How the International School of Portland Became a Top Place to Work
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What does it take for a school to be named a Top Workplace in its city when it never set out to win the award? Bodo Heiliger, Head of School at the International School of Portland, leads a pre-K through fifth grade language immersion IB school of just under 400 students learning in Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish.
Roughly 80 percent of his employees grew up outside the United States, and Bodo describes the Top Workplace recognition as the cherry on top of years of deliberate work: climate checks, small touch points, constant requests for feedback, and a leadership team that went looking for the excellence already happening in classrooms so it could name it and celebrate it. Adopting the IB gave three language tracks a shared definition of good teaching, and cross-track collaborative planning turned three separate schools into one coherent experience for kids.
The conversation reaches well beyond the staff room. Bodo shares how ISP chose to lean into its downtown Portland location, including partnering with City Hall and neighbors when a transitional houseless village opened across the street, a relationship that now shapes how students understand their role in the community.
In the extended conversation for Moonshot Lab members, we get into the operating side of culture: bringing after-school programming in-house, giving extended day staff full-time status so they become part of the faculty community rather than an add-on, treating a summer camp of roughly 600 children as a meaningful enrollment opportunity, and building the endowed Spear Center for Teaching Excellence into both a professional learning engine and a bridge to public school educators.
Bodo closes with how he knows culture is working, pairing retention data and an external benchmark with something harder to measure but just as real: whether you hear laughter when you walk the building.
Top 5 Takeaways
Belonging Is Built on Intentional Systems: Earning recognition as a top workplace isn't about aiming for a title; it is the natural byproduct of continuous climate checks, feedback loops, and creating psychological safety for a diverse faculty.
Cross-Track Collaboration Drives Coherence: Bringing teachers and students together across distinct language tracks around shared inquiry topics, such as marketing or revolutions, breaks down organizational silos and elevates teaching quality.
Auxiliary Programs Are Strategic Drivers: In-housing after-school care and hiring language-specific, full-time staff turns extended-day programs into seamless cultural extensions, improving retention and generating meaningful revenue.
Lean Into Your Local Context: Rather than isolating the campus, active engagement with local city leadership and neighborhood initiatives, such as partnering with a nearby transitional housing village, teaches authentic, local-first global citizenship.
Endowed PD Centers Create Long-Term Value: Establishing an external-facing professional learning center elevates internal teacher leadership, attracts public school partners, and serves as a foundational bridge for future capital campaigns.
