Hoping to counter poverty’s toll on children, Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg, are launching what’s certain to become a multimillion-dollar project: a private comprehensive preschool and K-8 school, linked to health services for children and families in East Palo Alto.
The couple is expected to announce Thursday their vision for The Primary School, which will target the most disadvantaged residents of East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park.
Set to open in August, the project stems from Chan’s passion to alleviate the effects of poverty on children — something she’s witnessed while tutoring in inner-city Boston and now working as a pediatrician at San Francisco General Hospital.
The school — announced just as the couple expects the birth of their first child — is the latest Zuckerberg-Chan donation to education, including a controversial $100 million gift to New Jersey schools, $7.5 million for college scholarships to undocumented students, and a $120 million pledge to schools in low-income Bay Area communities.
A former elementary science teacher, Chan hopes to take a holistic approach to address health and other issues that hamper children’s well-being and learning from a young age. “There is something physiologically happening early in life that changes a child’s trajectory,” said Chan, 30.
She refused to estimate how much the couple is contributing. But the investment, channeled through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, is sizable. When the school is fully built, it will be able to serve 700 children plus their families — that’s one-quarter larger than the entire Luther Burbank School District in San Jose, which runs on an annual budget of $4.9 million.
The Primary School’s extensive services, all free to children and families, could well exceed that budget.
“It’s very exciting to do the things we imagine are possible,” said Luisa Buada, chief executive officer of the Ravenswood Family Health Center, a federally funded clinic in East Palo Alto that is Chan’s primary partner. The clinic just built a new $39 million center — with $5 million donated by the Zuckerberg-Chans. For The Primary School, the clinic will provide comprehensive health care from prenatal care through medical, dental and mental-health services.
The school has purchased a lot on Weeks Street near the East Palo Alto Baylands and has begun recruiting families, many of them clinic patients. It will start next year with two infant and toddler classes and one preschool class, and reportedly will occupy a temporary site on Bay Road near Pulgas Avenue. It expects to expand age groups the following year, then add one grade each subsequent year, up to the eighth grade. Initially, 50 children will be accepted into each class.
The school hasn’t yet decided how it will choose children if they get more applicants than they can accommodate.
In an interview with this newspaper, Chan emotionally described her quest to help children overcome poverty. An increasing number of studies, she pointed out, show that chronic stress — brought on by emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, and household dysfunction during childhood — radically alters brain development. Children subjected to such stress are 32 times more likely to suffer from a learning disability, and a heightened risk of heart disease, obesity, drug abuse and mental illness, she said.
Chan recalled former students and patients whose conditions she could not cure, because multifaceted problems extended beyond her realm. As a Harvard undergraduate, she tutored children in a Boston housing project. “After the first year,” she said, “it became evident I could do all I wanted, but there were much bigger problems that were preventing these kids from succeeding in school.”
She trained at UC San Francisco to teach physicians to advocate for underserved children. Now a primary-care physician at a hospital caring for the indigent, she has the medical skills to diagnose and prescribe. But “I soon realized that for those pervasive problems, I had no treatment,” she said. “I was stuck on the other side of the same problem.”
So two years ago, the idea for The Primary School was conceived. It draws from initiatives such as the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, Boston’s Codman Academy charter school, Montessori schools and California guidelines for “whole child” education. A similar innovation in early-childhood care, Educare, has just opened in San Jose.
“We want to dramatically improve education and health outcomes of underserved children in East Palo Alto and Belle Haven,” said Meredith Liu, the school’s president and chief operating officer, who has experience in charter schools and in school reform.
Chan has tapped a former Rocketship Education charter school leader, Andrew Elliott-Chandler, as principal.
Chan and Zuckerberg are part of an elite group of wealthy local leaders who have set their sights on improving education: Venture capitalist Tim Draper founded a university, philanthropist John Sobrato helped fund Jesuit Cristo Rey high school and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings has donated to charter schools.
The East Palo Alto announcement comes as national attention focuses on the failure of a Zuckerberg gift to Newark, New Jersey, schools. A recently released book examining the 5-year-old project concludes that Zuckerberg neglected to understand the complexity of public education, failed to talk to people on the ground and approved top-down changes that provoked outrage and resistance. What Zuckerberg hoped would become a model to transform inner-city education has failed to improve learning for most Newark public school students, the book by former newspaper reporter Dale Russakoff concludes.
In The Primary School, Chan, too, seeks to create a model that can be replicated elsewhere.
But she has spent two years talking to community members — first holding discussions in Oakland and San Francisco as well, before choosing East Palo Alto — examining other schools, talking to nonprofit and community leaders in East Palo Alto, and gathering a core of reformers.
“They’re not acting like an outside group coming in,” said Gloria Hernandez-Goff, superintendent of the Ravenswood City School District. “They’re developing an insider approach.” She believes that the school and district can work together to serve children.
But Ronda White, president of the Ravenswood Teachers Association, said while she likes the idea, losing hundreds of pupils to a private school will cost Ravenswood precious state funding, she pointed out. “That would be a huge hit to lose those kids,” she said.
East Palo Alto Mayor Lisa Gauthier, however, sees a net benefit: “It’s really going to help the city as a whole.”Contact Sharon Noguchi at 408-271-3775. Follow her at Twitter.com/noguchionk12.
