Since its founding in 1910, Tenacre Country Day School has grown and evolved while remaining a community that warmly welcomes children through its doors every day. While the curriculum and the campus have transformed over the decades, certain aspects of the School have remained constant. After years of research and planning, Tenacre is proud to announce its Success By Design Campaign.
Success By Design Goal: $12.5M
List of 3 items.
The Endowment
The endowment is a powerful driver of financial stability, flexibility, and sustainability, helping build capacity for Tenacre to deliver its program to students. The endowment provides necessary resources to support faculty and staff compensation and professional development, financial aid for families, and critical operational support.
The Tenacre Endowment Fund was established in 1972 with $175,000 in funds, growing to more than nearly $26 million in 2024. A strong endowment provides resilience when challenges emerge (such as Covid), protects deeply held values such as the importance of small classes, and offers flexibility and choice in the face of market challenges. For schools of our size, we need to increase the endowment by $3M to be aligned with industry benchmarks.
Increased endowment funds will be essential to achieve the following strategic goals:
Ensuring competitive salaries and benefits to attract and retain highly qualified educators
Providing generous professional development to match our evolving curriculum
Growing resources for financial aid, making the Tenacre experience available to more families
Mitigating the rising cost of tuition for all families
The Core Learning Hub
The Core Learning Hub will be a centralized and collaborative place for students to receive academic, social, emotional and developmental learning instruction. The centralized setting will allow for all student needs to be addressed, whether they need extra help, catching up, additional support or academic extensions.
The Core Learning Hub will have space for assessments, standardized testing, and tutoring. Tenacre’s outside services—OT and speech therapy—will also use this space. Participation in these services is included in tuition. In the Core Learning Hub, students will work through challenges alongside trusted adults, normalizing the process of seeking extra help and helping build their self-advocacy skills.
The Core Learning Hub's goals include:
Collaborative home for the team of enrichment specialists
Flexible configurations to allow for one-to-one, small group, before- and after-school help, and grade level instruction
One center for all services to make the hub a normal part of each day for students
The Design Center
The new 9000-foot tech and design center will include three light-filled art rooms on the top level of the building, a tech classroom and design studio/maker space on the middle level, and a wood shop and flexible space on the lower level that will be used for learning, student collaboration projects, or meetings.
The art rooms: Creating three new art rooms will allow both lower and upper students to take art classes simultaneously. The proposed art rooms have numerous windows, allowing natural light to fill the spaces. Currently, Tenacre has one art room for all students from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade, which creates scheduling issues that affect the entire student body.
The tech and design spaces: A new technology classroom and a design studio/makerspace will replace the current tech lab, which—although at one point was state-of-the-art—is now outdated. These tech spaces will be flexible, allowing teachers to rearrange tables and chairs depending on different projects and collaborations happening in the classroom.
The flexible lower level: The lower level of the building will have a woodshop to be used as part of tech and design classes and a flexible space that will offer numerous different uses—after-school activities, dance club, yoga, or indoor recess space on rainy days, to name a few.
No. Endowment growth from the campaign can help control tuition increases and maintain access and affordability for families. Also, new programs have an opportunity to generate new revenue.
We have a long history of these capital campaigns, roughly every ten years. Since 1972, when we established an endowment fund, generations of donors have demonstrated their commitment to our mission and helped us grow.