Ross School To End Programs For Youngest Students

The Ross School in East Hampton will end its prenursery, nursery and prekindergarten programs beginning in September, the school announced last week.

Ross has about 400 students overall, including 27 enrolled in the early childhood program. Administrators plan to meet on Friday with members of the 14 families who will be affected by the decision to discontinue the program to help find alternatives for next year.

Tuition for the youngest children at Ross is $22,720, not including fees.

“We are partnering with local early childhood centers to support the placement of our current prenursery and nursery school children until they return to Ross for kindergarten,” Patti Silver, co-chair of the Ross Board of Trustees, was quoted as saying in a press release last week.

Founded as a day school in 1991, the Ross School developed an innovative interdisciplinary curriculum for kindergartners through 12th-graders. The school added the youngest students when it merged with the Morris Center School in Bridgehampton in the 2005-06 school year.

In the 2018-19 school year, Ross moved younger students from Bridgehampton’s Butter Lane to the Upper School campus on Goodfriend Drive in East Hampton. At the time, a letter to parents and faculty explained that the move would “allow us to leverage our resources and better plan for the long-term sustainability of Ross School.”

Over the years, the school has increasingly added international and domestic boarding students to its student population.

A press release last week said that the recent decision to eliminate the early childhood program will allow the school’s leaders “to concentrate fully on building enrollment and refocusing resources on expanding the Ross Lower School,” which serves students in up to sixth grade. Tuition will not increase for Lower School students this coming school year, the release notes.

Dan Roe, director of communications at Ross, said the school not only is cleaving more closely to its original educational mission by focusing on students beginning at an older age, but also transitioning from an endowment-based institution — the school used to rely on funding from its founder, Courtney Sale Ross — to an independent one. Fundraising last year surpassed the school’s goal, bringing in more than $1 million, he said.