A financial aid committee at a school I work with met one evening in February to decide on the year’s tuition assistance awards. The committee was three people. The head of school, the board treasurer, and a parent volunteer who had served on this committee for six years. They had thirty-one families to consider. They had a tuition assistance budget of one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. They had a spreadsheet that the head of school had stayed late three nights in a row to assemble.
The spreadsheet had columns for each family’s adjusted gross income, their stated need, the number of children they had at the school, the program level of each child, and a notes field. The notes field is where the actual decisions lived. “Father lost his job in November but starts a new role at lower pay in March.” “Single parent, second child, sibling discount already applied, grandmother contributing.” “Started here on full pay but the family business collapsed mid-year and they have asked for emergency assistance now.”
The committee got through eleven families in two hours. They scheduled a second meeting for the following week. The head of school went home and stayed up rewriting the spreadsheet to capture the conversation they had just had, so that the next meeting would not start from scratch.
This is the part of Montessori school finance the financial reporting system does not see, and it is the part that is doing most of the actual work.
The model schools inherited
Montessori school finance, in most cases, was set up the way independent-school finance has always been set up. Tuition is the dominant revenue source. Tuition is set annually by the board based on expense projections. Financial aid is a discretionary award process funded out of either the operating budget or a designated endowment subaccount. The financial statements are produced for the board on a quarterly cycle. The accounting system is QuickBooks or a similar small-business platform. The chart of accounts looks like the chart of accounts of a small nonprofit, with revenue, expenses, and net assets, organized in ways that the IRS recognizes for the 990.
This model is functional. It produces audit-ready statements. It satisfies the board’s fiduciary obligations. It does not, however, tell the school anything useful about whether the school is being financially just, or whether the financial aid budget is reaching the families it should reach, or whether the tuition structure is keeping out the families the school says it wants to serve, or whether the program is paying its faculty in a way that matches the values the school says it holds.
The chart of accounts was not built to answer those questions. So the questions get answered in spreadsheets, in the notes column, in the committee’s collective memory, in the late nights the head of school spends rewriting things so the questions can be answered at all.
What money infrastructure for justice looks like
There is a thread, going back at least to Montessori’s own writing, that the work of the school is bound up in questions of who gets in, who stays, who can afford to be there, and who is shaped by the work the school does. That thread has not, in most schools, made it into the way money is tracked.
A school that wanted to bring its money tracking into alignment with that thread would need a few specific things. It would need a tuition structure that could be analyzed by family income band, not just by tier or program. It would need a financial aid award process where the decision criteria were written down and visible, so that the committee could be honest with itself about which children were and were not being served. It would need to be able to look at its faculty compensation in light of the cost of living in its zip code, the credentials and experience of the staff, and the comparable salaries at the other independent schools the parents at this school have access to. It would need to know what its budget actually says about who the school is for, in the language of dollars, and not just in the language of mission.
This is not exotic. It is what just institutions in any sector look like when they are taking justice seriously. The reason it does not exist in most Montessori schools is not that the leaders do not care. It is that the financial infrastructure was not built to surface these questions, and the leaders do not have the time to build the spreadsheets that would surface them on top of doing the rest of the job.
What we built for this
When we sat down to build the financial side of MMAP, the question we kept asking was not “what does a school accounting system look like.” A school accounting system already exists. QuickBooks works. The question we kept asking was “what does the financial layer of a Montessori school need to surface so that the school can make decisions in alignment with what it says it values.”
The answer turned into a set of features I have not written about much yet, because they are still being refined with the pilot schools that are using them. A tuition structure that supports two-guardian split billing by dollar amount, because the actual lived arrangements of separated families are not honored by software that assumes one bill per household. A financial aid module that tracks both the award and the rationale behind the award, so the committee’s memory is not lost when the spreadsheet is closed. Ancillary services that are tied to the student record, so a child enrolled in extended day or lunch or enrichment automatically appears on the right invoice without anyone re-entering anything. An equity analysis layer on top of the enrollment data that lets a school look at its own population by program level, race, and program type, and notice patterns it could not see in the chart of accounts.
None of this replaces the chart of accounts. The chart of accounts still has to do its job. What this does is add a second layer of financial vision on top of the first, in which the school can see itself the way it wants to see itself.
The slow piece of this work, the piece I do not write about often because the writing has not caught up to the doing, is the pricing model question. What does it cost a school to be financially just, in the way that justice would actually mean for a Montessori community. What is the right ratio of full-pay families to financial-aid families for a school to operate sustainably and serve broadly. What is the right faculty compensation curve for a school that wants to retain its most experienced guides. These are not questions a chart of accounts answers. They are questions a community has to answer in conversation, over years, with money infrastructure that supports the conversation rather than fighting it.
What this writing is for
Twelve issues in, what I will say is that the slow work of articulating these threads publicly is the part of MMG I most want to do well. The reel is doing its job, the pilots are doing their job, the platform is being built every week. The writing is the part that gives the rest of it a frame the field can examine.
If you have been reading along and have not become a paid subscriber, I am asking again. The weekly essay stays free. The work behind it has a sustainability question, and paid subscribers are the answer to that question. The archive opens to you, the comments open, the monthly behind-the-build update lands in your inbox, and the quarterly reader-question post is where I take the questions I am being asked privately and answer them out loud.
This Substack is a small thing relative to the size of the field. It is also, increasingly, a thing the field is reading. That matters. Thank you for being here. Reply if something in this piece is alive for you.
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