Silver Oaks Cooperative School is a small, private K-5 school just outside of D.C. that opened two years ago. As a new learning institution just establishing its reputation in the greater Washington area, which has well over a hundred independent schooling options for those who can afford them, the school was worried that coronavirus-related closures might spell doom for them.
“We were all terrified that we wouldn’t survive, or make it— that parents wouldn’t be able to pay tuition when we moved online,” says Alicia Cacace, the school’s director. “What we are finding is exactly the opposite.”
As D.C.-area schools begin announcing their plans for reopening — or not — in the fall, some private schools are reporting a surge in interest and enrollment, which experts worry will only further widen the achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income peers.
“Our schools already are stratified,” says Joe Weedon, spokesperson for the Washington Teachers’ Union. “We have huge and growing achievement gaps, and more importantly opportunity gaps. As we lose students, whether leaving for lottery or private options, we see less and less resources going to those schools and communities that need it the most.”
Professionals in the private education world think reasons for a public school exodus are twofold.
For one, families are looking for certainty and clear guidance for how (and where) their children will be learning come fall and beyond, and they aren’t getting it from area public schools.
And secondly, parents are telling private school enrollment directors across the D.C. area about their dissatisfaction with their public school’s overall response to the pandemic and the quality of virtual learning.
“I have several families a day contacting me right now,” says Cacace at Silver Oaks Cooperative School. “We’re hearing the same thing over and over again — I need my kid to go to school, I really need my kid to go to school. They say they’re looking for a school that will be opening in September and are trying to understand what their other options are right now.”
So far, many public school districts around the Washington area have only very recently offered plans, which they insist are still drafts, and some have yet to say anything at all.
Mayor Muriel Bowser announced on July 16 that she would wait two additional weeks before making a final decision for District schools, pushing right up against a planned August 31 start date for classes. In Fairfax County, public school teachers are refusing to teach in-person classes should the school district call for them. Montgomery County Public Schools only announced last week that their first semester will be entirely virtual, leaving parents scrambling to make plans that include having their children home full time until January.
“Parents can’t handle just not knowing what’s going to happen in Montgomery County or Prince George’s County or the District,” says Cacace. “They’re looking for alternatives and what they want to know is that we have a plan for stay-at-home orders, and a plan for Phase One, and a plan for Phase Two. That’s grounding, versus the District where it’s just — we just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Cacace says she’s also heard concerns from parents about their kids’ experiences with remote learning over this past school year.
Dr. Leila Morsy, a researcher at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in Australia, says, “The families who can afford to leave public schools and pay the private school fees will do so. And the children who will be left in public schools will be those who are of the most concentrated disadvantage.”
Morsy’s work focuses on race, socioeconomic inequality, and health inequities and children’s outcomes. In a classroom of 25 to 30 students, with about 10 to 20 percent of those being children from significantly disadvantaged backgrounds, teachers can distribute their energy to ensure that those students receive more attention, raising their achievement, says Morsy.
“But when you have a substantial portion of children whose families can afford private school leaving,” Morsy says, “What you’re left with is a higher proportion of children who have significant academic and social needs in the classroom, and it becomes more difficult as a teacher to do your job.”
David Fronapfel’s son was attending kindergarten in a Title I MCPS school when the pandemic hit and education moved online.
“It was a pretty rough start,” Fronapfel says. “I noticed that the [virtual] class size was extremely small, as compared to the class size when he was in class. There were only half a dozen, where there were supposed to be at least twice that.”
Morsy points to studies that show low-income children as less likely to log on for online learning.
“Access to online learning spaces is more difficult to gain for children from more disadvantaged backgrounds,” says Morsy. “It will be harder for parents if they’re paying for a limited amount of bandwidth and have multiple children in the house who need to spend several hours a day for online learning. They’re going to have to make decisions on how they’re using their money, and whether they use that on their child’s digital learning, which they may not think is of a very good quality in the first place.”
Fronapfel’s school was holding classes daily, but he noticed differences in the quality of instruction when it came to virtual learning versus what was taking place in the classroom.
“It seemed like they had to make a lot of adjustments and ad-hoc instruction,” says Fronapfel. “There were videos that weren’t produced by the school, that teachers had found online, and kids would just, you know, sit there and watch them.”
Religious schools are seeing an increase in enrollments, as well, for similar reasons.
“We definitely have a rush of interest,” says Emily Strab, office and enrollment administrator for St. Jerome Institute in Washington, D.C. “People are looking at their school’s response and what online instruction looked like, and then looking at especially small private schools and what they were able to provide.”
