On Love, Money, and the Live Oak Waldorf School Community

When I got here, I didn’t understand this place. I didn’t plan on sending my kids to a private
school. Stuffy people go to private schools. Of course, I didn’t plan on having kids. So plans change.
Apparently they mainly change when my wife tells me they’re going to change. This was no exception,
and I found myself at Live Oak Waldorf School. I remember thinking, “I’ve never been to a hippy
commune, but they must look something like this.” You’ve all been to the early childhood village, so I
needn’t dive into the visual. Suffice to say it’s a pretty stark contrast to the public schools that I knew so
well. I went to public schools my whole life. My mother was an elementary public school teacher for 30
years. My two stepdaughters graduated from public schools and I was with them every step of the way.
This was not that. I was soon to find out that the differences extended far beyond the shortage of
concrete and numbered classrooms.
Three years later I didn’t understand this place. I thought I did. I had started to drink the
proverbial organic Kool-Aid. I was making handmade contributions to the auction in my wood shop. We
had cut out most of the media at home (I still miss Sesame Street). My wife was cleaning classrooms to
pay the tuition and I was coming along and getting in her way. I started showing up at school. Class
meetings, work parties, festivals, even guest-speaker events. I was hooked. My wife was right. Again
(sigh). But in spite of my newfound love for Live Oak Waldorf School, I was still blissfully unaware of the
mechanisms in place that underpin its fragile existence.
Two years after that I still didn’t understand this place. But I was beginning to learn more of
what I didn’t know. I was on parent council. I was reading Payne and Kohn and Louv and Sears and I
was consuming everything I could find (good and bad) on the internet relating to Waldorf education. I
still had difficulty with Steiner, but I was occasionally trying. I was noticing more and wondering more
about how our school operates. Some of the conventions that I took for granted as a business owner
were not as I thought they might be. I knew that all successful organizations have a success formula,
and I was trying to understand ours.
I’ve been here eight years now. I’m still just a baby in comparison to some of our veteran
families, both past and present. I’ve participated in the governance of our school for the last four years
and I still learn new things regularly about this unique model that we have here. I’m pretty sure I’m
finally starting to understand this place. I don’t blame myself for not getting it for so long and frankly I’d
be shocked if a new family has ever fully understood what they’re signing up for, at least in the last
twenty years or so. I’m pretty certain that the founding families must have understood it, but beyond
them, I’m not so sure. I’m completely convinced at this point that what goes on at 410 Crother Road is a
rare and unique social phenomenon. I think we all sense the magic there and we are attracted to it.
However, I don’t believe we are adequately nurturing it, and I believe it is in danger. It is my opinion
that this is the case because we don’t take responsibility for our model. I think we don’t call it what it is,
and that lack of clarity is damaging. I think we dance around it because we don’t want to upset anyone
and we don’t want to scare anyone away. Because it is so wonderful, families put down their roots
here. And then inevitably, love and resentment grow from the same rich soil.
We need to do something about this. We need to come to terms with the true nature of our
organizational model and then act accordingly. We need to unify as a community and do what needs to
be done to make this type of model flourish. It’s time to dig in and dig deep.

Do We Take Responsibility For Our Model?

What exactly is the operational model of our school? Is it a business model for a typical private
school? Is it the financial model of a charity? A cooperative? Something else? Are we even clear on
what our model is? Is it the way it is by design, or has it arrived there by default? Was it always this
way? Will this model take us from year forty to year fifty? We really need to have clarity on what our
model is today. One way to do this is to look at our finances and our structure to determine what
organizations we most closely resemble, and then analyze whether or not we are effectively following
the success formula for the best of such similar organizations. Only then can we decide if the model
that we determine is in place is the one that will take us successfully into the future. We have to be
clear enough on our operational model that we would be perfectly comfortable explaining to a brand
new potential family at the school why it is the best vehicle to take us forward and thus why they need
to fully support it if they want to join us here. If we can do that, then we can look at ourselves and be
honest about whether or not we are representing the same ideals in our own actions.

