Financial Aid

Three Cedars School acknowledges that even the full, published rate of tuition does not cover the operations costs of the school, and therefore all tuitions paid are "sliding scale," supplemented by annual giving fundraising and volunteer work. For that reason, we avoid the terms "Financial Aid" and "Financial Assistance" and prefer the more accurate terms "Sliding Scale Tuition" and "Tuition Level Adjustments."

In addition to simply paying the full, published rate of tuition, tuition discounts are available in the form of automatic Sibling Discounts (optional 20% discount for second sibling, 25% for third sibling) and application assessments for Tuition Level Adjustments (TLA).

Students at Three Cedars School are accepted to any class "blind" to financial need. That is, teachers are not aware of a family's financial situation and are not involved with the Tuition Level Adjustment (TLA) program. The school does not assess financial qualification for a Tuition Level Adjustment until after the family has applied, interviewed and the student has been accepted to the program.

Three Cedars School offers TLA to qualified applicants based upon each family's relative needs and means, with the goal of having families from a wide range of socio-economic position in every class. The school's management sets a TLA budget each year, and allocates funds according to the following priorities:

The majority of TLA funds are allocated to re-enrolling elementary students. A small portion of TLA funds are set aside for siblings and newly enrolling families, with the majority of those funds allocated to incoming elementary students.

Most qualified families can expect to pay the full rate of tuition through kindergarten and not receive TLA adjustments until first grade. We encourage families to apply for TLA after they have been admitted to any program so that they may have a sense of the level of adjustment for which they qualify and so that even if funds are not available at the time of enrollment, the school can offer a mid-year adjustment in cases where funds are freed mid-fiscal year (due to families relocating, etc.).

Once a tuition level is offered to an applicant family, there is a two week deadline for confirmation of enrollment or appeal. For the 2008-2009 school year, Three Cedars families pay a range of combined tuition and fees between $2,150 (minimum TLA tuition level) and $16,100 (maximum Grade 8) per year, per student enrolled.

Tuition, fundraising, and volunteerism make Waldorf education a community-supported education. While public schools are another form of community-supported education, they receive financial support from all taxpayers in a district. A number of Waldorf schools in other countries receive some form of government funding, but most Waldorf schools in the United States are community-supported directly from the members of the community who have chosen to be a part of that particular school. This means that everyone in the school community is contributing to the school program in some way – through the tuition level appropriate to their family, through volunteer work, through gifts to fundraising campaigns. Our parents are committed to the education of not only their own children, but to all of the children in the school.

In addition to support from parents, friends, and relatives, the school relies upon the employment of faculty and staff who work for pay and benefits levels that sit far below their work's social "value."

Parents, employees, relatives and friends choose to be a part of our of community in order to raise children from a wide variety of backgrounds within a common values system. Diversity, including making Waldorf elementary education accessible to every family that wants it, is an explicit goal of at Three Cedars School coming out of our core values. One of the ways in which this commitment is most immediately and practically reflected in our school practices is through the TLA process.

The original motivation for the Waldorf education movement was to promote the peaceful evolution of humankind by leading children away from narrow interests toward a broad worldview. Three Cedars School continues the active development of that tradition. Consequently, it is not merely an act of compliance with federal law, but of free, willful and deliberate policy to offer Waldorf education to families who desire it for their children regardless of race, color, national or ethnic origin, class, gender, sexual orientation, family structure, or, to the extent our resources permit, their ability to pay.