We are thrilled to announce the VenturEd Vanguard Awards, celebrating the very best of our school community. These awards recognize private schools that exemplify accessibility, efficiency, impact, innovation, and excellence. This year, we proudly honor five outstanding schools that are truly setting the standard, leading with creativity, strengthening family connections, and showcasing what’s possible in today’s enrollment landscape.
More than recognition, the Vanguard Awards highlight schools that others can learn from, offering valuable insights and inspiration to help peers across the country put proven strategies into action and learn from the best.
Learn more about the Vanguard Awards and the inaugural winners.
Vanguard Innovation Award
Winner: Punahou School
Location: Honolulu, HI
The Vanguard Innovation Award celebrates a partner that has introduced forward-thinking approaches to strengthen its enrollment lifecycle strategy and improve the application experience for families and staff.
Punahou School is widely recognized for its rigorous academics and commitment to well-rounded development and offers a rich curriculum spanning STEM, the arts, and beyond—preparing students to excel at top universities while fostering intellectual, creative, and personal growth.
Punahou School was selected for its exceptional partnership and commitment to continuous improvement. As a Ravenna Financial Aid® customer, they have dedicated significant time to VenturEd customer focus groups, collaborating with product owners to enhance the financial aid experience.
Having participated in the pilot group that tested Ravenna’s instant IRS integration, the team at Punahou School met regularly with our teams, and shared thoughtful insights to meaningfully improve our financial aid product and strengthen the launch of new features.
Additional collaboration served to test and improve new workflows, reduce delivery risk, and deliver higher-quality releases that lower follow-up support needs. For schools and families alike, these improvements translate into a clearer, more reliable financial aid process, fewer errors and manual follow-ups, smoother tax document verification, and faster, more confident aid decisions.
Update: Punahou School chose to direct its donation back into its own community, investing in a dynamic learning environment where students can flourish, innovate, and explore. By supporting its educational mission, the gift helps shape the next generation of leaders and changemakers.
Vanguard Impact Award
Winner: Kingswood Oxford School
Location: West Hartford, CT
VenturEd Solutions’ Vanguard Impact Award recognizes a partner that has achieved meaningful, measurable progress across key metrics such as inquiry growth, application conversion, yield, retention, and/or financial aid effectiveness.
Kingswood Oxford delivers an intellectually vibrant academic program that inspires students to excel and lead lives of integrity and involvement. Leaning into a strong partnership with the Parent Association as a pillar of their institutional mission, the admissions team, likewise, aims to build consistently steady interpersonal connections with each applicant’s family.
Their use of Ravenna Admissions® has transformed this organic community building. With events now discoverable in the same solution parents use to fill out applications, the admissions team has created higher demand for in-person events, effectively reducing “digital decision fatigue.”
With automated engagement tracking, the team has all the information needed to follow up with personalized communications, shortening conversion times at each stage of the application process. Additional Ravenna features, including workflow automations and data insights, have provided a focused direction so the team can strengthen partnerships with each family, resulting in enrollment success.
Kingswood Oxford Academy truly exemplifies a school making a systematic impact.
Update: Kingswood Oxford School chose to direct its donation to 2-4-1, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to helping children grow physically, emotionally, and socially through youth sports and social-emotional learning programs.
Vanguard Operational Excellence Award
Winner: The Bay School of San Francisco
Location: San Francisco, CA
The Vanguard Operational Excellence Award recognizes a school that has built strong systems and processes to improve efficiency, collaboration, and service throughout the enrollment lifecycle.
The Bay School of San Francisco is known for its rigorous and innovative curriculum. As long-time users of Ravenna Admissions and Enroll®, they have worked especially hard in recent years to make parent and applicant experiences seamless. For example, the use of two Ravenna products allows the team to send accepted students emails via Admit to contractual next steps in Enroll without creating gaps or family questions.
As noted in their nomination, The Bay School team also integrated Ravenna into the top of their recruiting funnel, using its Hub as a marketing tool to provide outreach to families applying to similar schools in the Bay Area. With bright and informative landing pages, families then were enticed to explore, attend events, and apply.
