VOLUME 22 ISSUE 4 • 2020 | WWW.MONTESSORI.ORG/IMC | ©MONTESSORI LEADERSHIP ����
for most, if not all, children. Doing this requires
highly trained teachers, extensive
(and expensive) materials, beautiful facilities,
and a lot of time and energy. Far too
often, Montessori schools don’t charge sufficient
tuition to reflect all of this.
This is obviously not the time to increase
tuition. But, as a general rule, you should
set your tuition as close as possible to the
actual cost of what it takes to deliver the
wonderful service that you offer.
One way to set tuition is to find out,
formally or informally, what other private
schools and preschools in your area are
charging. You don’t necessarily want to be
the most expensive, though it’s OK if you
are, but you should be charging at least
80%-90% of the most expensive. If you’re
not, you should gradually increase your
tuition over time to reach that level, and
then keep raising tuition a few percent each
year to stay ahead of inflation and give
raises to your staff.
Setting your tuition this way will ensure
that families come to your school because
they really value what you offer, not just
because you are cheap, and it will give you
more resources to support your work.
• Develop strong internal and external
marketing programs to attract and keep
families that understand and appreciate the
value of what you do. These are things you
should do all the time – and they are more
important now than ever before.
External marketing is critical to attracting
new families to your school. It includes
a wide variety of activities such as tours and
open-house events for prospective families
(all of which can be done virtually or in
small, socially distant groups), developing
an informative and engaging website, doing
some basic work to ensure that your site
ranks highly in Google searches for schools
and preschools in your area, and using
social media tools such as Facebook and
Instagram. In these efforts, you want to
be sure that you are sending a consistent
message that highlights the strengths of
your program and attracts the kinds of
families who will enroll because they value
what you can do for their children.
Internal marketing is critical to keeping
families at your school. You do not necessarily
want to think of this as “marketing.” It
may fit better with your school’s culture to
think of it as “parent education” and “parent
relations.” The key thing to keep in mind is
that parents who have already made a commitment
to your school by enrolling their
children are the easiest target for you to
reach. So, you should do everything you
can to provide the best possible education
for your students and to involve and educate
their parents, as well. If the people who
know your school best don’t want to keep
their children there, you’ll have a hard time
convincing anyone else to enroll.
Strong internal marketing, coupled
with the excellent education that I know
your school provides, can also help with
external marketing because it will lead to
increased “word-of-mouth” enrollment, as
parents of current and former students tell
their friends how much you did for their
children and how happy they are with your
work. This is the strongest possible kind of
marketing, and it can play a critical role in
your enrollment efforts.
• Communicate with parents as often
as possible and as transparently as possible,
both individually and as a group. I hope that
you are in regular communication with your
parents all the time, but you will need to do
even more at a time like this. Here are some
things that schools I’ve been in touch with
recently have done to stay connected:
• Talk with parents individually to
find out how they’re doing, if they have
any questions, and whether there’s
anything you or the rest of the school
community can do to help their family
during this time.
• Send out surveys asking for
parent input about questions such as how
eager/willing they are to send their
children back to school, what schedule(s)
would work best for them, etc.
• Send parents regular updates (at
least weekly) to let them know what you
and your staff are doing and to fill them in
on your plans as they develop.
• Hold parent roundtables on Zoom
(or something similar) so parents can
ask questions and you can address their
concerns directly.
• Set up a Google Classroom (or
something similar) for parents where you
can post information about school plans,
resources for at-home learning, etc.
Through all of this, you want to be
empathetic and listen closely to what your
parents are saying – and to be honest about
what you know and don’t know. This is a
hard time for everyone, and there’s a lot we
all don’t know. This is an opportunity for
you to strengthen your relationships with
your parents, and if you can communicate
regularly in a caring, compassionate way,
your school community can be stronger as
a result.
• Develop a need-based ��nancial aid
or tuition assistance program to support
families that can��t a��ord to pay
full tuition. Many Montessori schools keep
their tuition low to ensure that a wider range
of families are able to enroll. But for me, at
least, a better way to do this, however, is to
set your tuition as close as you can to the
top of the market in your area (see above),
and then use some of the funds from
tuition, supplemented by fundraising (see
below), to provide need-based financial
aid to families who can’t afford to pay
as much.
Setting up a financial aid program this
way ensures that families who have more
resources pay something close to what they
would pay if their child went to one of the
other excellent schools in the area. It gives
you the ability to bring a wider range of
families into your school community as well.
The COVID-19 pandemic makes
creating a financial aid program even more
important, since there are undoubtedly
parents in your school community who
have lost their jobs and/or seen a significant
reduction in income. If you haven’t
offered a financial aid program before, this
is a great time to start.
To make your financial aid program as
objective as possible, you’ll need information
about each family’s financial situation.
This can be hard to collect and analyze,
so you may want to use one of the online
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