Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy upon us and save us!

How do we pay for Orthodox education?

First, what does “pay for” mean?

“Pay for” means that we in the Church provide for our children’s growth and nourishment in the Church — with our time, money, and loving attention.

This article answers the tough economic question of how much it really costs to do education in an Orthodox Christian manner.

We only have two options: We can opt to “do it ourselves” by creating educational opportunities in church schools, home school coops, online academies. In the final section of this article, I outline 4 models we can use to start and fund schools.

The only other option is that we can partner up with local schools (public school or private Christian schools). I also explain the true cost of letting others raise our children.

In this article, I argue that (1) education is necessarily expensive, impractical, and inefficient — and that’s a good thing. I explain (2) the true cost of each solution, and (3) make suggestions for how to pay for new, existing, high quality Orthodox schools and homeschool coops, with (4) some creative ideas for how to advance education at a broader scale.

(1) School is impractical, inefficient, and expensive — How much do schools cost?

There is no such thing as cheap education.

Ballpark figures (early 2020s dollars, illustrative) for full 5-day schools range from 7,000-14,000, with a few outliers:

• California public schools ~$14,000 per pupil;
• Oklahoma ~$12,000;
• Voucher-assisted charters often ~7,000–9,000.
• Private tuitions rarely sit below ~$6,000 and can exceed $35,000 — it depends on what is included
  • Boarding schools can hit $50,000+ for room, board, expert teachers, small class sizes and a wide variety of subjects and electives
  • Any private school with tuition under $9,000 is likely to have volunteer teachers, parent-led activities, few if any electives, and few sports, social activities, field trips, etc.

Models range from five-day community schools (often 60–80 students) to university-model and hybrid parochial programs to nearly free homeschool co-ops.

Is there any way to reduce the cost?

No. School is necessarily expensive and education is necessarily inefficient. The cost and inefficiency is a feature not a bug.

What is school? By its very nature, education is a transformative process in a given community. Offering our children a school is offering them the gift of a community, and offering them as a gift to that community.

A student spends roughly 12,000 hours in their school over thirteen years. That type of formation is indelible.

Is there any way to “speed up” time? No. Soon, a child will be able to learn any “subject” at his own pace with AI robots, for the low low cost of subsidized tokens. But this will not be true education, and we all know that the “free, efficient, practical,” path leaves out the most essential things: history, poetry, innovation, humanity, and theology.

To make education more efficient and cheap is also to make it less like education. It’s sort of like saying I can make hamburgers and pancakes cheaper at my restaurant if I make them out of plastic. Yeah, they’re a lot cheaper, but they’re also a lot less like food.

On the opposite extreme, we accept that efficient education isn’t education.

Many people vaguely worry that all this expensive education is impractical — especially those who are objecting to classical education. What is the real world dollar value of this real world dollar cost? The objection massively misses the point. All true education is impractical.

Education is not career training or job prep. Most people in most places learned survival and job skills by osmosis in a functional culture. Until the mid-nineteenth century a majority of Americans (by some counts a large majority) were subsistence farmers; until the 1980s, most Chinese were too.

Dollar-value education can only be obtained by doing the work, live, on site, as an apprentice in your field. Ask 100 gainfully employed college graduates if they learned their job skills “in school” or “on the job,” and well over 50 of them will say that school was impractical relative to what they do today that earns their salary.

Instead of asking for dollars and cents, we must ask why do we spend so much effort to go to school in the first place?

The answer is plain once you reflect on it: The only education worth doing in a school (as opposed to on-the-job apprenticing) is bookish learning—law, medicine, theology, philosophy, mathematics, grammar. Education has always been impractical, expensive and aristocratic because it requires leisure: freedom from manual labor so someone can be a schoolmaster.

The very same fact is precisely why education is precious. A fork is useful; fine china you rarely use, or art with no “function,” is what we prize. Astronomy and music are not practical—and that is why we love them. They open the secrets of the cosmos. Knowledge for its own sake is the opposite of career training. That is the point of liberal education.

(2) The true cost — Why is it worth it?

School is worth it because it can produce fully formed or ill-formed people.

A school is like a military boot camp — it inducts young people into Christian manhood and womanhood. A school is not a ‘service’ like babysitting, an ‘experience’ like a theme park, or a ‘venue’ like a local coffee shop. A school is the site for a group of adults (teachers, parents, clergy, admin) to pass on their form of life to students.

