Who We Are
Acton Academy Silicon Valley is a learner-driven school serving ages 2–14, built on the belief that young people are capable of far more than we typically expect of them.
We don’t follow a traditional model. There are no lectures, no busywork, and no one-size-fits-all pacing. Instead, learners take ownership of their work, set goals, hold each other accountable, and build real skills through hands-on projects, Socratic discussions, and self-paced mastery.
Our studios operate as small communities where learners practice independence, responsibility, and collaboration every day. The goal is not just strong academics, but developing people who can think critically, communicate clearly, and navigate challenges with confidence.
We care deeply about preparing learners for the real world - not just the next grade. That means fostering curiosity, resilience, and an entrepreneurial mindset, while building a genuine love for learning.
Working here requires flexibility, ownership, and a willingness to rethink what school can look like. It is fast-paced, high-trust, and deeply rewarding for people who believe education should be more meaningful, more challenging, and more aligned with the future.
We're a young school growing thoughtfully and we're looking for a leader who'll help the right families find us.
The Role
The Head of Enrollment & Marketing owns one of the most consequential functions in the school: how families discover us, how they decide to join us, and how every step from first inquiry to signed contract actually runs.
You'll inherit a real foundation - a HubSpot CRM, an existing pipeline, a school with strong outcomes and a story worth telling - and you'll have the autonomy and resources to make this function genuinely world-class. You'll lead a small team, manage specialist contractors, and partner directly with the Head of School.
This is a builder's role. If you want to inherit a polished, fully-tuned machine, this isn't it. If you want to design and run an enrollment engine for a school that genuinely changes lives, keep reading.
What You'll Own
- Enrollment outcomes. You're accountable for filling every seat with mission-aligned families, maintaining healthy waitlists, and keeping the top of the funnel flowing. You'll set targets, build forecasts, and own the result.
- The admissions funnel and CRM. You'll run HubSpot end-to-end - clean data, clear stages, fast follow-up, and live dashboards that let you and leadership read funnel health in real time. You'll diagnose drop-offs and fix them.
- Brand, story, and content strategy. You'll own how the school shows up in the Bay Area - what we say, how we say it, and what families experience when they find us online. You'll set the content strategy, write in the school's voice, and direct the people who help bring it to life.
- Family experience through the admissions journey. Every family - whether they enroll or not - should feel seen, respected, and clearly informed at every step. Tours, follow-ups, decisions, onboarding. The experience reflects the school.
- Community partnerships and referral pipelines. You'll build relationships with local preschools, community organizations, and partners that drive sustainable, mission-aligned referral growth.
- Marketing initiatives and enrollment events. Open houses, info nights, tours, partner events - you'll plan and execute them end-to-end, and analyze what worked.
- Outreach to under-represented communities. You'll lead our efforts to broaden access - geographically, linguistically, and economically - so that the families who'd most benefit from our model can find us and join.
Your Team and Resources
You won't do all of this alone. You'll lead and be supported by:
- A part-time Content & Community Producer who handles social posting, content production, and basic community management. You'll set strategy and direction; they'll execute the recurring work.
- A part-time Admissions Coordinator who handles scheduling, document collection, billing coordination, and CRM hygiene so you can focus on relationships, strategy, and outcomes.
- A dedicated contractor budget for designers, photographers, web/CRM technical help, and project-based specialists you bring in as needed.
- AI tools and workflows. We expect you to be - or quickly become - fluent with tools like Claude or ChatGPT to multiply your effective capacity. We'll invest in the tooling and the training.
- Direct partnership with the leadership team for strategy, founder-level family conversations, and unblocking. You will report directly to and work most closely with the Co-founder / Head of School.
You own the outcomes. The team, contractors, and tools are there to give you leverage - but someone has to hold the rope, and that's you.
What Success Looks Like in Year One
- By the end of your first year, we'll know this role is working when:
- School is at target enrollment with healthy waitlists by the stated deadlines
- Our admissions funnel is fully instrumented, with live dashboards leadership can read at a glance
- Lead response times are measured in hours, not days, and no inquiry goes stale
- Our SOPs and systems are documented clearly enough that someone new could be onboarded into the function
- We have a steady cadence of authentic, on-brand content reaching the right Bay Area families
- We have meaningful, active relationships with several partner preschools and community organizations
- Family NPS and re-enrollment rates reflect a smooth, professional, respectful admissions experience
We'll set specific targets together in your first 30 days. We're not interested in vanity metrics - we care about real enrollment outcomes, real family experience, and a function that runs like a machine.
Who You Are
You're likely a strong fit if you bring:
- 5+ years in admissions, enrollment marketing, growth marketing, or a closely related function - ideally in education, though adjacent fields (membership organizations, family-focused brands, mission-driven nonprofits) are welcome
- A track record of owning a funnel end-to-end and improving its outcomes through data, not guesswork
- Multi-channel marketing fluency - digital and offline. Hands-on experience across organic social (especially Instagram and LinkedIn), email marketing and lifecycle automation, paid social (Meta and Google), event marketing, local SEO, and community- and partnership-driven growth. You don't need to be elite in every channel - but you need to know what each is good for, what it costs, when to use it, and how to direct specialists who go deeper.
- Strong writing chops and aesthetic taste. You can write in someone else's voice. You have opinions about what makes content land. You can spot generic marketing slop a mile away.
- Comfort with CRM tools (HubSpot ideally) and basic data analysis. You don't need to be an engineer, but you can build a dashboard, read a funnel, and pull insights.
- Relational warmth and sound judgment. Families will trust you quickly, partners will want to work with you, and you'll know when to push and when to listen.
- Persuasive, well-spoken, and accountable to outcomes. You're confident in front of families, partners, and audiences - you can give a tour that makes parents lean in, ask for the next step without flinching, and follow up with the kind of warm, consistent urgency that moves families from interested to enrolled. You feel personal responsibility for hitting the number, but you'd never push a family who isn't the right fit, because you understand that mismatched enrollments cost the school more than empty seats.
- Genuine alignment with learner-driven education. You don't need to have heard of Acton before, but you should believe deeply that children are capable of far more than traditional education asks of them.
- Comfort in a young school. Meaning you're energized - not paralyzed - by ambiguity, and you see the chance to build as a feature, not a risk.
Helpful but not required: experience managing small teams or contractors, fluency with AI tools, marketing experience in high-consideration, trust-driven categories (private education, premium services, healthcare, mission-driven nonprofits), prior PR or community-building experience, parenting experience, prior work in a startup or founding-team environment.
What We Offer
- A team that deeply believes in this work
- Annual Salary: $80,000–$100,000 commensurate with experience
- Health, dental, and vision benefits
- Paid time off
- Tuition discount for your own children, if applicable
- Professional development budget for conferences, courses, or coaching
- Real autonomy and ownership of a function that genuinely matters
- Direct access to leadership and the chance to shape how the school grows
