Reply to Is starting a small private school in Alexandria a good idea?

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[quote=Anonymous]I suspect that you may be over-estimating the market.

If you very carefully review the City Council docket records, you'll see that about once every 2-4 years, someone applies for a permit to establish a very small-scale private school in Alexandria.  Nearly none of them lasts.  Parents who were going to devote all of their available time to teaching don't wind up doing so; money is tight; initial real estate deals don't work out; eventually, the tiny number of paid staffers is let go.

Compounding the difficulty is the significant increase in the popularity of the ACPS elementary programs.  In the east-half of the City, there are Lyles-Crouch, Mason, Barrett, MacArthur, and Maury.  Again, at this level, it's difficult to objectively define how any of the privates could be better in any material respect, and parents regularly pull their kids from private schools perfectly voluntarily to go to those five public schools.

If you determine space (good enough to be permit-compliant) at roughly $30 per square foot, with the first two months pre-payable (even assuming, generously, no need for a build-out), and you add insurance, and you add a lead teacher at a minimal $70k (total, including payroll taxes, insurance, SIMPLE-IRA, and related benefits would be roughly $89k), at least a Part-Time admin and a part-time ass't teacher, and then you assume 100% free-labor from parents, your minimum gross cost is about $265,000 per year.  So that means , at $7k tuition, you'd need 38 kids whose parents will be paying in full.  This would mean paying for a much worse ratio than at any public school anywhere in the region, with no enrichment, a barely-passable facility, no library, no gym, no formal curriculum, no specialists for interventions that smaller kids need (especially a reading specialist), etc.

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