Private K-12 Schools
Industry Profile Report
Dive Deep into the industry with a 25+ page industry report (pdf format) including the following chapters
Industry Overview Industry Structure, How Firms Opertate, Industry Trends, Credit Underwriting & Risks, and Industry Forecast.
Call Preparation Quarterly Insight, Call Prep Questions, Industry Terms, and Weblinks.
Financial Insights Working Capital, Capital Financing, Business Valuation, and Financial Benchmarks.
Industry Profile Excerpts
Industry Overview
The 34,500 private K-12 schools in the US provide basic preparatory education for children in kindergarten through 12th grade. Elementary schools typically include grades kindergarten through six. Secondary schools typically include grade seven through twelve. Combined schools offer elementary and secondary education. The vast majority of K-12 private schools are non-profit organizations and about 66% of them are religion-based.
Dependence on Skilled Staff
Private school families expect high quality education from qualified, experienced teachers.
Competition from Alternative Education
In addition to standard public schools (which are free), private schools face competition from a variety of alternative sources, including charter schools, magnet schools, and home schooling.
Industry size & Structure
The average private K-12 school operates out of a single location, employs 10-26 workers and generates over $1 million in annual revenue.
- The private K-12 school industry consists of over 32,400 schools that educate over 5.7 million students and employ about 482,000 teachers, according to the National Center for Education Statistics Private School Universe Survey.
- Although tuition can vary significantly, average tuition is about $7,700 for elementary schools, $13,030 for secondary schools, and $13,640 for combined schools.
- The vast majority of K-12 private schools are non-profit organizations.
- Most private schools are small institutions. About 21% of private schools have less than 150 students; 25% have between 150 and 299 students; 20% have between 300 and 499 students; and 34% have 500 students or more.
Industry Forecast
Private K-12 Schools Industry Growth
Coronavirus Update
Apr 21, 2022 - Vaccination, Masking, Social Distancing Decisions Being Left To Individuals
- Federal and local health officials are leaving it up to people to assess if they need booster shots, whether to wear a mask, and how long to isolate after a positive test, according to The Wall Street Journal. Businesses, schools, and other entities are scaling back specific guidelines. The lack of effective treatments, vaccines, and widespread testing early in the pandemic resulted in social distancing mandates and lockdowns. The response is becoming more tailored to people’s own health and appetite for risk, as those tools help blunt the worst outcomes as the virus continues to spread, according to public-health experts. “The history of public health has been a constant tension between individual-level and government or community-level intervention,” said Megan Ranney, an emergency-care doctor and academic dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
- A federal court has upheld a Connecticut law that eliminates a religious exemption to state vaccination requirements for communicable diseases, including COVID-19, for public and private school students. Two organizations, We the Patriots USA and CT Freedom Alliance, joined three parents with different religious beliefs in a suit against a variety of state agencies and local school boards in an effort to block enforcement of the law. Judge Janet Bond Arterton dismissed the suit in its entirety. She said the state agencies, as arms of the state, are immune from such suits, and the two organizations lacked standing to sue because they could not show how they are specifically harmed by the law. The parent claims fail, Arterton said, because, among other things, the Supreme Court has upheld mandatory vaccination laws in public health emergencies and the new law “is constitutional because it is a neutral law of general applicability which is rationally related to a legitimate state purpose.”
- A majority of US Supreme Court justices indicated that they would not allow Maine to exclude religious schools from a state tuition program, according to The New York Times. The court ruled in earlier cases that states may choose to provide aid to religious schools along with other private schools. The question in the current case brought in Maine was the opposite: Can states refuse to provide such aid if it is made available to other private schools? Legal challenges regarding public funding for private schools increased during the coronavirus pandemic as families sought alternatives to distance learning programs put in place by public schools during lockdowns.
- Nearly 1,400 new students enrolled at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston's school for the 2021-2022 school year, according to data provided by the archdiocese. The school had lost more than 5,000 students shortly after the pandemic started, but more than 4,000 new students had enrolled by the start of the 2020-2021 school year, turning “around the fortunes of Catholic schools in a dramatic way,” said Thomas Carroll, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Boston.
- The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that local health departments do not have the authority to close schools due to emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic. The ruling is a win for private and religious schools that challenged a Dane County order. The law in question allows local health departments to do what is “reasonable and necessary” to suppress a disease outbreak. It does not specifically grant authority to close schools. There is a law giving that power to the state Department of Health Services secretary.
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