GREENFIELD — With a $5.5 million mortgage after the completion of its new campus in 2020, rising costs and declining enrollment, the Center School needs to raise $1 million in the next six months to stay open.
The Center School, a private school teaching students in preschool through eighth grade, was founded in 1981 under the nonprofit Northeast Foundation for Children (NEFC). It opened its new 30-acre campus at 739 Bernardston Road in 2021, leaving its former campus on Montague City Road.
Lauren Obregón, the school’s interim co-head, said interest payments on the new campus’ mortgage amount to $200,000 per year. Inflationary cost bumps for utilities, services and basic supplies, along with a 13% enrollment decline in the past two years, have resulted in an annual deficit of more than $400,000 for the school.
“Our operational budget’s deficit has ballooned to over $400,000,” she said. “The demographics are just getting older in Franklin County, and that’s led to what some admissions folks and independent schools refer to as an enrollment cliff … There are fewer kids of the age where they would typically enter independent schools. It’s the higher cost of everything, and the fact that we now have a much higher debt load from this incredibly stunning and wonderful new campus that we have.”
In an effort to balance its operating budget within two to three years, it launched the $1 million “Save the Center School” campaign designed to keep the school running as a more long-term strategy is drafted. The campaign already has raised just shy of $384,000 — which Director of Admissions and Advancement Emily Redman said was mainly through donations from current and former families of students.
“The people that are donating have said again and again, ‘This is the biggest donation I’ve ever made.’ It isn’t that we have somebody who can just easily hand over a check for a lot of money,” she said. “We have a lot of families who are saying, ‘We want the school to be here. We want our kids to get to go to preschool here and elementary school here.'”
Over the past year, Redman explained that the school’s administration and board of directors have implemented a series of measures to strengthen financial oversight, diversify revenue and expand fundraising efforts.
In a written statement, Obregón listed the hiring of a director of auxiliary programs as a cost-saving measure the school has undergone to restructure its finances. She noted that the Center School recently assembled an Ideas to Action Task Force to help generate and implement strategies to drive fundraising and enrollment.
In an interview, Obregón said that while fundraising will always be a part of the Center School’s budget, school administrators are searching for ways to cut costs anywhere they can.
“We are looking at ways to cut costs for our everyday expenses, for overhead expenses. Fundraising will always be part of what we do,” she said. “As an independent school, we will always have an annual fund, and hopefully we will not always have a $5.5 million mortgage.”
Redman said the school also is recruiting the help of families to find new fundraising strategies. She said parents of current and former Center School students have helped significantly with the school’s fundraising.
“It’s a real challenge to raise money for a building that already exists, so we’re asking the community to help us think of different ways we could raise that money, and giving ourselves some time,” Redman said. “Part of the $1 million goal is to give ourselves some time to get those ideas moving forward.”