Financial aid harder to come by in local schools

The endowments and enrollments of local private schools are spiraling downward along with the economy.

These institutions rely on expensive tuition payments to keep their doors open.

In Morningside Heights and Harlem, these private institutions, educating students from grades K-12, have dealt with the recession with mixed success.

At St. Mark the Evangelist School on 138th Street, enrollment has increased and endowment has stayed steady but “the parents are suffering,” Sister Catherine Hagan, principal of St. Mark, said.

“I certainly spend more time trying to help and negotiating financial aid,” Hagan said. She attributed the school’s consistent enrollment to the financial aid that the school offers, but noted that the number of families in need of financial aid this year has increased by 30 to 40 percent.

Each year at St. Mark, tuition increases by $100, but recent uncertainty in the job market has left many parents unable to pay. Tuition is typically paid on a monthly basis and parents are losing their jobs, Hagan said, adding, “It becomes a choice of paying the rent and the electric bill or tuition—so we have to work with them.”

Bank Street College School for Children on 112th Street, where tuition for kindergarten through eighth grade averages around $32,000 a year, found that as the enrollment increased slightly, the school needed to spend more on financial aid.

Alexis Wright, dean of children’s programs at Bank Street College, said aid spending rose “in order to help some of our families whose economic situations had changed to stay in the school.” He added, “We were fortunate to be in a position to help those families.”

Wright said that there were more requests for financial aid this year, some which even came earlier in the summer as the financial situations of students’ families fluctuated with the unstable economy. The school honors its commitments to families already receiving financial aid, so funding for all new financial aid applicants is limited in light of the tight availability of financial aid in this year’s budget.

At Morningside Montessori School on 100th Street, maintaining enrollment has been a much more difficult task. According to Admissions Director Astry Wells, enrollment has dropped by around 20 percent recently.

“There are definitely more parents applying for financial aid,” she said, adding that around 30 percent of students now receive financial aid—doubled from the 15 percent of students that have typically required it in recent years.

“Not everyone who applies for financial aid receives it,” Wells said. The school’s endowment has decreased due to lower enrollment, which further restricts the school’s ability to provide financial aid for families in need. Tuition at the Morningside Montessori School ranges from $9,060 for a two-morning-a-week toddler program to $21,310 for a five-day-a-week preschool program.

Often, financial decisions are made independently of admission decisions, but a declining number of full-paying students means less money available for financial aid in this time of increased need.

St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School on 114th Street, where grade school tuition soars upward of $30,000 a year, would comment only that it is still “fully enrolled” for the 2009-2010 school year. There is competition for the over $1.5 million in financial aid that the school typically awards to around 25 percent of its students.

But as some parents are forced to pull their children out of expensive private schools, endowment—and the ability to cover financial aid for other students—decreases, leading to a vicious cycle in which schools are less and less able to meet the financial needs of many of their students, according to some of these private school directors who described the trend.

Some school administrators say that they are now planning even more conservatively in an attempt to weather the storm in upcoming years. Wright from Bank Street said, “We are now in the process of building next year’s budget and taking a very conservative approach with regard to enrollment projections, as we are just not sure how or if the admissions landscape may change as the city continues to cope with the economic downturn.”

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