I. The Numbers

We can start by taking note of the opposite ends of the spectrum in the world of educational
entities. On one end are the public schools, funded by the tax base (mostly personal income tax, sales
and use tax, and property tax). If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you don’t find the public
option to be an optimal choice for your family for one reason or another, and so you donate 42% of the
sales, use, and income tax that you pay in California, along with about half of any property tax that you
might pay, into the public K-12 system out of the goodness of your heart. Society thanks you.
At the other end of the spectrum are the “elite” private elementary schools. Non-boarding rates
are around $43,000 a year. Yikes! Probably not a realistic consideration for most of us even if we did
like their programs. Even just the average tuition of a private elementary school in California is reported
by the website privateschoolreview.com to be $10,306. That’s a fair amount above the national average
for private elementary schools, which is between $7,700 and $8,500 a year depending on which source
you trust. As a point of comparison, at Live Oak Waldorf School our maximum annual tuition is $6,778,
but after sibling discounts and tuition assistance programs are applied our average tuition is about
$5,700 a year per K-8 student. Or to look at it another way, the state’s average private school tuition is
34% more than Live Oak’s maximum tuition and almost 47% higher than Live Oak’s average tuition rate.
Clearly our tuition amount is well below the average. The next questions revolve around whether the
tuition income we produce can sustain our program, and if so under what circumstances.
At Live Oak Waldorf School our budget has sustained repeated cuts in the last ten years and our
current cost to provide the existing program is now a very trim $1,260,000 a year. Our total income
from all tuition sources (including preschool, aftercare, and home school programs) comes in at
$1,029,000. Since preschool, aftercare, and the home school programs are essentially financially self-
supporting, the remaining difference between total program cost and total revenue is attributed to the
K-8 program. We refer to the difference between those two numbers as “the gap.” We currently raise
the funds to fill the gap through a combination of donations and volunteer-supported festivals and other
activities. If volunteerism and donations were eliminated, the additional cost per student (with an
enrollment of 160 K-8 students) would be $1,443.75 per student. But is filling the current gap enough to
sustain us for long term growth and prosperity? Let’s explore that.
The average mean wage in California for a kindergarten teacher is $63,940. For an elementary
school teacher it is $69,320. The median salary in the US for an elementary education administrator is
$66,955. In virtually all cases these positions offer a benefits package that includes medical insurance
and a retirement plan. In California, public school teachers contribute 8% of their salary to their

retirement plan and that contribution is matched with a 10% contribution between the employer and
the state. In California a modest HMO medical insurance plan for a 50 year old person making $65,000 a
year will cost approximately $7,800 a year in 2017. This would not cover any other family members,
rather just the primary employee. If we take an average salary of $65,000 and add 10% for a retirement
plan and $7,800 for medical benefits, the total cost of that employee is $79,300. Paying their payroll
taxes and providing them with worker’s compensation insurance will cost another 8% or so. So the total
cost to a school per employee in this example would be $84,500. In contrast, at Live Oak Waldorf School
all fifteen full-time education professionals currently are paid the minimum salary required by California
law of $41,600 per year, regardless of experience and seniority. They have no medical benefits and no
retirement plan. The total cost to the school is $44,928 per teacher/administrator. In fact the only
benefit available to them at all is the potential for a full or partial tuition remission if they have their
child at a Waldorf school. They quite literally make about half of what the average public school teacher
makes today in their position. I think it’s critical that we reflect on this pay differential intently and
often. Lest anyone is mistaken and thinks that we have come up with some magical way to run a private
school for less than anyone else can, we need to be crystal clear on the true reason for our sub-market
tuition rates. In the truest sense of the word, our teachers and administrators are actively granting a
subsidy to the school. The definition of a subsidy is “a sum of money granted by the government or a
public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low
or competitive.” They grant this subsidy out of love, that much is certain. That they should not have to
is equally certain. But since they do, it is my belief that we should quantify it and aggressively seek to
eliminate it. In broad strokes, the difference between the average in the example above ($84,500) and
the current reality ($44,928) is $39,572. Multiply that times the fifteen full-time faculty members we
have at Live Oak and you get $593,580. If you add that to the $231,000 gap mentioned above and
divide by 160 students you find that the average tuition would need to rise not by $1443.75, but actually
by $5,153.63 per student in order to provide the current program with no donations or volunteerism
from the community and no subsidy from the faculty. That would bring our average tuition to
$10,853.63 and our tuition without discounts and assistance to $11,931.63. It is around these numbers
(as they relate to our teachers) that I often find myself feeling something between guilt, gratitude, and
motivation.
Even if our faculty were fairly compensated, the gap would not yet be fully bridged. There
would still be three critical long-term needs as yet unmet. The first is deferred maintenance. The
second is ongoing maintenance. The third is capital investments. The grounds of Live Oak Waldorf
School have been providing a subsidy of their own for many years. The decks need repairing and the
heating, ventilation, and cooling systems need updating. The bathrooms need remodeling, the floors
need a refresh, the lighting needs modernizing, and the parking lot is crying for completion. Moreover,
it would be wonderful to realize 220 students in our program and an assembly room that could host
them all along with their families. A commercial kitchen would be a welcome addition, as would a
multipurpose room, a library, and an additional classroom or three. These are all visions that can be
realized, but not without a realistic budget for maintenance and a plan for future investments. In my
estimation, the true fair-market cost of the program that Live Oak Waldorf School provides is the base
cost of $1,260,000, plus $593,580 to eliminate the teacher-provided subsidy, plus another $150,000 a
year for deferred maintenance, ongoing maintenance, and future investment. That comes to a nice
round figure of about two million dollars a year, or $6,091 a year per K-8 student more than is currently
received.

