Even though it is only February, independent Schools across the country are in the process of enrolling and reenrolling families for the 2021-22 school year. In this email, I will orient you to your reenrollment process, share tuition for next year, review any action your family may need to take, provide a copy of the 2021-22 academic calendar, and invite you to our next Head of School Huddle.

Our reenrollment process provides us a unique opportunity to reflect on where we are as a School, where we are with our strategic long-range goals, and what we want to accomplish during the next school year. While this year has been fraught with COVID-19 challenges, your partnership throughout has been exceptional. Together, we have successfully navigated every single challenge. 

Thank you for being part of our team, and remember my door is always open if you want to talk.

Dr. Kevin Navarro

Head of School

With your continuous enrollment agreement, preparing for the 2021-22 school is simple. To guide you through the process, Rhea Egbert will email you tomorrow with a custom reenrollment checklist for your family.

Families who are taking any of the below actions will have specific items to complete by Monday, March 15, 2021. 

Beyond these needs, there is no new contract to review or sign, and your child’s spot is secure when we receive your deposit and applicable fees by March 15, 2021. Rhea's email will provide specific information and how the School will collect your deposit and fees based on your family's current payment plan.

Your board of trustees sets tuition prices each year. They carefully consider any tuition increases, completing market analyses and value assessments for the School. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and as an independent school, Greensboro Montessori School’s funding for the day-to-day operations of the School comes from tuition dollars. For next year's $3.8M annual operating budget, approximately 83% of the budget is allocated for faculty and staff compensation. Especially after such a challenging year with COVID-19, the decision has been made to provide faculty and staff raises for the upcoming school year.

To best serve both our students and employees, tuition will increase by 3.75 to 4.50%, based on the specific needs of each division. This represents the same percentage increase as last year, and provides the additional dollars needed to cover the School’s annual operating expenses.

Throughout the pandemic, we have sought to be transparent with our educational priorities and the challenges of COVID-19. We have regularly shared with you that the School is running a significant deficit for this year. We are proud that tuition for 2021-22 has not been increased specifically due to COVID-19 or this year's deficit budget.

As a 46-year-old nonprofit organization, the School’s finances have been very carefully managed over the years, including the best practice for independent schools to build up reserves of six months' annual operating expenses. Due to the financial strength of the School going into the pandemic, combined with the board’s careful fiduciary oversight – including taking advantage of federal relief programs and other tactics – we have been able to successfully navigate financial challenges of the pandemic.

We know a tuition increase can be challenging, and neither the board of trustees nor our team take it lightly. Our tuition setting is always a balance between the cost of running the highest quality program, which includes fairly compensating our teachers, and keeping tuition as low as possible for our families.

As you evaluate your family’s finances for the 2021-22 school year, please remember the School has a robust financial assistance program. Financial assistance is reviewed and granted on an annual basis and is available for students enrolling in kindergarten through ninth grade. As your partner in education, we may be able to support your family’s continued enrollment at Greensboro Montessori School.

During COVID-19 we have been proud to offer financial assistance to more of our families than previous years. Some families applied for the first time during the pandemic and qualified for an award. We welcome any family that continues to be financially impacted due to COVID-19 to consider applying for financial assistance, even if for the very first time.

Along with reenrollment work, our team is also actively involved in preparations for 2021-22, and we are pleased to share the 2021-22 Academic Calendar.

Just as during the onset of COVID-19 last spring, it is still challenging to be able to accurately predict what the future will look like. We are currently engaged in various levels of scenario-based planning to be best prepared for whatever fall brings us. Our general approach is to assume we will follow many, if not most, of the current COVID-19 precautions. However, at the same time we eagerly anticipate when it is safe to lessen many of those precautions. Some procedures can be changed on a moment’s notice (for example, if the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services no longer requires taking daily temperatures, we can stop that instantly), while some procedures take time and planning to unwind (for example, how much of our Pod structure will we need to have in place versus our regular class groupings). The March Head of School Huddles will be a time for us to share what we do know, as well as what we do not know, about how 2021-22 will look in the fall. We invite you to join us for the conversation.

During reenrollment season, we often focus our thoughts on a central idea. For example, we talked last year about how important the sense of “belonging” is for our students, and the year before that we talked about how our accreditations with the American Montessori Society, Southern Association of Independent Schools, and Cognia (formerly AdvancEd) all contribute to and help ensure the excellence of our program and business.

This year we think it is especially important to look at the "long view.” COVID-19 has forced so many of us into the immediate: into reactive postures ... into financial realities that are challenging ... into finding ways to maintain close social community when we are physically forced apart. We think it is important to look beyond the immediate and to look forward onto the horizon, to know that our Toddlers will soon be graduates, who will one day be independent adults charged with making a positive impact on the world. Our mission is entirely based on helping our students become their best selves. That is one of the main reasons many of you choose to send your children to our School.

As a toddler-through-ninth-grade school, we think the best way for us to look at the long view is by looking at our alumni community – to learn their stories, to learn why they chose to stay at Greensboro Montessori School, to learn what skills they took away from their time with us, and to learn how they are making their worlds a better place as productive and compassionate citizens. Our alumni community is our most important testament to the strength of our School.

As we think keeping our eye on the long view is so important, we plan to take over The Pinwheel for the next several weeks to share stories of our alumni. Each week we will feature an individual alumni story. In each story, we hope you will see and connect with our core mission and values that inspire us and drive our collective work every single day.