The Companion Shelf — Head of School
The guide is the map; this shelf holds the tools — demonstrations of the real work, downloadable templates, and exercises you can run with your team. It grows and changes between editions, which is why the guide points here rather than to individual items.
Tools You Can Use Today —
Free tools that live on the web rather than in a PDF. They need no login, they are always current, and they change as the public data behind them does.
They are also examples of what this guide is about. Each one was built with AI — finding the federal datasets, reconciling sources that disagree about geography, drafting, testing, and throwing out the versions that turned out to be wrong. None of them has AI running inside. The figures come from the public record and the comparisons come from a fixed table, so what you see is the record itself rather than a model's account of it.
Building with AI and running on AI are different things, and these are here so the difference is visible in something you can actually use on Monday.
Class of 2030
Your enrollment picture five years out is already sitting in the public record, county by county.
Choose your state and county, then the grade most of your students enter — kindergarten, 6th, or 9th. Kindergarten reads the birth record; 6th and 9th read the children the Census Bureau estimates are living in your county now, lined up by the fall they reach that grade. Beside either sits how many households are arriving or leaving, and what they earn. Read as a set, they describe the size, the direction, and the tuition-paying capacity of the market you draw from — well before any of it reaches your applicant pool.
Every figure comes from the public record: federal birth records, Census population estimates, and federal tax filings. You can add up to three neighboring counties, since most schools draw across county lines.
It closes with questions written for a leadership team, and a view you can print for a board meeting — where "our market is changing" becomes a number a trustee can look up.
Free and ungated, like everything on this shelf — no login, no email. It lives on the web rather than in a PDF because the underlying figures are revised every year. Pairs with Chapter 8.
Your Backyard
Where are the families near your school who are already choosing something other than public school, and does your enrollment plan reach them?
Most schools draw from the neighborhoods they already know: current families, familiar feeders, the places where private school is already an assumption. The market around the school is usually larger than that. The distance between the two is often the biggest untapped opportunity a school has, and it's a good question to put to your enrollment director and your board.
Type a ZIP code and see how many K–12 students in your neighborhood, and in every neighborhood near you, are enrolled outside public school, with the share that represents. A split by grade band shows whether families in your market decide early or late. One thing to know: the Census counts home school in the same box as private school, so the number means "outside public school."
Free and ungated, like everything on this shelf: no login, no email. Each lookup has its own link, ready for a board deck. Pairs with Chapter 8.
By chapter —
Each item is what a chapter's "in practice" callout points to.
Chapter 1 — The AI Moment in Private K-12 Education
The Redesign Is Coming. Private Schools Should Lead It — three ideas from the Ai4 2026 keynote by Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng, and why the redesign of how children learn is a place private schools can lead rather than follow.
Chapter 4 — The Personal Disciplines
Thinking Partner Prompt Card — the chapter's starter prompt on one page, ready to paste into any AI assistant.
Chapter 5 — The Leadership Layer
— the Real AI Series video presenting the chapter's core concept on screen.
Chapter 6 — Strategy, Board, and Communications
— watch a static board report become a working what-if tool.
Chapter 10 — Governing AI
— the free self-diagnostic for the three postures the chapter describes. ·
— the trustee-facing TRE scenario lab with downloadable whitepaper.
Chapter 12 — Leading the Team
— a ready-made team activity for a learning circle or leadership meeting.
Chapter 13 — Different Schools, Different Playbooks
The AI Readiness Diagnostic — a school-level read on process, data, and culture readiness.
Templates & downloads —
Feel free to adapt to your school. One click to the PDF.
Seven-Part AI Policy Skeleton — the policy outline to adapt (Ch 10)
Thinking Partner Prompt Card — the personal-disciplines starter prompt (Ch 4)
Vendor AI Questions Card — five questions + the demo-day list (Ch 11 / A1)
Board Packet — TRE→NIST Crosswalk + the Four Standing Artifacts(Ch 10 / A2)
Six Starting Rules for the Leadership Team — the data-line one-pager (Ch 3)
AI Posture Statement Skeleton — a fill-in starting posture statement (Ch 10)
Vendor Data-Question Checklist (Ch 3)
The Four-Move Redirect Card — classroom AI questions (Ch 14)
I add to this shelf as the work happens, not on the guide's publication schedule. New tools, demonstrations, and templates land here first, and nothing on the shelf is locked to the edition you own.
Occasional notes from Linda
Updates when there's something worth sharing. No schedule. No spam.