Why Senior Leadership Engagement Determines the Success of Summer and Auxiliary Programs

Summer and auxiliary programs sit in an unusual position within a school. They operate on the same campus, serve many of the same families, and rely on the same spaces and systems as the academic year program. However, they often lack the institutional authority to make decisions independently. They are, in many ways, on the front line: the first to encounter every scheduling conflict, every territorial dispute over a classroom, and every gap in a school-wide process that nobody noticed because it never had to flex before. I often tell Heads that if you really want to know how well run your school is, ask your auxiliary director. Like the “canary in the coal mine,” they often experience and see issues before the rest of the school.

Sometimes what is actually a feature of growth gets confused with failure.

Pressure Is a Sign of Progress and Not a Bad Problem to Have

As summer and auxiliary programming expands, it inevitably puts pressure on school-wide systems and exposes pinch points: who controls which spaces, how facilities get scheduled, which decisions require sign-off from whom. The instinct might be to read this friction as dysfunction. It's more accurate to read it as evidence that the program is working. The more progress auxiliary programming makes, the more pressure it puts on the systems around it. A program that generates no friction is probably a program that hasn't grown.

The question, then, isn't how to eliminate that pressure. It's how to respond to it; and that response depends almost entirely on senior leadership.

What Senior Leadership Can Do to Clear the Way

Auxiliary leaders can identify the pinch points. They usually can't resolve them alone, because the fixes require authority that crosses departments, faculty, and long-standing norms. That's where senior leadership comes in, not to run the program, but to clear the way for it.

1. Reinforce the strategic priorities, consistently. It's not enough to announce summer programming priorities once. The school community needs regular reminders of why the program matters and how each department or individual can support it. Without that repetition, priorities fade into the background and old habits reassert themselves. One of my mentors said to me as I stepped into senior leadership that I “should prepare myself to repeat myself a thousand times a thousand times” (that equals a million for those trying to figure that out).

2. Step in to shift culture when needed. Some problems won't resolve through process alone, they require intervention. A common example: clarifying that spaces belong to the school, not to individual departments or faculty members who have informally claimed them. That kind of ownership question rarely gets settled by the auxiliary team; it needs to be settled from the top. To make that point, I once took all the teacher’s names off the doors to reinforce that the spaces exist for ALL the activities that support the mission.

3. Bring the leadership team into the problem-solving, together. When summer and auxiliary programs are left to solve school-wide issues on their own, they're solving problems they don't have full authority over. Creating regular opportunities for the broader leadership team to work through these issues together, rather than handing them off, produces better, more durable solutions. I put my auxiliary director on the senior leadership team, but there are other approaches, such as regularly convening and facilitating a group of leaders who are relevant to auxiliary programs (hint: that may be almost all your senior leaders).

The Payoff Extends Well Beyond Summer

When senior leadership engages in this way, the benefits aren't confined to the summer program. They ripple across the entire school:

• Clarified shared purpose and a school-wide understanding of strategic priorities and objectives, not just a summer-specific one. A side effect I learned first hand is that by having to intentionally include auxiliary, I was knitting a much more cohesive institutional alignment and identity.

• Better communication, scheduling, and planning practices built to handle complexity, not just to survive it. Auxiliary is often a tremendous asset in supporting this operational efficiency–just listen to what they are telling you.

• More leveraged facilities and resources which are used more fully across more of the calendar year. Your campus and program are your largest assets and a 12 month view of utilization takes time and commitment to adjust to–but is becoming essential.

• Increased revenue is a natural outcome of a program operating with fewer structural obstacles. 

The work of supporting auxiliary programs isn't a favor to one department. It's an investment in how the whole school operates. The friction summer and auxiliary programming surfaces is an opportunity, but only senior leadership has the standing to turn that opportunity into lasting change.