With such a focus on creating the best experiences possible for families, backed by powerful workflow automation, it’s no surprise The Bay School has successfully recruited well, even in such a dynamic market. This two-pronged approach resulted in the school exceeding enrollment targets this past year making it an excellent choice for the Vanguard Operational Excellence Award.
Vanguard Access & Affordability Award
Winner: Walther Christian Academy
Location: Melrose Park, IL
The Vanguard Access & Affordability Award recognizes a school demonstrating a meaningful commitment to financial aid and affordability to expand opportunity within its community.
Walter Christian Academy demonstrates a consistent, operational commitment to making tuition and financial aid workable for families, especially those living paycheck to paycheck. The financial aid team describes affordability as a day-to-day responsibility shared across finance, admissions, and advancement.
Using the full TADS Suite covering admissions, enrollment, financial aid, and tuition management, Walter Christian Academy has adopted proactive, hands-on support for families who may lack English fluency, comfort with technology, or access to computers. For example, the school may personally invite families to come in with paperwork and help them complete financial aid steps early.
The school prioritizes identifying families who may struggle to re-enroll and exploring personalized solutions, such as additional aid, payment options, or scholarship opportunities, rather than waiting until families fall behind. This comprehensive affordability work serves an extremely diverse community, extending education access to families who might otherwise be priced out.
Through this commitment, Walter Christian Academy reports 85 percent of students at their school receive some form of financial assistance, evidence of an affordability model that is central, not peripheral. This includes a dedicated $30,000-40,000 annual emergency financial aid fund to respond to families experiencing mid-year hardship, such as job loss, family changes, or reduced hours.
The tuition management and reporting tools from TADS have helped the team improve collections over the last five years and, importantly, identify struggling families earlier, before late fees and crises escalate. Doubling down, the school aims to build a scholarship endowment designed to produce recurring support year after year.
Update: Walther Christian Academy chose to direct its donation back into its programs and services, using the funds to pay off the remaining tuition balance of a graduating senior whose sibling had been helping contribute toward tuition expenses. This meaningful gift helped ease the financial burden and ensured the student could celebrate graduation with that balance fully resolved.
Vanguard Emerging Leader Award
Winner: The Archdiocese of Baltimore
Location: Baltimore, MD
The VenturEd Vanguard Emerging Leader Award celebrates emerging leaders in private K-12 education who are driving meaningful progress and shaping a strong, strategic enrollment journey.
As an emerging leader, The Archdiocese of Baltimore’s schools form a diverse, faith‑based educational system serving tens of thousands of students, with strong academic programs, and active community involvement.
Across the archdiocese, leadership has used CampusPay® at their schools to transform how parents and staff handle payments. Managing all incidentals large and small, CampusPay gives schools easy-to-create forms to process and track payments.
Nominated in part for always seeking ways to improve the enrollment process, there needed to be a more modern, reliable payments system than traditional cash and checks. Kids constantly lost hard copy permission slips and payment envelopes, and busy parents expect modern experiences.
Now, all payments are online, including mobile, covering everything from field trips, ticket sales, spirit wear, yearbook sales, cap and gown, sports registration, after care, class fundraisers, and events. One school even allowed families to use online payments for teacher gifts, something a few teachers may appreciate more than a dozen candles.
CampusPay also expands accessible payments to donors, businesses, and the larger community. Rather than relying on in-person fundraisers and sponsorships, external partners now have the option to pay remotely, giving schools better flexibility to pay their own expenses.
Overall, online transactions make payments convenient for parents, easy for schools, and more inclusive to the broader community.
Update: The Archdiocese of Baltimore designated its donation to a parish school within the diocese, furthering its commitment to supporting Catholic education and strengthening school communities.
Take Advantage of the Full Enrollment Suite™ With VenturEd Solutions
Across the board, VenturEd Solutions has worked with our partners to power success across their admissions, enrollment, financial aid, and payments functions. While we celebrate these five success stories with the VenturEd Vanguard Awards, there are hundreds of schools across the country enjoying similar triumphs.
If just one of these solutions can make such an impact, imagine what an entire suite of VenturEd products can enhance. Learn how the full Enrollment Suite can expand your school’s applicant pool by up to 30 percent while creating a smoother application experience for families.
