potrero view

July 2009

Live Oak Elementary School Navigates the Great Recession

By Halley Cornell

While some independent schools may be suffering enrollment drops due to the faltering economy, Potrero Hill’s Live Oak School is hanging on to its student body, in part by offering extra financial help to struggling parents. The kindergarten through eighth grade day school, which charges more than $21,000 a year for student tuition, has established an emergency fund for parents who, in better economic climates, would otherwise not qualify for financial aid.

A quarter of Live Oak’s students receive tuition assistance.  Aid packages generally range between 15 percent and 75 percent of annual costs, and are needs-based. Last year, an additional 4.7 percent of the student body received support from a fund that was created after the school over-enrolled its kindergarten classes two years ago.   “Essentially, we allocated it in the budget for our reserve fund,” said Head of School, Holly Horton. “These funds are essentially to support families who hopefully have short-term needs. There are a lot of families who qualify for that and who are really making sacrifices for their children to be here.”

Horton said that out of 250 students who hail from various San Francisco neighborhoods, about five are not re-enrolling for the 2009 school year, a number that’s lower than the school anticipated.  Horton doesn’t know what to expect regarding future attrition rates, particularly for would-be incoming kindergarteners.  The instability of the economy and the job market make the prospect of nine years of tuition costs daunting at best.   “We’ve lost very few students – the last thing that parents want to do is disrupt their kids’ education. Particularly in independent schools, the parents who choose them put education very high in their hierarchy of priorities,” Horton said. Still, Horton said, there seem to be more parents than normal who were seriously considering public schools this year who wouldn’t have a year ago.

A local parent of two young boys enrolled at the school said she may have been among that group had she not been granted assistance through the special fund. She said after her family’s investment income was halved, private school suddenly seemed to be slipping out of reach.  “We applied for financial aid at the last minute, and were one of the families who wouldn’t have qualified for regular aid but were able to get some this year,” said the parent, who asked not to be named. She said the Live Oak emergency fund contributed $8,000 toward tuition assistance and waived fees. But the assistance may not be available on an ongoing basis.  Live Oak doesn’t have an endowment, and parents have been told not to assume that they’d be able to keep the additional tuition subsidies going in the future.

According to Horton, like other businesses Live Oak is cutting back where it can, including simplifying events, dialing back teacher pay increases, and keeping professional development local to lessen travel costs. She said that they have contingency plans in place, there’s just no way to gauge how deeply economic woes will affect future enrollment rates.

The pinch is glaringly evident at Jackson Park and Playground, where Live Oak School holds its recess and Physical Education classes. The park has suffered service, program and hours cuts due to staff lay-offs.  The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department has reduced staff by almost half to accommodate an $11.4 million cut from its $140 million budget, with more reductions likely.  As a result, full-time equivalent staff at Jackson Park dropped from two to one-half earlier this year.

Some Potrero Hill residents have called for Live Oak to pay for its use of the park.  Currently, the school has a permit that allows it to use the facility for free.  According to Horton, some community members want Live Oak to pay the salaries eliminated from the Recreation and Parks Department budget.  “We are certainly not the only ones who use the public park. All of our families are tax-paying members of the community and we are good neighbors who take care of it,” she said. Live Oak students are involved in an educational garden project at the park and the school holds monthly park clean ups.

Potrero Hill resident Karen Glasz feels that Live Oak should provide financial assistance to the park. According to Glasz, the park is used by many of the community’s poorer residents, and Live Oak should consider that they could help all kids benefit, instead of just their students.  “If they close that clubhouse, the only kids who will be able to benefit from Jackson Park are Live Oaks kids. I had my toddler there one day and counted the Live Oak kids – there was more than half a million dollars using the park, right there in one class,” she said, referring to tuition cost per student. “It was quite a dichotomy – at the other end of the park were the poor kids using the clubhouse that is now in danger of closing, and the tennis courts were just full of rich Live Oak kids.”

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