It’s not just the subjects that are taught there but the people doing the teaching (and the peers our children learn alongside). Is it true that a student accrues transferable assets — such as a GPA, standardized test scores, honors, and leadership experience? Yes. But those benefits are secondary to the primary impact of their educational experience: formation in community.

For Orthodox Christians, the deeper product of education is Christian formation: training ourselves and our children to worship God, and building friendships that will carry us through the slings and arrows of this earthly life.

Properly conceived, Orthodox Schools extend parish life (discussing last week’s homily, reading the daily synaxarion, doing prayers), into that parish’s family life and social life.

The social aspect of school cannot be overstated—the space between politics and the household includes dances, chess clubs, dating and eventual marriages(!), mentors, sports and house games, friendships, as well as learning. For thirteen years or more (Kindergarten through senior year) the school is, in a real sense, the child’s whole life.

So what is the true cost of each alternative?

• A home school is expensive in time and effort —mom’s full time and more than full-time labor.
  • Time — Full time educator Mom (or full-time educator Dad) is giving up the economic value of what could be a full-time salary — often $50,000+ (well over what a private school would cost)
  • Effort — Mom must be good at teaching a variety of subjects, must research constantly, must buy curriculum, create social and athletic avenues for her children, and she spends well over a typical 8 hour day caring for her children (often multiple ages!)
• Public school is expensive in taxes and in lost opportunities
  • Lost opportunity — There is no “free” public school! Until school choice or a voucher system spreads, public school is the least economically expensive. But it’s also expensive - tax money directed toward an anti-religious formation, with no attention paid to avoiding folly and vice. If that is free, I do not know what could be more expensive.
  • If you think children can spend 12,000+ hours away from God—around emptiness, smartphones, and secular mentors—and still be formed as Orthodox Christians by an hour and a half of Divine Liturgy on Sunday, you are kidding yourself. Education passes the soul of one generation to the next. It forms lifelong friendships. It gives children non-parental mentors who see past our parental blind spots. It is natural to parish life, evangelistic toward visitors, and aimed at eternal success—sanctity—for teachers and students alike
• Private-school is expensive in dollars and effort — salaries must be paid for good teachers, plus there are costs for facility, supplies, and services. Revenue is tuition, donations, and tax-vouchers from the state.

So none of these are free or easy.

Paying a lot is inevitable: through tax dollars; through charter school funds, which are tax dollars; through your own income, which is private-school tuition dollars; or through patronage, the scholarships of other families who pool their funds into schools that have the trust of a wonderful board of directors and a wonderful headmaster to organize an education.

The final option may not be perfect, but it is robust and family-centered, it is truly Christian, and it allows for the formation of the souls of Orthodox Christians.

So what are Orthodox Christians to do?

(3) Four Models

For a couple of years now, as we have founded and run a church school, one question has kept percolating: how do we get more of these? Not one heroic parish academy that limps along on bake sales—ten or fifty Orthodox Christian schools in the next few decades. That means talking frankly about money. Vision, motivation, and capital: the mind, the money, and the muscle.

Private schools have to charge tuition. This doesn’t mean they have to be snooty or fancy rich-kid schools. They can be humble and have lots of scholarship options. They can use charter school funds like school vouchers, or they can appeal to places like OCEN for scholarships.

Orthodox Christians can start and maintain any one of four types of schools:

1. Plain Jane Christian Co-Opy

Focus: Academics and Christian formation. Culturally strong, tight-knit, mostly local, and many tied to a parish—but always fundraising because there is little margin. Teachers serve largely for love of the work and the children.

Strengths & Costs: Cultural integrity and rootedness. Perpetual financial tightness; fundraising serves as oxygen.

Financial Model Overview:

• 100 students, $12,500 sticker tuition → $1.2M nominal budget
• ~15% scholarship fund → ~$1M tuition collected
• Annual gala/banquet ~$100,000; no endowment
• Actual budget ~$1.1M → ~$11,000 spent per student (after deducting scholarships, adding fundraising, dividing by total number of students)

This budget breaks down into teacher salaries (75%), admin and expenses (10%), and rent, mortgage, or utilities (15%).

