Back in 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his partner, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, opened The Primary School, a tuition-free private school opened with the explicit goal of helping low-income families and people of color to access education, healthcare, and social services. A decade later, they’ve apparently deemed that all those problems are solved now, as The Primary School announced it would be closing for good next year—supposedly due to lack of funding, which is one thing that shouldn’t be a problem when you’re backed by billionaires.
In the 10 years since The Primary School first opened its doors to students in East Palo Alto, the political ground has shifted significantly, and it’s hard not to read into that at least a little in the decision to shutter the school now. When it opened, The Primary School explicitly recognized the challenges faced by families in low-income areas, who often do not have access to well-funded education options. On the school’s website, it acknowledges, “Because of systemic racism, communities of color are disproportionately affected by these challenges and have the added burden of not being able to afford or access adequate services.” The school was established with a “diverse team” with backgrounds in education, healthcare, and family support to help extend resources to underserved communities.
Now? Well, now that smells an awful lot like DEI to the Trump administration, and Zuckerberg has been sucking up to the President and his ghouls to serve his own ends.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was axing its DEI programs—and that same crackdown on anything that smells like diversity also hit the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that originally funded The Primary School. The philanthropic arm of the Zuckerberg fiefdom scrubbed references to inclusivity or economic fairness from its website, per The Guardian, and informed its employees it was ending its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility team. All of that follows Trump’s crackdown on DEI on programs, including trying to withhold federal funding from schools that bother to acknowledge that inclusion is a good thing.
Shuttering the school may be as simple as Zuckerberg aligning where his money goes to his current interests and ends. But for the families who count on the school, the move is devastating. The promise of the school went beyond the classroom, and many families were able to get access to care and services they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.
Veronica Van Leeuwaarde, a mom of two students who attended The Primary School, told the San Francisco Standard that employees at the school helped her get an appointment at Kaiser Permanente to discuss her son’s learning difficulties, which eventually led to him being diagnosed as having ADHD. That diagnosis and treatment would have been significantly harder for her to navigate on her own. “Honestly, just talking about it makes me want to cry, because it’s just impacted my family so much,” she told the Standard.
The school will offer families between $1,000 to $10,000 to help them enroll their children in another school, per the San Francisco Chronicle. Per the Private School Review, the average tuition cost for private elementary school in Palo Alto is around $35,000, and $16,500 per year across the state of California, so that money isn’t going to get these families all that far.
As for the claims of lack of funding, the Chronicle did note that The Primary School saw contributions drop from $8 million in 2022 to $3.7 million in 2023, which is a significant decline in funding to operate. If only two of the people involved in funding the school in the first place happened to be worth nearly $200 billion and promised to give away 99% of their wealth. Sure seems like this would be a worthwhile project to give what amounts to pocket change to in order to keep it open.
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