Fundraising FAQ

Our goals this year are ambitious yet achievable: to raise $580,000 and to reach 100% participation from our community by December 31.

The Fund For All (September–December): our most important fundraiser of the year. We invite every member of the Pacific Primary community to join us in supporting the Fund for All. Each family is unique, and every gift, no matter the size, makes a difference and is deeply appreciated.

Here Comes the Sun event (spring): an adult party for parents, staff, friends, and alumni to celebrate our community and raise funds for the school.

The Fund for the Future (June): graduating families are invited to continue a long-standing tradition of donating all or part of their last month’s tuition deposit to the school.

The Pacific Primary experience: donations support everything that goes into delivering our high-quality full-day program accessible to working families: from purchasing supplies to providing emergent experiences and daily music, movement, and expressive arts programming.

Teacher recruitment & retention: donations support anti-bias education workshops and training specific to developmental stages, and empower us to attract and retain exceptional educators by offering competitive salaries and benefits.

Tuition assistance: Pacific Primary is dedicated to enhancing economic diversity and ensuring our program is accessible to as many families as possible. Roughly a quarter of our families receive tuition assistance, and your donation ensures strong economic diversity in our community.

We encourage every member of the Pacific Primary community to contribute to the Fund For All. Recognizing that each family has its own circumstances, we view full participation as a powerful endorsement of our commitment to our students, staff, and mission. Achieving high participation serves as an important indicator of community support and parent engagement, and is a key measure used by the National Association of Independent Schools to assess overall support and approval.

It is incredibly helpful for the school to know how much we have raised before finalizing our budget for next year.

We could, but we choose not to lean on tuition alone. Setting tuition high enough to cover everything would put Pacific Primary out of reach for many families and make our community far less economically diverse.

It would hit middle-class families especially hard: families with two working parents, or a single working parent, who earn too much to qualify for the City’s Early Learning For All (ELFA) program, yet for whom a high tuition would still be out of reach. Serving these families is part of our mission, and we don’t want to price them out.

Instead, we keep tuition as accessible as we can and invite those who are able to give a little more to do so, so that a Pacific Primary education stays open to families across a wide range of incomes. Fundraising is how we share that responsibility with one another, and it is a big part of what makes this school feel like a community.