Prémisses d'un nouveau modèle de consommation responsable

we shouldn’t spend the money having reunion, annual dinner…those thing that we normally
do and we should suspend and not do this year. But what we need to keep because we need
to reinforce the message that the School is healthy. If we had change and not had for
instance the general assembly and annual dinner it would have sent very negative message
to our community that the School is hurting. So we needed to like we were telling them for
the State-of-the-School, keep that and said we try to cut back whatever we could in the way
of expenses. We knew that we needed to keep that going because otherwise it would have
sent very negative messages that we didn’t want to send. But School community was very
supportive throughout the all-initial crisis but fundraising was very down as far as
participation. And the good news is that it’s picking up. I think people have renewed energy
and confidence in the economy and that’s made a difference a year later as to their giving
ability and their willingness to give. And, they also, although I’m sure people are still
impacted, I think our objectives are the same, we still want 100% participation from people,
we still want to show that we are a thriving community. And I think one of the most positive
thing that I’ve heard about in the past is that from an Admission stand point, we seem to be
right back when we were before that happens and the number right know is 830 projected for
next year. So we have this momentary blooper time with Admission and it’s apparently the
companies that bring expats over here that are bringing people back like they did in the past
because they are confident in the economy. The other way that we were hugely impacted was
our demand for financial aid for those people who don’t receive it from the French
government and don’t receive compensation from their companies to send their kids to
School, our demand was up by 20% and we responded by adding to our budget accordingly
so that we could help those family that have either an impact by loosing their jobs or didn’t
get their bonuses. The other thing that happen at our Gala this year, the Olivia Tucker ask,
which happen every year and that goes to financial aid, was far more supported this year
than usual (went from $30 000 to $57 000) in 15 minutes. We had a great auctioneer, the
Board of the Chair who get up and said we need your help in this direction but whether or
not it had to do with people just very strongly feeling that they wanted to support this type of
imitative. We and our department had to cut back a position and some of the ways we
delivered our publications for next year. Because the budget was set a all six months earlier,
we still have our budget to work with this year but the impact will be seen next year in the
way we deliver our communication tools. As far as the new web site goes, the spenditure for
the web site was justify by the fact that we were told to cut back in printing which cost a lot
more (issues of the magazine, view book.. hundred of thousand of dollars) and to spend
30.000 on the new web site we could delivered this communication in electronic fashion
seems justifiable to the Board and the Head of School. Advertising – we didn’t seems to have
any issues there, in fact we double or triple our advertising income. The economy didn’t
seems to heart the Gala anyway and in fact we went from $220 000 and we added a $100
000 more than we did in the past.
I don’t think they were a School that was not impacted by this recession and particularly
those that are international in nature. The fact that they depend on expats, everybody have to
have been in the same situation that we were and I assume that they all in a positive going
for as far as the Lycee is looking for more properties. We are very different from the Lycee,
far more French and less bilingual than we are even they do have English classes. We have a
mission and I don’t think that the School even with this financial impact would waver from
the mission of the School to accommodate. This is not the first time we had a recession. The
way this School is set up takes in to account the adding flow of expats coming and going all
the time. Every year we have to do that, recession or not. This was just a much larger and
uncertain length of time rather than encapsulated within one year of what would be the
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