Session three

Session Three — Family Sentiment

A free companion artifact from The Enrollment Director Field Guide to AI. The guide explains when and how to use it; this copy is yours to adapt for your school. More at haitani.org/field-guides/enrollment-director

Q3 2026 edition · last updated August 13, 2026

What this is. The third of five working sessions. It turns what families say — publicly online, and privately in your own surveys — into themes you can put on a table.

You already hear this market better than anyone in your building. What has been missing is a way to carry that hearing into a leadership meeting as evidence rather than as anecdote. This session is that conversion.

Open a new conversation in your project. Turn web search on. Have Sessions 1 and 2 summaries in the folder.

Before you start: the data line

If you bring survey comments into this session, strip them first. Remove names, remove the identifying detail that makes a family recognizable, and remember that two specific details can identify one family in a small school even when no name appears. Aggregate comments are safe; a verbatim about the only family in a particular circumstance is not.

Paste this to begin

This is Session 3 of 5: Family Sentiment. Read my Session 1 and Session 2 summaries in the project files before you begin.

Your goals for this session: understand how families talk and feel about private schools in this area, about my school specifically, and about the admission experience.

- Public sentiment research: search Reddit, Niche, GreatSchools, local Facebook groups and parenting forums, and local news for conversations about my school by name and about private schools in this city or region. Summarize themes, recurring praise, recurring complaints, and the push and pull factors that drive families toward or away from private school here.
- Survey analysis: I may paste qualitative feedback from post-admission or withdrawal surveys, with names removed. Analyze emotional tone, recurring themes, and pain points and strengths in the admission process.
- If useful, sketch a persona of an unsatisfied parent based on the evidence, with recommendations for what would have changed their experience.
- Offer concrete recommendations for improving the admission process based on what the evidence shows.

State this caveat whenever you present online sentiment: public forums over-represent vocal and often dissatisfied voices, so treat them as directional signals, not a census. Distinguish clearly between what you found and how much weight it deserves.

Start with the public sentiment research, one source at a time.

What to expect, and where to push

Check that your assistant can actually reach these platforms before you read anything into the results. Access to Reddit in particular now depends on agreements between each AI company and Reddit, and it changes. If a search comes back empty, ask directly whether it could read the site — an empty result because the door was closed is a very different thing from an empty result because nobody is talking about your school, and only the second one belongs in your summary.

The volume of public material about your school will surprise you in one direction or the other. A school with almost no online footprint is itself a finding worth carrying into Session Five.

Watch for the model treating a single loud thread as a theme. Ask how many distinct voices sit behind any pattern it names, and how recent they are. A 2019 complaint about a policy you changed in 2022 is noise being presented as signal.

The most useful output here is usually the gap between what families say publicly and what your own surveys say. Ask for that comparison directly. Where the two disagree, you have found something worth understanding before the next season opens.

Close the session

Summarize this session using the Session Three template. Separate what came from public forums from what came from my own survey data, and carry the caveats about evidence quality into the summary rather than dropping them.

Correct it, weight it against what you have actually heard in conversations this year, and save it in your Sessions folder as Session 3 Summary.