PULSE POINTS:
❓What Happened: The Primary School, established by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, will permanently shut down at the end of the 2025–26 academic year, citing funding problems.
👥 Who’s Involved: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, The Primary School, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).
📍 Where & When: Schools located in East Palo Alto and the East Bay, to close by 2025–26.
💬 Key Quote: “After much deliberation, our schools in East Palo Alto and the East Bay will be closing at the end of the 2025–26 school year,” school officials announced.
⚠️ Impact: The closure affects families who relied on the school for education and support services. CZI will invest $50 million to assist communities in East Palo Alto, Belle Haven, and East Bay with transition aid.
IN FULL:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan‘s educational initiative, The Primary School, is set to close by the end of the 2025–26 school year due to financial constraints. Launched in 2016, the private school aimed to provide tuition-free education and supportive services to “underserved” communities in Palo Alto and the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
“After much deliberation, our schools in East Palo Alto and the East Bay will be closing at the end of the 2025–26 school year,” school officials said in a statement, adding: “This was a very difficult decision, and we are committed to ensuring a thoughtful and supportive transition for students and families over the next year. To sustain The Primary School’s legacy, [the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] will make a $50M investment over the next few years in the East Palo Alto, Belle Haven, and East Bay communities.”
The anticipated closure will affect local California families who have depended on The Primary School for educational resources and social services, especially healthcare and community welfare. The school’s founding principle emphasized collaborative child-rearing, involving educational professionals and healthcare providers.
“Though The Primary School as it exists today will be coming to an end, we sincerely hope that what we have learned and shown to be possible will live on,” the closure announcement states, continuing: “We will entrust our partners in this work—both our direct collaborators and our compatriots across the education and health fields—to carry the torch for all families, but especially the most vulnerable. Our belief in our guiding principle has not wavered, and we know that it will take all of us to work toward a future where our children and families can grow, learn, and thrive no matter the circumstances.”
The closure of the Zuckerberg-funded school comes amidst a broader fight between the Trump administration and far-left activists in academia who have pushed radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and introduced sexually inappropriate content in the K-12 curriculum across the country. A number of academic institutions have ended their DEI programs, along with enacting policy changes barring biological males from competing in women’s sports, in order to comply with directives issued by President Donald J. Trump.
Earlier this year, Meta announced it would suspend its DEI programs.
