Elizabeth Chace spent the first decade of her career in independent school communications, beginning as publications coordinator at the Concord Academy in Massachusetts before moving to the communications office of the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where she served for six years as Associate Director of Communications and ultimately led the school’s first comprehensive brand audit. She holds a B.A. in English and Visual Culture from Bates College and a certificate in Strategic Communications from the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California. She came to Clarebourne in 2014, recruited specifically to articulate what the school had always been — but had never quite found the language to say clearly in public.
Her work at Clarebourne sits at the intersection of brand, identity, and institutional voice. She oversees all external-facing communications — the website, print publications, annual report, admissions materials, and media relations — with a focus not on promotion but on accurate representation. She believes that Clarebourne’s strongest marketing asset is its willingness to say precisely what it is, precisely what it costs, and precisely what it will and will not offer a family — and that the school’s communications should do the same.
She was the primary author of Clarebourne’s current brand framework, developed in 2016 in close collaboration with Thea Francis Green and the administrative team, which articulated the school’s three commitments — rigorous academics, genuine belonging, and complete transparency — as operational standards rather than aspirational language. That framework now governs every significant piece of communication the school produces, from the homepage to the financial aid letter to the language an admissions counselor uses on a family tour.
She is also the editor of the school’s annual magazine, which under her tenure has moved away from the celebratory alumni format common to most independent school publications toward something closer to a journal of educational thinking — featuring faculty essays, student work, and honest assessments of where the school is succeeding and where it is still working to improve.
“Most school communications are written for the school, not for the family reading them. They’re written to manage perception rather than to give people real information. I find that both ineffective and a little dishonest. A family trying to make one of the most significant decisions of their child’s life deserves copy that respects their intelligence and tells them what they actually need to know. That’s the standard I hold everything we publish to.”
Clarebourne since 2014