II. The Model

Interestingly, even though we are located in an area of California where home prices are about 10%
higher than the state average and cost to rent is higher than average, we have set our tuition at an
amount that is two-thirds of the state average. Usually in areas where cost of living is higher than
average, tuition rates generally trend higher than average as well. Presumably our reasons for this
disparity are rooted in sound logic. When our maximum tuition was higher, our enrollment was falling
and our average tuition wasn’t much higher than it is now. This is because when tuition was higher we
provided more financial assistance than we do now with the lower tuition. Hopefully, we are more
accessible at the lower posted tuition rates, and as a community we value accessibility. But even in the
world of goods providers (cars, furniture, food, etc.) the businesses that choose a model that favors low
prices in order to increase market share (accessibility) do so with careful attention to their profit margin.
WalMart is a perfect example. IKEA is another. They have low prices, yet they are incredibly profitable.
In the case of Live Oak Waldorf School, we have low prices, but we have operated in the negative for at
least the last seven years. I point this out to emphasize that our model is not that of a traditional
provider of goods and/or services.
In the traditional goods/services provider model, the amount charged for a good or service is
always much more than the cost to procure or produce it. The difference isn’t profit, at least not yet.
The difference is first used to cover the many operating expenses that an organization has. Only if there
is anything left after all expenses are covered is there any potential for profit. In the case of a non-profit
entity, that potential “extra” would be reinvested into the organization to ensure sustainability. At Live
Oak, we charge substantially less for a service (an education) than the actual cost of providing said
service. Out in the world of business, this is impossible. Bankruptcy would be inevitable. In the world
of non-profits, it’s still pretty close to impossible. There are only two reasons we have managed to pull
it off thus far. The first, which we have examined in depth, is the generous subsidy provided by the
faculty and the facility. The second is the generous donations of money and work from the community.
What if the faculty stopped subsidizing and the community stopped donating? The answer is $13,000 a
year tuition.
To restate for clarity, if a family wanted to bring their child to Live Oak Waldorf and wanted to
purchase from our organization the service of providing an authentic Waldorf education for their child,
complete with the bevy of desirable outcomes that come along with it, without themselves engaging in
both donations and volunteerism and without benefitting from a teacher-provided subsidy, the cost of
that service would be a minimum of $12,869.13 per year per child. We could just call it $13,000 even.
Today the unsubsidized cost of attending Live Oak Waldorf School would be approximately $13,000 a
year per child. By increasing our K-8 enrollment from the current 160 to a number closer to 200, we
could potentially bring that hypothetical tuition number from $13,000 to around $10,500 a year, but it
would still be 34% higher than it is today.
Clearly, if the traditional customer/service provider model were in place, tuition would be
$13,000 a year per student or more. The actual model in place is much closer to that of a community
garden with a large giving tree in the middle of it. We need to all take responsibility for the fact that few
of us could afford the tuition for Live Oak Waldorf School if it were unsubsidized and covered the true
cost of the program. Our model is not that of a customer/service provider relationship. Our model is
that of a community co-op. Forty years ago I believe that the founders of our school were very clear on
the model that they had selected. It was a model that was completely dependent on community. Each
member of that community made a conscious commitment to support the school through not just
personal financial resources (tuition payments and monetary donations) but also their hard work,
unique skills, generous donations of time, and tireless advocating for their school in their social, family,
and professional circles.

