A tuition-free school founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, for low-income communities of color in the Bay Area is abruptly shutting its doors — only a decade after it opened.
The Primary School, founded in 2016 by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, sought to provide free schooling, health care and social work resources to families in the East Palo Alto area, just a few miles from Meta’s headquarters.
It decried the systemic effects of racism and poverty, and Chan, a pediatrician married to Zuckerberg, and her late educator friend Meredith Liu often discussed how low-income children were more likely to experience impactful trauma early in their lives.
But The Primary School, and its sister campus in the East Bay, sent shockwaves throughout the community last week when it announced it would close at the end of the 2025-26 school year.
Though it did not provide a reason for the closure, it comes as Zuckerberg has executed a strong political about-face as he tries to curry favor with the Trump administration.
The Primary School and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Earlier this year, just weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg killed Meta’s DEI programs and scrapped the social media platform’s fact-checking policies in favor of a “Community Notes” model. Trump ally Elon Musk uses a similar note system on X, arguing that content moderation policies infringe on free speech.
Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund through Meta, and, alongside Chan, sat upfront at his inauguration.
Meta also agreed to pay a whopping $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump brought against the company for suspending his account after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. About $22 million of that figure will help fund a Trump presidential library.
Emeline Vainikolo, a parent with children in the district, told The New York Times that she and other parents were invited by school administrators to a breakfast of bagels, fruit and Starbucks coffee when they dropped the news of the closure, but were given no reason.
Her son, a kindergartner at The Primary School, later shared what he had gleaned from his teacher.
“‘Mommy, the guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore,’” he told his mother, according to the Times.
Zuckerberg and Chan’s nonprofit, CZI, plans to invest $50 million in the school’s surrounding communities over the next few years, donating to education savings plans for all Primary School students, as well as support for families transitioning to new districts.
In February, the initiative announced it would focus on science and “wind down” its social advocacy work – including investments in immigration reform and racial equity grantmaking, as well as internal DEI programs.
Families at The Primary School, however, said CZI’s sudden departure is just another slap in the face from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who have contributed to a housing shortage thanks to an influx of highly-paid tech workers.
The Primary School “was highly publicized as a gift to the community,” one parent told the San Francisco Standard. “They were already taking our homes because of Facebook, landlords pricing us out. Now they’re gonna take this away too. It seems unfair.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
