Lalit Agarwal is the new CEO of APPA — Leadership in Educational Facilities, a nonprofit membership association that offers informational resources, continuous learning programs, and opportunities to connect with fellow educational facilities professionals in a welcoming and inclusive environment.
Robert Aldrich is director of operations and campus planning at Hackley School, a day and boarding school enrolling 850 students in grades K–12. He previously served Miss Hall’s School and Phillips Exeter Academy. Aldrich currently serves as vice chair of the APPA board of directors.
Net Assets: Both of you took circuitous routes to being facilities leaders. Can you tell me how you came into the role?
Lalit Agarwal, APPA — Leadership in Educational Facilities
LALIT AGARWAL: I came to this country in 1998 for master’s program in mechanical engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As a graduate student, I began working with the facilities team. Before that I didn’t think much about buildings — the garbage “magically” got taken out, for example. When I joined facilities as a student employee, I developed a new appreciation for all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes, under the ground, behind the walls, all of which creates a learning environment that supports students in their pursuit of education.
Upon graduation, I joined the facilities team as a full-time employee. In my 20 years at UNL, I progressed through my career, and eventually led the operations group. Then in 2022, I joined a private company, EnergyCAP, which supports energy managers and facilities professionals. When the CEO position at APPA opened up, I decided to throw my hat in the ring. I joined APPA staff last summer in this role.
I was introduced to APPA in 2012, when I was a new supervisor. Trained as an engineer, I did not have the skills that I needed to be a good supervisor. So I enrolled in APPA’s program Supervisor Toolkit, and I learned a lot of practical approaches that would help me become an effective supervisor and leader. The program made me a better individual and a better human. So I started enrolling in other APPA programs. Eventually in 2017, I felt I should give back and started teaching and facilitating delivery of those programs as a volunteer leader for APPA.
Robert Aldrich, Hackley School
ROBERT ALDRICH: I’ve been involved in APPA since transitioning from a career in law enforcement to education in 2006. The first school that I worked for was very involved in APPA and I was exposed to the association from the beginning. My deeper commitment and involvement came in 2014. I was the director of campus safety at Miss Hall’s School. Our director of facilities got injured at work, and school leadership asked me if I would step in and cover for him for six to eight months while he was recovering. He never came back, so I was thrust into the facilities and operations side. Leadership eventually merged campus safety and facilities and custodial and under the umbrella of operations.
I was thrown into the deep end of the pool, and I needed a crash course in everything I didn’t know. The first real professional development program I went to was that same one that Lalit mentioned, the Supervisor’s Toolkit, in 2015. I had been a supervisor for many, many years, at that point, but I needed programming that was facilities focused. I can say to this day that it was the best professional development I’ve ever attended. Since then I’ve also been involved in hosting the program at my institution.
Net Assets: It’s a common saying among our readership that “no one goes to school to become an independent school business officer,” and it sounds like you can say the same for facilities directors.
AGARWAL: Absolutely. All of us come from different backgrounds. We must learn on the job and through our professional associations. When you’re learning, it’s so valuable to engage with your peers that have more experience in the same field. You can get supervisor training in dozens of places, for example, but hearing personal stories from those in similar seats facilitating the program makes it so much more meaningful.
You can learn to be a good facilities technician. But you need the person you’re hiring to be the right fit for an independent school and for the community. So that’s what I look for, and, for the most part, we can teach the rest.
ALDRICH: My philosophy when I was running campus safety was not to hire former police officers or military, even with my law enforcement background as a former police chief, because you can teach the safety and security skills. In terms of facilities, you can learn to be a good facilities technician. But you need the person you’re hiring to be the right fit for an independent school and for the community. So that’s what I look for, and, for the most part, we can teach the rest.
Net Assets: APPA has been around well over 100 years, and the previous CEO had been in the role for 30 years. You serve as APPA’s CEO and as the APPA board vice chair, respectively. What’s next for the association?
AGARWAL: We stand on the shoulders of giants. That also means that we need to keep reaching for new heights, so that’s really what we are trying to do. I’m treating this 110-year old organization as a startup. There is a lot of opportunity. I wake up every morning and think, how can I do something that will make the lives of our members a little bit easier?
ALDRICH: APPA has turned the page recently in terms of reaching out to K-12 schools [currently the membership is mostly comprised of colleges and universities]. That effort started a year or two ago but has picked up in the last few months. APPA truly wants to serve all educational institutions. I was a thorn in the side of the previous CEO, urging APPA to reach out more to K12 schools, because the programming applies to us as much as it does colleges, and I’m still banging that drum.
AGARWAL: To be honest, when I was at University of Nebraska, it never dawned on me that K-12 schools had similar problems as we did at the college level, but when I worked at EnergyCAP, I saw that they do. At least higher education institutions had APPA. Most K-12 schools don’t have that yet. We want to grow our K-12 membership significantly. We are also looking to serve more community colleges, which, like some large K-12 schools, can have larger facilities than some 4-year colleges.
ALDRICH: APPA provides education for every level of facilities professional. There’s programming for line-level employees that will show them they have a career path ahead of them, if it appeals to them. There’s a leadership academy for people who want to focus on leadership skills, and everything in between.
AGARWAL: We are hoping to segment some of our offerings in the future for K-12, and many of our offerings are already relevant. The Body of Knowledge (BoK) is an online resource that is basically the facilities director’s go-to, a bible of sorts. We offer advisory services where consultants come to campus and identify gaps and share best practices. We also offer a certification program, which has about a 60% pass rate — it requires real work to pass the test. And perhaps most interesting to business officers, we have a benchmarking tool called Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI). You can use it to compare various metrics like staffing levels on similar size campuses.
One other resource that independent school business officers should be aware of is what we call the guidelines trilogy: custodial, maintenance and grounds. It’s available both in print and electronic format and has a wealth of valuable information that any facilities manager would immensely benefit from. You can plug in square footage of carpet and hardwood, for example, and calculate how many custodial hours you will need. Or plug in land acreage, what’s wooded or landscaped, for example, and see how much labor is needed to maintain it. It’s well researched and widely accepted throughout the industry.
Net Assets: What are some top trends in school facilities that every school leader should aware of?
ALDRICH: People are aging out of this profession at a far greater rate than people are coming in. So professional development opportunities that consider succession plans for leaders in the industry are critical. Recruitment and retention are critical, or else the facilities will just fall apart.
Funding is also an issue. I know counterparts that work in state schools who are struggling to get funding for maintenance and repairs, but in the private sector, we too have to fight for donor and tuition dollars. Facilities directors need solid information, data to make a good argument for funding. When people have been in the seat for 20 or 30 years, there’s a lot of institutional knowledge, but you also need numbers. You’re going up against admissions and academics, who are coming with data. You need to be able to say more than, “I was up on the roof this week, and it doesn’t look good.” Facilities leaders need to be able to quantify and professionalize their approach.
AGARWAL: Facilities professionals don’t always have the financial chops and sometimes they lean heavily on their business office or the business officer to do a lot of that work. But if the facilities leader wants to expand their administrative skills, we have a variety of programming to help them.
There’s terminology you need to know and communication skills as well. You need to talk about impact if something does break, how that takes away from teaching and learning. Don’t talk about kilowatt hours, but financial and risk impact to the programs, and then you will have leadership’s attention.