This model comes with some unique challenges. First and foremost, everyone has a different
capacity for contribution. Some people can give more time. Some can give more money. Some can do
both, and perhaps some can’t do much of either. And while monetary contributions are pretty easy to
quantify, contributions of time, skills, and effort are much more subjective. This is where some
members of the community can begin to feel like they are being taken advantage of, especially since not
all contributions are visible to all members. Balancing the needs against the requests and then
balancing the requests equally among the community members is an extraordinarily difficult task. It is
of course why a school Board would prefer to set tuition at a level that covers all expenses in order to
avoid the continuous stream of “asks” and to avoid the inevitable situation where some community
members perceive that they are carrying, or actually carry, a heavier load. If only it were that simple.
The second challenge is those pesky “asks.” Sometimes it seems like they never end. If you are
a fully involved parent/guardian at this school, especially as you approach the upper grades, you have
probably felt sucked dry at one point or another, or perhaps constantly. You’ve probably noticed that
the requests never stop coming. Tuition is only the very tippy-top of the iceberg. You pay class fees.
Then you donate your time and food and perhaps other materials to the festivals. Then you buy tickets
to the same festivals. Then you buy the very things that you just donated to the very same festivals. Is
this somebody’s idea of a bad comedy? But it doesn’t end there, does it? No, it doesn’t. You are asked
for money for annual giving, probably several times. You are asked to donate to the auction, and then
to buy tickets to the auction, and then to buy the stuff that was donated to the auction that you
donated to and then bought tickets to. Then it will be time to consider re-enrollment deposit right
before we get into spring festivals. During all of that, please don’t forget to buy scrip and buy pumpkins
and buy mandarins and buy wreaths and buy pictures and buy a yearbook and whatever you do make
sure you set aside some money for eighth grade trip! And regarding all those festivals, we’re going to
need you to work a shift or three. Yes, and your significant other also. No we don’t realize that you
have small children or a job or a schedule or a life. Please make it to set-up or clean-up as well. Also,
make sure you get to the class meetings….and the fieldtrips. By the way, can you make spaghetti for 20
people and freeze it for that fieldtrip? Don’t forget to buy a flute. Can you make a dish for the potluck?
No nuts please. Don’t forget to rent a violin tomorrow, or a trumpet, or maybe a nice clarinet. Can you
come this Saturday for a work party (do you have a weed eater?)? Bring the kids, it’ll be a hoot!
I suppose that we could get together and write a strongly worded letter. Tell “the school” that
“they” should ask less and give more. I’ll admit it, I’ve had that thought before somewhere in my past.
Since then I have come to a couple of sobering realizations. Number one, this is the model. Number
two, there is no “they” – “they” is us. We’ve all gotten together, collectively over time, and built a
wonderful experience that should cost $13,000 a year per student to produce. Then, after charging
$5,700 for it, we make up the difference with blood, sweat, tears, subsidies, and donations. It’s kind of
insane, but here we are doing it year after year. As we are now in our 40 th year as a community, I
believe that it is more important than ever before to review the numbers I’ve outlined here, to
recognize the model that is still in place today, and either recommit to it or make a conscious decision to
change the model. We don’t have to keep doing it this way. We do have other options, albeit with
different prognoses for success or failure. We can raise the tuition to $13,000 a year. We can look for
other sources of income. We can try something we haven’t even thought of yet. Or we can embrace
the existing model with a new fervor, as T.S. Eliot said, “and know the place for the first time.”
Whatever we decide, we must face the reality that there is no service provider providing
customers a service here in this model. There is no “parent body and the school,” no “us and them,”
there is only us. Of everything I’ve written here, nothing bears repeating more than this. There is no
school, at least not in the traditional sense. There is no amorphous entity to be criticized independent
of criticizing ourselves. There is only us. We are it. This isn’t like some public school district or private
institution that operates independent of the parent body. The parent body IS what’s running this thing.

