In early October, parents at Manhattan Country School were panicked to find out in the pages of the business press that their school faced foreclosure. For nearly 60 years, families had been coming to Manhattan Country for its scrappy intimacy and a dedication to equity that went well beyond performative rhetoric and the reductive simplicities of D.E.I. Inc. But now it was not clear how much longer this sustained utopia on the Upper West Side could persist.
Since the beginning, Manhattan Country offered sliding-scale tuition, a model that had been devised with the help of Frank Roosevelt, the grandson of F.D.R., who was an economist and one of the school’s longtime trustees. Affluent families paid full price while others paid according to some calculated proportion of their income. The school, which runs from preschool to eighth grade, was educating not only the children of liberal aristocrats but also the children of undocumented immigrants. Until a few years ago, the school did not require tax returns or any other form of income verification to establish need.
Parents were drawn to M.C.S. fully appreciating that it did not function in the same universe as Trinity, say, or Collegiate, nearby private schools that have been rooted in the city for hundreds of years and have amassed endowments of tens of millions of dollars. Resources were tight; parents were always pitching in to do things. The hands-on aspect of the school’s culture was so much a part of its allure. Still, parents had little sense of how insecure the future of the institution had become.
“My favorite students were always the ones from M.C.S., and so when I had my son, I knew that I wanted him to go,” Olga Ramos, the deputy director of Bard High School and a parent at Manhattan Country, told me. “But this left me really blindsided.” By the spring, bankruptcy proceedings would show that the school owed creditors more than $27 million and held $82,000 in its bank account.
Recently, the last day of school was pushed up a week because money ran out. At the same time, parents were scrambling to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet back payroll for teachers and other staff members, which they did. They were also busy creating a food pantry to help the employees get by in the meantime.
On Oct. 7, Flushing Bank filed a $3 million suit against Manhattan Country School for a default on interest payments tied to a line of credit. Flushing also holds the mortgage on the school’s West 85th Street building, which M.C.S. was struggling to pay. The day the news was reported in Crain’s New York Business, the former board chair and one of the school’s major donors, a lawyer named Roxanne Elings, sent an email to the community trying to calm nerves. Trustees, she said, were working closely with the bank and anticipated “resolution shortly.” Two days later, she sent out a second note, more urgent and sobering in tone.
It claimed that the board had no idea the suit was coming and had learned about it, as everyone else did, from Crain’s. The board had been working with the bank on a payback plan when the suit landed, Ms. Elings told me recently, and was looking at alternative roads for the school to right itself — raising more and more money, possibly merging with another school.
Manhattan Country’s “radical commitment to socioeconomic diversity” created financial challenges that required “sustained philanthropy” from the community, the note said. This ought to have been self-evident, but significant fund-raising was consistently difficult in a context that was not flush with the kind of money floating around other Manhattan schools.
How the Platonic ideal of a private school succumbed to real estate aspirations follows a familiar arc. In 2017, M.C.S. moved from its cozy townhouse on East 96th Street to a larger building across town that it bought for $28 million. The original location was significant because it sat on the dividing line between the wealthy Upper East Side and East Harlem and had been chosen to stand as a kind of shorthand for the school’s ideology.
Inspired by the civil rights movement, Gus Trowbridge, who had grown up on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and his wife, Marty, conceived the school in the image of the institutions they had attended and admired. The Trowbridges had both come of age at Putney, a back-to-the-land boarding school in Vermont, before going to Brown University. Moving to New York after college, Mr. Trowbridge taught for several years at Dalton and set out to build a school that could offer the same sort of rigorous, progressive education to students across the class spectrum.
By the mid-2010s, Manhattan Country was getting applications from many more families than it could accommodate. A new building, the thinking went, would allow the school to double its enrollment to about 400 students and add substantially to its tuition revenue, as well as offer amenities — a gym, for instance — that the old building did not have. The school was renting gym space elsewhere, and its playground was essentially Central Park.
But the decision to buy the new building was controversial. In 2014, Mary Trowbridge, a daughter of Gus and Marty who was the head of the lower school, suggested to the The Wall Street Journal that the purchase had amounted to mission drift. The community, she and others felt, had not been given a sufficient voice in determining what should happen.
The expansion might have proceeded successfully enough if not for the pandemic. By 2019 there were 305 children enrolled, a former board member said. But Covid saw some full-paying families move away or opt for other schools when M.C.S. remained remote in September 2021 at the request of many teachers. By 2022, 40 percent of families fell into the bottom two tuition brackets. The highest rate of tuition, in the upper school, is $59,000 a year, but between 2015 and 2024, even as enrollment grew, the average annual tuition coming in remained only around $21,000 to $23,000.
On Tuesday afternoon, parents, children and teachers rallied outside M.C.S., calling for the school to be saved. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who represents the West Side in the State Senate, and Micah Lasher, his compatriot in the Assembly, each spoke out in support of the community and the need for the school to survive.
The next morning, in a Zoom call with parents, a newly appointed emergency board announced that there was not enough money to meet the next payroll on June 17. Nor was there any money for bills related to upkeep and maintenance. Unless the school received an enormous infusion of cash, it would not reopen in the fall. Some parents had found new schools for their children; others were still looking.
Many were also looking for blame and found it in a board they felt had been willfully opaque about the school’s financial condition and then, in the final hour, had chosen to involve a Canadian businessman with a private foundation who had a plan to bridge the school to some sort of solvency. The deal fell through in bankruptcy court in large part because he insisted on getting paid back ahead of other longstanding creditors.
If there are any villains in this story, they do not present themselves easily. One former board member, with very young children at the school, lent Manhattan Country $350,000 during the current crisis, money he and his wife are unlikely to ever get back.
Twenty-three years ago, the school had a $7.2 million endowment. Continued success depended on the willingness of wealthy people to join and underwrite an institution that is not obsessed with metrics or advancing children to boarding schools that will inevitably get them into Yale. Its future depended on families wanting their children to experience the city in its full scope rather than just a narrow demographic slice of it. Eventually, there were fewer of them to go around.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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