The One-Person Admissions Office
Enrollment Boot Camp for Catholic and
Small Independent Schools
SAVE THE DATE
Thursday, August 6, 2026
East Bay Location TBA
Full registration details will be shared with interested schools first.
Families compare your school to every other option before they ever walk through the door. The first impression isn’t the tour. It’s the email. The follow-up. The feeling that someone is paying attention.
For lean admissions offices, often just one person wearing every hat, that’s a lot to carry alone.
Families are already comparing Catholic, independent, public, charter, and alternative options in the same conversation. This workshop helps schools understand this new market reality and respond with clarity.
We call it admissions. The work is enrollment strategy. This workshop treats it that way.
Most schools call this work admissions. We use this word because it’s the title on the door and the job most people recognize.
But the work itself is enrollment management: reading what families are responding to, noticing where they hesitate, and reporting these findings back to school leadership as real information, not just a tally of applications received. In lean offices, the person doing this work often doesn’t realize how much strategic value they’re sitting on.
This workshop treats it that way. It’s the same thinking behind Enrollment Intelligence, the framework that shapes every engagement at Journeys Edu, applied here in a single, practical day built for teams of one.
Admissions vs. Enrollment
What We’ll Cover
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From first inquiry to enrollment, we’ll look at how families move from curiosity to commitment, and where schools lose them quietly.
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Why the first reply, the tour invitation, and the follow-up are not administrative details. They are trust signals.
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A look at best practices used by selective private schools and how smaller schools can adapt these habits without needing a large team.
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How to prepare, structure, and follow up after tours so families understand your school’s value.
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We’ll look at how to enlist current parents and members of your community to support tours, answer questions, and extend the school’s voice.
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Simple tools and habits for tracking inquiries, managing follow-up, coordinating with leadership, and staying visible to families.
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How admissions professionals can gather the right information and help principals and Heads of School understand what families are asking, hesitating over, and responding to in the market.
Attendees will leave with sample inquiry-response language, a basic follow-up framework, tour planning questions, parent ambassador ideas, and a simple enrollment intelligence dashboard they can adapt for their school.
Who Should Attend
Admissions and enrollment professionals
Principals and Heads of School
Advancement or development staff who support enrollment
Office managers or coordinators involved in admissions
New and emerging enrollment leaders
Experienced Catholic school admissions professionals who want to sharpen systems and compare practices with the broader independent school market
School leaders who want to better understand what their admissions teams are seeing in the market.
Why This Workshop
This is not a national conference with generic enrollment advice.
This is a local workshop for Bay Area schools navigating Bay Area families, Bay Area competition, and Bay Area expectations.
Led by David Lazo, founder of Journeys Educational Advising, the workshop brings together 20 years of admissions, enrollment, and financial aid experience across higher education and Bay Area independent schools, including Stanford, Vanderbilt, College Prep and Woodside Priory, plus years advising families directly and presenting to school professionals through VenturEd and the Bay Area Directors of Admissions (BADA).
David grew up in the Bay Area outside the independent school system and later worked inside some of its most selective institutions. This perspective shapes his belief that enrollment is not just administration. It is strategy, relationship-building, and institutional listening, the same thinking behind the Enrollment Intelligence framework.
Get In Touch
Questions? Contact David Lazo or visit the Schools page to learn more about Journeys Educational Advising.