Strab says parents who attended a virtual open house in June were excited to learn that the school continued to hold art studio and music classes during distance learning. “We’re still trying to figure out what those classes will look like in person with social distancing but we have the capacity to do those in small groups. If [Center for Disease Control guidelines] call for nine to 10 students in a class, for us that’s absolutely possible,” she says.
Carolyn Law, the director of communications for Maret School in Woodley Park, says summer admission inquiries have doubled over last year’s numbers. At St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes in Alexandria, phones have been ringing off the hook, per Katherine Carbo, director of lower school admissions there.
“Fairfax made the announcement and the inquiries just poured in,” says Carbo. “Families have said, ‘In the event we have to be distance learning, we want to do it with a school that does it seamlessly. And if we can be in person, because of the design of your campus and the size of your classes, we want that, as well.’ ”
St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes plans to open on Sept. 9 for five days a week of in-person learning. Carbo says that many of the parents she’s speaking to had already considered an independent school for their child, but that the pandemic was the final push, telling her “we can’t lose another year.”
“[Our school] didn’t lose a day,” Carbo says. “We were able to pivot really quickly. One thing we were doing was sending our kids home with their devices every single night in the event that they weren’t able to go to school the next day. Pretty much all of our faculty meetings in February were about what distance learning would look like.”
Even independent schools focusing on early childhood education are noting an uptick in interest. Diane Dunne, head of school for Country Day School in McLean, which serves Pre-K through kindergarten, says she thinks their primarily outdoor-based program is what’s drawing new applicants.
“I think that’s very appealing to a lot of parents, at this point in time, who are worried about the virus,” Dunne says. “They’re all worried about what the public schools are going to do. They’re not in favor of the virtual learning. It’s hard for the younger kids, especially, and if the parents are working, it’s doubly hard for them. They’re concerned that they’re not going to open, or if they open they’ll be on the split some people are talking about.”
The Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington reported that there were 29,312 students enrolled in 76 AISGW schools during the 2019-2020 school year, which doesn’t include students at any of the Archdiocese of Washington’s 92 Catholic schools. The association believes that number may likely increase.
“We’re in regular conversation with our heads of schools and CFOs, and we’ve heard there’s been an uptick in interest and enrollment in many of our area schools,” said Amy McNamer, executive director of the AISGW. “We have not heard about substantial decline in enrollment, which you may have expected going into a recession, like we seem to be.”
When it comes to abiding by CDC guidelines for reopening schools (which are not compulsory, and are expected to be relaxed at President Donald Trump’s urging), private schools have a few advantages.
For one, their class sizes tend to be smaller than most area public schools, making it easy to space students six feet apart for in-classroom learning. Similarly, their communities are smaller, too, which eases the burden of contact tracing. In many cases, they also have more physical space in their buildings, which allows for better social distancing.
Places like Washington Waldorf School have already been using outdoor classrooms for younger grades as part of their educational philosophy, and will offer them for all grade levels this coming year, according to Alia Goodyear, the school’s director of communications.
“Inside the school, we’ve made changes to the building and HVAC to maximize ventilation and are making changes to our bathrooms,” she adds. “We will take advantage of all entrances and exits for the school to minimize contact, and each grade will function as a ‘cohort’ or pod.’ ”
Such structural adjustments aren’t so easy to make in public schools, certainly not with speed.
“A third of [public] school buildings are in disrepair and don’t have proper HVAC, don’t have windows that open, have asbestos, don’t have drinking water, rarely have clean restroom facilities, or even soap,” says Dr. Khalilah Harris, managing director of K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress. “To send those students back into those buildings, even if they don’t have COVID, is unconscionable.”
Schools in low-income areas are more likely to face such existing structural problems, with or without a global pandemic, but the District has other complicating factors in the context of the coronavirus that private schools don’t necessarily face.
Given COVID-19’s disproportionate lethality for Black and Latino Americans, safety measures in schools can be a matter of life and death in communities of color.
“One of the concerns that the District teachers have highlighted are concerns around transportation,” says Weedon, WTU’s spokesperson. “Many of our students ride multiple buses and take public transit to and from school. That places them, their teachers, and their classmates all at a higher risk.”
Many private schools don’t even offer busing, with the expectation that parents will drive students to school.
Unencumbered by the politics of the public school system (not to mention its sheer size and scale in the counties surrounding the District), private and religious schools were able to respond swiftly when schools shut down back in March.
“Our schools were able to move to an online platform in a matter of days, almost universally,” says McNamer of AISGW. “My daughter’s school closed on a Thursday and she was online Monday morning at 8 a.m. for her classes. There’s an ability there to adapt quickly. It was not perfect. There were a lot of hiccups, but [independent schools] can be creative. They have small communities to work in. They did a lot of surveys during spring to see what was working and what wasn’t working, and they made adjustments.”
