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.