data, seeking an in-depth understanding of the critical elements that would inform and direct the development of the school’s future strategic framework. Working seamlessly together, Triangle and school leadership synthesized internally gathered data with demographic information and projections to identify potential strategic priority areas — domains in which the school must excel to ensure strength and sustainability in the future.
The identification of these ‘strategic priority areas’ was the foundation for an iterative process of developing strategic statements and goals, resulting in a framework that provides directionality for Key School in the future and that is distinctly unique and true to the school’s culture and values. The school can move forward confidently, making consequential decisions about its students, its teachers, its culture, its learning environment, and its financial path, ensuring a dynamic future for future generations of students.
