Private Schools Hold New Attraction for Rich Parents

Jennifer and Spiros Liras, who live in Brookline, Mass., and work in Boston, moved their family to their weekend home in Stonington, Conn, so their 14-year-old twins could enroll at the Williams School, a day school in New London, Conn.

“We were nervous in July when we hadn’t heard about the school’s plans for mitigating risks,” Ms. Liras said. “They’re very dated schools that are very crowded.”

Their children are thriving with in-person learning, but she said she worried about what would happen when she and her husband could no longer work remotely and needed to return to their offices.

Kim Leipham Freedman, head of New Garden Friends School in Greensboro, N.C., an area rich with colleges and universities, said she had several families who went through the admissions process over the summer but had to pull out at the end when they decided they couldn’t afford the tuition, which is $22,000 a year for the upper grades and $17,000 for the lower grades. She said the school could have added more families if price weren’t an object.

“Many of them think they’re going to get a ton of financial aid,” Ms. Freedman said. “We do what we can, but we lost many families at the end.”

One thing many independent schools are doing is giving financial aid to existing students whose families have been affected by the pandemic. New families are generally out of luck: Most financial aid budgets are spent every year by summer.

If independent schools are a barometer, the pandemic is continuing to affect families’ education plans. Many private schools, like Berkeley Prep in Tampa, are reporting application requests for next year that are many times higher than in a normal year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/your-money/private-schools-wealthy-parents.html