Our Financial Roadmap to Save the Center School

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For 44 years, the Center School has been a magical place of transformative education where curiosity is nurtured, exceptional teaching flourishes, and community is celebrated. It is where your own path, or the path of your children, was significantly shaped.

It is with a sense of profound responsibility that we must now share an important update: the Center School is navigating a complex financial moment. We are facing the most significant financial headwind in our history and must raise $1 million by spring 2026 to continue operating and provide the necessary time to stabilize the school.

Our Twofold Financial Challenge

  1. The building debt hurdle: Our beautiful campus, built in 2020, came with an $11.3 million capital investment. Despite raising $6 million through a previous capital campaign, our mortgage currently stands at $5.5 million. We have only been able to make significant, interest-only payments of $200,000 annually. This commitment places an intense and ongoing strain on our yearly budget and limits our ability to pay down the principal.

  2. A ballooning operational deficit: Like many independent schools, we face rising operational costs, especially related to the maintenance of our new campus and a recent 13% decline in enrollment over the past two years. This has caused our operational deficit to double to over $400,000 annually. This gap, coupled with several significant unexpected expenses, like repair of a critical HVAC failure and a drainage remediation mandate from MassDOT, requires immediate funding to rectify.

 
 

While these difficulties have been years in the making, the urgency of the problem has only been starkly revealed over the last 12 months. A clear plan has been devised, but in order to work on solving both the debt and operational deficit sufficiently, time is of the absolute essence.

Why We Need More Time

 
 

There is positive news here: our business model as a school actually WORKS. But we need more time to get us to the black.

  • Our data shows that with the changes we are making, we can achieve a balanced operational budget in two years – that’s when we expect these two lines (income versus expenses) to cross and rightsize our budget.

  • Raising $1 million this school year is critical to get us on this positive course and provide us the time we need.

    1. That $1M allows us to:

      1. Pay off our line of credit

      2. Fund our HVAC repairs and required driveway work

      3. Meet payroll and maintenance expenses this year

      4. Pay our mortgage interest payments for this year

    2. All of this provides us more time for the most critical financial work for our school: solving our mortgage. 

  • We must tackle the $5.5 million mortgage to secure the school for the future. We do not make enough money through tuition and auxiliary income to pay down this debt. We need time to re-establish a charitable pipeline, be it through donations, loans, or other creative solutions, to settle this debt permanently.

Our Path Forward is an Investment in Time

The current school administration and Board of Directors are moving diligently and strategically to secure the Center School’s financial health. We have:

  • restructured our financial management

  • hired a Director of Auxiliary Programs to create new revenue streams

  • hired a Leadership Gifts Officer with fundraising expertise

  • carefully looked at our operational budget to determine where restructuring is possible

This $1 million fundraising goal is necessary to provide that time to get our operational budget steady, so we can turn our focus to our debt.

By meeting this goal together, we gain the stability needed to tackle our building debt. The mortgage on our building is a significant hurdle to realizing true solvency for the school. With only our revenue from tuition and auxiliary programming, we cannot pay back the building loan on our own. We will look to friends of the school to help us achieve this task, just as we did seven years ago when we raised capital to position ourselves to move to this beautiful campus. A capital campaign is more challenging to raise money for after a building has been completed, but we are actively pursuing creative opportunities to engage investment partners.

In Summary: Moving Forward, Looking Ahead

We are facing an enormous financial challenge.

We have a viable model here and there is a plan to rightsize our operational budget and increase the school’s visibility.

Raising $1M this year allows us the time to implement that plan as well as work towards solving our mortgage debt.

We are making strong strides towards our $1M funding goal and ask our community to continue to lean in with us and help secure the future of this magical school.

Visit our Save the Center School Campaign page to see how you can help connect us with investment partners, to learn about upcoming events, and for updates on our progress.