A number of people have asked me about how the Free School's finances work. The short answer is that they are always squeezed, but lately some developments have stretched money even further.
The Free School gets about 60% of its budget from tuition, which is charged on a sliding scale. (The radical curriculum here, free of standards, standardized tests, grades, and all the traditional baggage, would not be possible if this were a public school.) We don't turn students away based on ability to pay, and in fact because over half of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, we have a very high percentage of families who pay little or no tuition.
The remaining 40% comes from a group called Friends of the Free School, a non-profit that owns several apartment buildings in the area and manages them on behalf of the school, using some collected rent to help fun school operations. We also fundraise like crazy, but most of that money goes for special things like building improvements or class trips.
Because even the maximum tuition is relatively low for a private school (about $10,000), hardly anybody pays the maximum, and class sizes here are very small, even the rosiest budgetary situation involves pinching every penny. If anything should go wrong, the financial situation can devolve into a crisis pretty quickly.
The biggest single item in our budget is teacher salaries. You would cry if you knew how little our teachers make, and I'm not going to tell you for the sake of privacy, but suffice it to say it's not really a living wage. But there isn't much else we spend money on - we don't do texbooks, and we get many supplies donated, so if tuition gets paid late or there are unexpected bills, it jeopardizes the school's ability to pay teachers on time.
Recently a government agency that subsidizes childcare, and therefore funds tuition for some of our families, especially families of younger kids who use after-school care, withdrew its funding. Apparently a form was filled out incorrectly a very long time ago by someone who used to work here. This will get rectified, but in the meantime we are short about a quarter of our tuition.
In meetings people offer to make huge sacrifices - working for less pay. These are teachers who already have second jobs to pay their bills. When someone is out we don't hire a sub, we just reshuffle our schedules. And still it feels like maybe it's not going to be enough.
The teachers who make democratic education happen for these kiddos every day are committed. Any school like ours, which does something radical and different, always has to fight to survive, and everyone accepts that. But I also know that teachers don't stay here as long as they might, because of the low pay and uncertainty. And I think this place, which can be such an oasis of joy in a grim educational landscape, deserves to continue.