To hold up “the parent body” next to “the school” in any sense is a false dichotomy. I would challenge
anyone to show me where the parent body ends and the school begins in our community. There is only
the parent body (and our dedicated teachers and administrators, who mostly are or were parents, too).
Have you looked at the composition of the Board lately? It’s parent council part two! The only
difference is the parts of the organization on which each group is focused. There really is no school
independent of us as parents/teachers/community members. It’s just a concept. Or to say it another
way, there is no “the school” there is only “our school.” Our school is not the property at 410 Crother
Road, and it’s certainly not the collection of buildings (those could be used for any number of things).
Our school only exists in the minds of the community. If its image stops existing in our minds, it stops
existing altogether. If the image isn’t clear, our school suffers. If our school is failing at something, we
are failing at something. If our school expands, it is because we expanded. If our school improves, we
improved to make it so. And sadly, if our school degrades, it can only be because we have degraded.
The only way to change our school is to change ourselves. The only place where you can even look
directly at our school is in the mirror. I really hope you will give this some sustained thoughtful
consideration. As Rudolf Steiner offers, “A healthy social life is found only when in the mirror of each
soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when, in the community the virtue of each one is
living.” Lest you think I’m some kind of Rudolf Steiner buff, please know that I have read very little
Steiner, and I struggle with nearly all of it. I’m not sure that I even qualify to read Steiner. But the above
passage is printed at the bottom of every meeting agenda of the Board of Trustees and I have been
repeating those words at the end of every meeting for 3-1/2 years now. For most of that time those
words didn’t really speak to me. Maybe I didn’t notice or maybe I just wasn’t open to them. It wasn’t
until I was staring at a few past agendas last year, pondering what it would mean to be the president of
our Board that I found those words staring back at me and began to think about them in terms of our
community co-op model.

III. The Path

It is time for us to fish or cut bait. If our school is still around in ten years it will be because here
and now we decided to take responsibility for the model we have chosen and recommitted to acting
accordingly. If you are one of those people that really goes the extra mile in our community and
recognizes that paying tuition is really only half of the equation in our model, I salute you and please
don’t hear me saying that you need to do more. If you are contributing your time and resources to this
community, to this cooperative effort, please know that I am grateful and that I am trying to earn your
respect and to lead by example wherever I see opportunity and I appreciate that you are doing the
same. To those of you that are walking the walk, I would remind you that your example is inspiring
someone to do the same, even if it doesn’t always seem like it.
If there are folks out there that believe that their tuition payment purchases a service from the
school and that service is paid in full at that point, they/you are certainly correct from a legal standpoint.
But I think we have to ask ourselves a difficult question here. What percentage of the community could
we afford to hold that viewpoint before that view became the prevailing view and we went bankrupt
and closed? 20%? 30%? What percentage can a community co-op carry before the burden becomes
too great? You may disagree with me to varying degrees on this point, but perhaps if you are willing to
carry the concept forward in your mind you might see the eventuality of it. If everyone were to pay
tuition and nothing more, if donations stopped and volunteerism stopped, our school would close this
year. Not next year, but this very year. That’s how important volunteerism and donations are to our
model. They ARE our model. If we want there to be a different reality than this, then we need to
expand our base of support. If we can agree as a community that we want to expand on our current

