Ken Kunin, Head of School
International School Nido de Aguilas (Santiago, Chile)

I first met Jon Hansen of Global School Operations (GSO) in 2024 at the AAIE conference in New York City.  While I appreciated learning about his experience with systems development in large corporations and his understanding of the life of schools through his wife, who is a teacher, and the many roles and consultancies he’s had over the years, it was his listening that set him apart.  Clearly knowledgeable about the issues and challenges faced by international schools, he listened not to convince, nor to immediately offer a solution, but to understand.  We followed this up with several zoom calls over the course of 2024 and some email correspondence.

 

Following this, when faced with roadblocks in developing and implementing more effective and efficient operational systems, I engaged Jon to work with me and my Deputy Head of Administration and Finance.  He guided us through a reorganization of our administrative structure by asking excellent questions, providing key insights and helping us to reflect back on our thinking to arrive at solutions that made sense for where we were at as an organization.  

 

When we issued a request for proposals to conduct a thorough review and audit of our enrollment management process, the GSO proposal was both competitively priced and showed the deepest understanding of all of the moving parts and how they could be analyzed.  Our staff, including the Director of Enrollment admissions team, counselors and principals have been universal in appreciating how Jon gathered information and even during the audit process, pushed us all to think broadly to develop an enrollment ecosystem to better serve our school.  While we have much more work to do, partly as a result of the work GSO has done with us, we are exceeding our budgeted enrollment targets for this school year.

 

Our Board appreciated Jon’s clear, specific and incisive insights regarding our enrollment process, challenges and opportunities.  We saw in his report and summary matrix, a road map for deep and expert follow-up work that has the potential to accelerate our progress and increase our revenue stream.  We have engaged GSO to continue this work with us and are very excited about the potential to strengthen systems and processes that support Nido into the future.