Table of Contents
While enrollment in public schools across Henrico County and the state have taken a nosedive since the onset of the pandemic, some families have flocked to private schools like The Steward School in Western Henrico.
There are about 700 students enrolled in the JK-12 school this year, an 8% growth from the 2018-2019 school year, the last year before COVID-19 hit. In comparison, the Henrico County Public Schools division has had an enrollment decrease of 3.8% since fall 2019.
The obvious reason for Steward’s growth: the school was open for in-person learning during the 2020-2021 school year, while public schools largely remained virtual.
“I am not 100% sure that the enrollment we're experiencing right now is long term or if it's what you might call a COVID blip, so I'm doing the long term budgeting forecast with both scenarios in mind,” said Head of School Dan Frank. “But what I can tell you is that for the students who were new to the school and started during the pandemic, we retained those students at a rate of 97% to 98%, so I don't think they're in a rush to leave.”
Steward closed its doors in March of 2020, as was required by the state. A few months later in August, Steward opened back up five days a week in-person for all students and has remained open from that point through today (with the exception of a two week break between Thanksgiving and the winter holiday). Most public schools in Virginia remained largely virtual.
The influx of new students have mostly come from public schools, according to Ingrid Moore, the director of lower school.
“It doesn't feel like a direction that we didn't want or didn't anticipate,” Moore said. “It feels like we have more kids now but that everybody's really bought into being here, being a part of the community, which feels really good. It would be strange, I think, if we had taken a new direction programmatically or philosophically, but that has not happened.”
One of the Steward’s new students, Camren Gregory, transferred from a public school in Maryland.
He repeated his junior year when he transferred to Steward, because he felt he “needed that year back.”
Camren plays basketball, is a member of the school’s Black Student Alliance, and is in the National Honors Society.
Although competitive sports came to a halt in 2020, Steward still hosted practices, and trainings for all of its athletic teams. There were no fans allowed in the stands that year, so in their place were cardboard cutouts of the players’ parents, Camren said.
“It was kind of weird. We had to play in a mask, everybody's skin was terrible,” he said. “ But we toughed it out, we had a season still, we had a state tournament.”
After graduating this spring, Camren will go on to play Division 1 basketball for Saint Francis University.
Despite being at the height of the pandemic, Camren the atmosphere was relaxed when he came to the school last fall. Staff members walked around with 6-foot sticks, he said, to remind students to stay socially distanced during community time.
There have been no COVID-19 outbreaks, or in-school transmission, at Steward to date, according to school officials.
The school adhered to mitigation strategies like masking, improved ventilation and so forth – nothing special or different from what most schools have done throughout the pandemic.
Many schools in HCPS have similarly experienced zero outbreaks, while some have recorded as many as six this academic year. Overall, HCPS has seen 118 recorded outbreaks since Sept. 1, which roughly amounts to about one outbreak per every 400 students.
School closures have had obvious negative effects on student learning overall. As a private school, Steward students aren’t required to take the Standards of Learning assessments, so there is no precise comparison of students’ academic footing compared to other students. But according to Frank, test scores have remained “relatively constant.”
The students who transferred from outside schools have not been behind in any blanket fashion, Frank said, like being behind an entire grade level.
“But what we have found is they are perhaps missing a concept here or a concept there,” he said. “Because of the kind of school that we are, we've been very able to bring them up to speed with the kids who have been at Steward the whole time predating COVID.”
An education from The Steward School comes with a price tag. Standard tuition ranges from $18,160 a year for JK students to $29,200 a year for upper school students.
The school offers a variable tuition program, a sliding scale in which families pay a percentage of tuition based on factors including annual household income. The lowest rates available are about $5,500.
A little more than one third of students utilize the variable tuition program, and about 14% of upper school students have a merit-based award, according to a Steward spokeswoman.
About 30% of Steward students are people of color, according to Moore, compared to the Henrico public school division, whose student population is about 65% students of color, according to state data.
“I think there is a good chance that the public will be drawn toward the independent school ecosystem for some time to come because I don't think that it was simply that the schools were closed. That's a huge part of it — but I think that many of the families were disappointed by the unpredictability of what those schools were able to do and offer,” Frank said. “I think they're seeing independent schools – or at least us – as more predictable, steady and ready to pivot successfully on behalf of students.”
