Zuckerberg-Funded Silicon Valley School to Shutter Next Year

(Bloomberg) — The Primary School, a tuition-free private school with 543 students co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan, will shutter its doors after roughly a decade in operation.

The school said in a note on its website that it will close after the 2025-2026 academic year. To sustain its legacy, the billionaire couple’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, will make a $50 million investment in the communities the nonprofit serves — East Palo Alto, Belle Haven and the East Bay near San Francisco — over the next few years.

“This was a very difficult decision, and we are committed to ensuring a thoughtful and supportive transition for students and families over the next year,” according to the note, which was posted late Thursday.

Carson Cook, a Primary School spokesperson, had no comment beyond the statement.

Chan, 40, a pediatrician, co-founded the school in 2016 with an “integrated health and education model” to work with families and kids from birth through high school, according to the entity’s tax forms. The nonprofit’s first middle school cohort started in 2023. 

According to the latest tax form, more than 95% of the Primary School’s East Palo Alto students are under-represented minorities. The filing shows it had more than $30 million in assets at the end of June 2023. 

The Primary School isn’t the only such initiative started by billionaires recently. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison have all also opened schools over the last several years. 

Musk’s nonprofit, the Musk Foundation, has donated $237 million toward his education venture — a technology-focused primary and secondary school in Austin, with eventual plans for a university. That school, Ad Astra, is partnering with the same company that helped Ellison set up his Hala Kahiki Montessori school in Lanai, Hawaii, the island 98% owned by the Oracle Corp.co- founder. Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. co-founder, created a network of Montessori-inspired preschools for children in poor communities.  

The Primary School’s closure comes as Zuckerberg, 40, founder of Meta Platforms Inc., makes sweeping changes to his business empire to better align with the Trump administration. He’s appointed longtime Trump allies to his board, including Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White and Dina Powell McCormick, who served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser during his first term.

Zuckerberg also tapped a Republican strategist to serve as chief of global affairs, eliminated Meta’s US fact-checking program, dismantled the company’s hate-speech policies and axed key diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Meta as well as at CZI.

The Primary School has prioritized diversity efforts, conducting an audit in June 2020 in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and establishing a DEI task force that fall. 

–With assistance from Riley Griffin.

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