model, then perhaps we can proceed down our path with a new clarity that will allow us to develop the
model by looking for support outside of our circle of comfort.
It is my conviction that we should in fact expand our current model. I believe that the first step
in that expansion would be for each of us to reach out into community organizations beyond our
comfort zones. We need to advocate for the school in our community in ways that we have never
before pursued. We need our community members to become our school’s representation in as many
community organizations as possible. Whether it’s Rotary or Lions or Masons or Native Sons &
Daughters or a place of worship or 4-H or Kiwanis or AARP or any of the other thousands of community
organizations out there, we need to connect with them. We need advocates within them. Our Board
cannot make all of the community connections that need to be made. We all need to go to these
organizations and not assume that they know about us. We need to tell them about us and tell them
that we want partnerships and ask them how we can get involved with one another.
Right along with an unprecedented wave of new efforts in connecting with community
organizations, we also need to reach out in the business world beyond our comfort zones. In the
simplest terms, in order to spend more money we need to raise more money. Raising tuition has limits
and declining returns. Growing enrollment is wonderful but even that eventually will max out. But
donations from the business community and foundation support have literally no limit. However, we
need introductions. We need that one person that has a connection to introduce us and give us an
audience. The leaders in our business community almost certainly don’t know what we do for the
community. They almost certainly think that since we’re a private school we have plenty of money. If
they’ve heard of us at all they probably also think we’re weird. They don’t realize what a wonderful
benefit we provide to children and the community and why we are so worthy of their altruism. We have
to tell them. If you have a contact in the business world, please be brave and introduce us. If you have
a desire to help us develop these types of contacts, please join our Development Committee! We need
to ask business leaders to tour our campus. We need to talk with them about how we can provide
benefits to their organizations and we need to show them why we are so worthy of their support and
partnership. But cold calls are an ineffective means to move this process forward. This sort of support
is developed through relationships. We have to have the contacts of everyone in our community to
make this work.
I understand that you may feel maxed out. I can only tell you that while I empathize with you, it
is the model that is currently in place. We have to pay for the program with dollars or hours, and we
have to either bring those dollars and hours from outside or we have to provide them ourselves. I’m not
presumptuous enough to value my time as a volunteer any higher than I value the time of the teachers
here at Live Oak. Today, that’s around $21/hour. Even at $85k a year, that’s about $40/hour. You can
do the math to figure out how many hours we have to donate per child to make up the gap with the
subsidy, and then the gap without the subsidy. It’s sure a heck of a lot more than twenty hours a year.
If you feel like “the school” is sucking you dry, the answer is to change the model. If you want to change
it, I’m with you. Let’s change it together. Look at the attached diagram of our governance model and
join a committee. Also please keep in mind that deciding to change isn’t the same as enacting change.
The old model is still in place until there is a new model that is producing new results. Please stay
committed to the existing model while we work on the new one. There are many ways to do that. You
can work at a festival, even if your class isn’t responsible for it. I know, crazy talk! You can keep working
in the classroom and going on fieldtrips and showing up at events. You can drag everyone you know to
every event we have. Offer a subsidy of your own in time or dollars or both. If you have the time
capacity, please volunteer way more than twenty hours a year. If you have the financial capacity, please
commit to a monthly monetary donation that you can manage to help fill the gap. The best way to
avoid feeling stressed out by annual giving is to ignore it completely and just select a monthly giving
level that you find manageable and give year round. When you identify something our school isn’t doing

well, rally people around a way to fix it. If it didn’t work in the past, try again. That doesn’t mean
complain in the parking lot. It means participate in governance. Be the solution. Give more. Do more.
I realize this can all be very uncomfortable sometimes. In fact, it just plain hurts sometimes. But it’s also
joyful, and it matters, and it’s a genuinely meaningful contribution to our community and our kids’
futures. If there is a better reason than that to stretch, I’m not sure what it is.

Yours in Community,

Eric Freedman
President - Board of Trustees

Post Script:
If you’ll allow me to geek out for a moment at the risk of belaboring a point, as I write on this subject I
can’t help but to have my thoughts continually drawn back to a movie. I’m sure you’ve heard of the
1999 film The Matrix. If you haven’t seen it, that’s a tragedy and I’m willing to wait here while you go
watch it…… OK, now remember the part where our hero (Neo) goes to see the oracle? While he waits
to go in, he has an exchange with a boy that is bending a spoon with his mind. The exchange goes like
this:
Spoon Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon Boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon Boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
Now, you can find hints of Buddhism in this, or maybe some Plato, but for me I like to think of our school
as the spoon. When I hear folks refer to “the school” in terms of something about “it” that is wrong or
right or needs to change, my thoughts are drawn back to this comparison. The focus, however well-
meaning, is completely misdirected. There really is no school. It’s just a concept. And the observer with
their commentary on the school, for better or for worse, is only giving commentary on themselves. It
can’t possibly be anything more than that because it’s just a reflection. There is no spoon. I hope you’ll
join me in working to build our school in the image of our highest and best selves.