Letter from Provost Jonathan R. Cole Regarding Columbia University School

Dear Colleague,

I am pleased to report that at its meeting of March 3, 2000, the Columbia University Board of Trustees unanimously approved moving forward to create a K-8 Columbia University School for children. I write to provide you with some details of our current plans.

The central reason for creating the School for children is to maximize our ability to recruit and retain the most able faculty in the world. It has become critical to the University's mission that we be able to provide both excellent housing and schooling at affordable prices so as to recruit the most talented younger faculty, many of whom are building families. A second reason is to help create a more integrated local community of Columbia scholars and others through the social patterns that develop among children and their parents during the K-8 years.

Summarized below are some of the key features that guide our development of the Columbia University School.

• The K-8 school will have roughly 700 students when it is fully enrolled.
• Approximately fifty percent of the students would be children of officers who are affiliated with Columbia; ten percent would be children from local school districts; twenty percent would be children of parents working at other non-profit institutions in New York; and another twenty percent would be from other families in the City who are interested in sending their children to the Columbia University School.
• The School will most likely be located at the corner of 110^th Street and Broadway, where we expect to build faculty housing.
• We are working with two tuition models. The first would have all Columbia officers receive a 50 percent discount from the full cost of educating each student-- the full cost is about equal to the tuition that is charged by other leading independent schools in the City. We anticipate that the ten percent of students coming from the local public school districts will receive full financial aid, and the other 40 percent would pay the full cost (although the parents might receive some form of scholarship support from their own employers). The second model is the same as the first with one difference--financial aid for Columbia officers would be scaled to personal or household income, to help make the school even more affordable for those with comparatively lower incomes. The "pricing" issues involved are one of the complicated aspects of this initiative that we need to work on over the coming year.
• Admission to the School for children of Columbia officers would be "as of right," except in those rare cases where the School is unable to meet the special needs of a particular child. This would eliminate the time, anxiety, and uncertainty associated with application to either the best public or independent schools in the City, where (as you may have recently read in the New York Times and the Observer) the current volume of applications for exceeds the number of available slots for children. For those who are not affiliated with Columbia, admissions would be based upon interviews and would be what is called "service based," which means that selection will be portfolio-based and will not require the use of standardized tests.
• In addition to involving our own faculty and staff in the process, an Advisory Board will begin work this Summer and Fall to develop ideas for the School's curriculum. We will seek advice from national experts in the schooling of young children. We have an opportunity to develop a new school and we will want to take advantage of the best knowledge that currently exists on modes of learning, but we will also have opportunities to create new practices.
• We expect to work cooperatively with local schools, including those in our neighborhood, to link our innovative activities with the public schools in the local districts and with others in the city and the nation. We hope that the Columbia School will serve as a resource to, and development lab for, the public schools and will contribute to the revitalization of the public school system in the City.
• A business plan for the School has been developed. If the distribution of students in the School is as I described earlier (50% CU, 10% full scholarship, 40% fully paying students who are non-affiliates), the cost of the University will be the equivalent of .75 of one point on the University's non-grant fringe rate (which is equivalent to $3.9 million in year five of the School's operations when it has achieved "steady state"). We anticipate paying for this K-8 benefit as we do our College tuition benefit.

The goal is simple. We want to meet a critical need of our faculty and other affiliates while creating one of the very best schools for children in the nation. To achieve this goal, we will need the active participation in the planning of the School by the faculty and other officers at Columbia-both those who will benefit directly from the program and those who can help us develop new and better ideas for the School because of their academic work at the University. In short, we hope to have a very active group of parents and scholars involved in the development and implementation of the Columbia University School for Children. Those of you who would like to volunteer your help, please be in touch with me. We hope we can call on others to help with their expertise. In the Fall, we will host a series of general meetings for members of the Columbia community to come together and share ideas about the School. We will also be working with both private and public schools in the area, as well as with others community leaders, to assure that the benefits of the School extends beyond the Columbia community.

We will be moving expeditiously in the hope of opening the School in the Fall of 2003. We expect to meet that target and perhaps beat it. However, complex endeavors like this sometimes take longer than one might like; we are placing a premium on "doing this well" rather that "as soon as possible." There is, of course, much planning to be done in anticipation of the opening of the School, and we have already begun to address the facilities, financial, and enrollment issues related to the initiative.

Finally, while the schooling of children should address one of our critical needs, it does not address the problem that faculty and other Columbia affiliates have in meeting their day-care and pre-school needs. In an effort to obtain the necessary data and information required to assess our current policy, as well as recommend changes in it, I have asked Dr. Gardner Dunnan, who founded the School Search Service at Columbia this year and had been the Headmaster of the Dalton School for 23 years, to chair a Task Force on Child Care and Preschool needs of faculty and staff. Comprised of faculty members who are experts in this field, faculty who currently deal with the problems associated with preschool education, and administrators who are familiar with the current Columbia policy, the Task Force has been charged to make their report to me no later than the end of the calendar year. Their efforts may include the distribution of a short survey that will be used to assess the demand for preschool facilities and costs associated with supporting efforts to help families with preschool children.

At the beginning of the last century, Columbia sponsored the Lincoln School, the Speyer School, and the Horace Mann School-each having an important impact on this country's pre-collegiate schooling. As we enter a new century, I believe the Columbia University School will rapidly become one of the nation's leading primary schools. I hope you will join us in creating this School-whether or not you have school-age-children - through your suggestions and support in the months ahead.

With best regards,
	Sincerely,
	Jonathan R. Cole          Provost and Dean of Faculties