We pay these schools roughly fifty thousand dollars a year, per child, to teach our kids what we hope is at least slightly more than they’d get for free at another school.
Math is one of those subjects. So, I checked theirs.
Here’s what I didn’t know until about a week ago: every private school is a nonprofit, every nonprofit files a tax return, and every one of those returns is public. It lists what came in, what went out, and what was left over at the end of the year. It even lists what the heads of schools make. It’s free. You can literally google it. (Or don’t, because I put it here for you.)
So I pulled all of them. Ranked below by how much money each school had left at the end of its fiscal year, richest to most broke. For each one: what came in, how much of that came from people donating, and whether they finished up or down. Fiscal year ending June 2025 for everybody except Carlthorp, whose year ends in August.
And look. I am not a math person. I want to be upfront about that. But some of these numbers were, to put it likely, surprising.
Richest
1. Wildwood Took in $51.4M. About $10M of that was donations. Finished $8.33M ahead. Sixteen percent of everything that came in the door was still sitting there in June.
2. Curtis Took in $31.0M. About $6.3M of that was donations. Finished $8.13M ahead. A twenty-six percent margin, which is a number most actual businesses would be thrilled about.
3. John Thomas Dye Took in $26.9M. $8.2M of that was donations. Finished $7.56M ahead. Thirty percent of their revenue was people giving them money. Twenty-eight percent margin, highest on the list. I’ll let you do that one.
4. Crossroads Took in $78.0M. About $9.7M of that was donations. Finished $5.89M ahead. Biggest school here. Also holding $170M in net assets, which is a sentence I had to read twice.
5. Buckley Took in $54.2M. About $4.3M of that was donations. Finished $4.70M ahead. Their net assets have roughly doubled in the last decade. Somebody there is extremely good at this.
6. Willows Took in $25.3M. $1.76M of that was donations. Finished $3.11M ahead. Take out every dollar of donations and they still would have finished ahead. What a concept that tuition could actually cover the costs to run a school.
7. LILA Took in $36.2M. About $4.4M of that was donations. Finished $937,000 ahead. A reasonable, sane number. Moving on.
8. Echo Horizon Took in $10.2M. About $1.67M of that was donations. Finished $912,000 ahead. Nine percent, which for a school this size is genuinely tidy.
9. Berkeley Hall Took in $12.5M. $1.1M of that was donations. Finished $703,000 ahead.
10. Park Century Took in $9.28M. $1.51M of that was donations. Finished $422,000 ahead.
11. Mirman Took in $23.6M. $2.08M of that was donations. Finished $181,000 ahead. If they didn’t, I might recommend they hire a more gifted head of finance.
12. Westland Took in $5.25M. About $845,000 of that was donations. Finished $137,000 ahead. Smallest school on the list and it ran clean.
The Palisades section
13. Westside Waldorf Took in $1.71M. Almost none of it was donations — ninety-four percent was tuition. Finished $114,000 ahead. Their campus burned down in January they still ended the year in the black.
14. Seven Arrows Took in $12.4M. $1.32M of that was donations. Finished $34,000 ahead. Also burned down. Also finished ahead. Their revenue actually went up from the year before, which I have not stopped thinking about.
Broke AF
15. Carlthorp Took in $16.6M. $3.17M of that was donations. Finished $244,000 down. Here’s the thing though. That’s almost a fifth of their entire revenue in gifts and they still ended up short. So when Carlthorp says it needs the money, Carlthorp needs the money.
16. New Roads Took in $32.1M. About $2.02M of that was donations. Finished $767,000 down. They had three different people serving as head of school in a single year, which feels related. Also, they should figure that out.
17. PS1 Pluralistic Took in $10.1M. $709,000 of that was donations. Finished $846,000 down. Eight percent under.
18. Brentwood Took in $75.0M. $5.94M of that was donations. Finished $2.06M down. That’s only about three percent and they’ve got an endowment behind them, so nobody panic. But they did take in almost six million in gifts and still finish down two.
19. Turning Point Took in $14.7M. About $617,000 of that was donations. Finished $2.47M down. Seventeen percent under. That one’s real.
20. Center for Early Education Took in $28.3M. $3.32M of that was donations. Finished $4.98M down. Biggest loss here by a wide margin. And that’s after the $3.32M, which means they were roughly eight million short before anybody gave them anything. Talk about really needing those celebrity checks. They better hope Hollywood doesn’t actually move to Nashville.
Okay so what does this mean?
Less than it looks like. And also exactly as much as it looks like.
A surplus isn’t a school being greedy. Half of those big numbers at the top are capital campaigns — people give money for a building, it lands as revenue in one year, it gets spent over the next three. And a deficit isn’t a school in trouble. Schools run planned deficits on purpose, drawing down reserves, absorbing a construction year. Brentwood being down two million on seventy-five could be a rounding error with an endowment behind it.
Also, check my work. Because my elementary school didn’t teach Singapore math, you know?
All figures from IRS Form 990 filings via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. Donation figures are the contributions and grants line, which includes annual fund, capital campaign, galas and grants, not just the letter. Campbell Hall, Brawerman, Wise School and Calvary Christian aren’t here because the IRS classifies them as religious organizations and they don’t have to file at all. Which is its own thing.