Public schools don’t have as much of an ability to pivot.
Independent schools “are working independently and individually as schools,” McNamer says. “They can be more agile and more flexible. If they put a program in place that’s not working, they can very quickly move in a new direction. [Public schools] are trying so hard to make this work. I have so much respect for what they’re doing, but it’s just such a different ballgame.”
Yet there’s a cost to small class sizes, big well-ventilated buildings, and the ability to roll out new technology like symptom-reporting apps overnight rather than working through the rigid bureaucracy of public education. Private school tuition can be tens of thousands of dollars a school year in D.C.
The parent of a high school student at Washington Waldorf, for example, can expect to pay $33,970 in tuition annually. At the Maret School, that’s $41,100 and at St Stephen’s & St Agnes School, $43,420. When it comes to lower grades, non co-op tuition at Silver Oaks is $10,920 a year (with family still expected to fulfill out of class co-oping requirements) and at Country Day School, it’s $8,225 for full-day kindergarten.
Many of these tuition costs don’t include additional fees like after-school care for younger kids (which can range from $2,200 to $2,800 a year, depending on the school and age of the child) or hefty enrollment deposits.
But if young students are forced to learn remotely from home and their parents still need to leave the house for work, families will most likely have to pay for childcare, which costs upwards of $23,000 a year in D.C., according to Child Care Aware of America — that amounts to one of the highest price tags in the country.
Coupled with lackluster virtual learning experiences and a near-certainty that public schools won’t be resuming full-time in the fall, the financial costs of private school tuition and childcare (which, in the D.C. area, doesn’t only mean daycare centers, which would likely be affected by school closings, but also full-time nannies and sitters) seem less disparate.
While even the most expensive independent schools usually offer some form of financial aid, some private schools (religious ones in particular) have tuition costs significantly lower than the average cost of childcare in the District. The 2020-21 high school tuition price for St. Jerome’s Institute, for example, is $13,500 — nearly $10,000 less than that average D.C. childcare cost.
Still, paying anything at all for education isn’t possible for many of the D.C. area’s most vulnerable families.
And even if private school tuition were affordable for his family, Fronapfel says he’s not certain he’d pursue that option for his son.
“My wife and I both went to public schools so want to support the public school system, from an ethical standpoint,” says Fronapfel. “We felt it would be irresponsible to pull [our son] out of that environment. It just doesn’t feel right.”
Dr. Emma Garcia has questions about whether private schools can fulfill the promises they’re making to parents during the pandemic. An economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, Garcia doubts that benefits such as more space for social distancing and low student-teacher ratios in private schools can be maintained with a surge in enrollments. Private schools tell DCist they are operating under-capacity when it comes to physical space and are having no difficulties hiring additional staff.
There’s also the question of how teachers feel about returning to the classroom. Without a union to represent them, many private school educators don’t have the same ability to voice their concerns as a group.
“One of the benefits of a collective voice, of having a strong union, is ensuring that we’re going to be safe,” says WTU’s Weedon. “Right now, I don’t think we’ve seen the safety protocols in place for teachers, students, and families to feel safe going back to school yet. I’ve yet to talk to a teacher who doesn’t want to return to in-person learning, but the fear and the safety concerns have to be put forth first. We’ve done a lot to improve and look at what went well with distance learning and hopefully we can move forward with a plan and implement it much better than we did in the spring.”
When schools first closed back in March, plans were made for a week in advance, and then another few weeks, and then till the end of the academic year. But the virus has persisted and, while the U.S. struggles to contain the outbreak, the 2020-21 school year is rapidly approaching.
“It was unexpected,” Garcia says, “but now it’s been with us for a few months and I feel like we’ve been walking in circles rather than thinking about these important questions and designing strategies that would work for all children, especially low-income children, under the different scenarios that we may face in the fall. Schools are part of the safety net.”
In public schools especially, low-income children and their families are relying on their school for more than just their education. Public schools provide meals, counseling and career services, a safe place for children who experience abuse at home, and a means for parents to be able to hold a job with regular hours without having to shell out thousands for childcare.
“This is a bigger problem,” says Garcia. “This is about a structural, systematic solution for public schools. Switching from here to there is a Band-Aid.”
But as families who can afford to do so rush to pull their children from public schools and enroll them in private ones, where they hope for in-person learning, a better digital education if under lockdown, and a lower chance of exposure to a deadly virus, low-income children are once again left at a disadvantage compared to their more privileged peers.