The reader can further divide those costs into a per classroom basis based on a 22-student classroom, a percentage of salary (say, $65,000), and percentages for everything else such as administration, rent, utilities, some auxiliary educational services, etc.

2. Fancy Private School Academy

• 200 students, $13,000 sticker → $2.6M nominal budget
• $800,000 scholarships → $1.8M actually collected
• Fundraising ~$200,000/year; no endowment
• Actual budget ~$2M → $10,000 per student ($180,000 per 18-student classroom)

Focus: Comprehensive prep experience with robust administrative infrastructure, athletics, theater, field trips, arts, and aftercare programs.

Strengths & Costs: Career professionals move across the country for a well-run school; secular neighbors may choose it over alternative options. However, sports and money can invite worldliness and political drift.

Financial Model Overview:

Teacher pay remains market wage (~$65,000+), but administrative costs increase to support admissions, athletics, fundraising, and counseling. That classroom also has an easier time funding extracurriculars and services. Each classroom may be able to stay in budget and bank a few thousand towards savings and a self-funded endowment.

3. Bootstrap Homeschool Academy

• 50 students at a hard ceiling, $5,000 sticker → $250,000 nominal
• No scholarships (“if you can’t pay, you can’t come”) — many arrive at the no scholarship policy after scholarship attempts nearly bankrupted them!
• Fundraising ~$50,000; no endowment
• Total ~$300,000 → ~$6,000 per student

Focus: Autonomy-loving, highly local community with low temptation toward worldliness.

Strengths & Costs: High autonomy and minimal secular influence. However, it is not a career destination for outside teaching talent and per-pupil costs retain a floor near $6,000.

Financial Model Overview:

Based on a smaller 12-student classroom (~$72,000 budget): teacher compensation is ~$33,000 without benefits/PTO (often an enrolled parent), single-principal or administrator (~$17,000), and minimal facility/utility expenses ($12,000).

4. Patron-Blessed Academy

• 200 students, $9,000 tuition → $1.8M nominal
• $400,000 scholarships (a little under 25%) → $1.4M collected
• Ordinary annual fundraising (gala, fun run, car wash)
• New line: $200,000 endowment income = 5% of a $4M endowment
• Total budget ~$1.7M — spend per student approaches Fancy’s $10,000 without the $13,000 sticker price

Focus: Academics, Christian formation, and socioeconomic diversity funded through structural scholarships and endowment income.

Strengths & Costs: Scalable, teacher stability through full benefits, accessible through dedicated scholarship pools, and sustainable fundraising that acts as a growth option rather than basic survival.

Financial Model Overview:

1. Per 18-student classroom (~$150,000): long-tenured teachers with benefits, sufficient administration for specials and sports, and ~$58,000 remaining for attractive core services.

All four of these models can work and are working in our 70+ Orthodox Christian schools across the country. But let’s explore the final model to see how patronage can make private education more accessible to Orthodox Christians.

(4) How we fund Patron-Blessed schools

We should pursue several tracks and match each parish’s situation.

1. Parish / school endowments. Target on the order of $2M per school. Do not launch until the money is deposited into accounts. One article on founding parish schools argues: do not start until 5% dividend income covers half the headmaster’s or first teacher’s salary—e.g. half of $40,000 → $400,000 endowment; half of $80,000 → $800,000; half of $120,000 for a seasoned principal → $1.2M. If your parish is committed, start setting money aside now. If you already hold an educational endowment for Sunday school alone, consider aiming it at a real parochial school. Free training pipelines (e.g. Herzog Foundation programs—named here as an example of available formation, not an endorsement) can form board, headmaster, and teachers while the capital accumulates.

2. A pooled Orthodox educational foundation. Private donors put capital into a fund that aims for ~$2M per school in the network. Five schools need ~$10M; fifty schools need ~$100M. I have been affectionately calling such a network the National Orthodox Unified Schools (NOUS). National in scope sounds impossible until you remember we are talking about the whole American Orthodox household.

3. A creative housing investment fund. A for-profit fund managed by local Orthodox businessmen buys houses near campus and offers free or at-cost housing to teachers and admin. Investor principal stays in the real estate; the “donation” is forgoing cash-flow so equity can grow. Later, schools or teachers can buy houses back in-house.

4. Archdiocesan pooling. Antiochian, Greek, or other jurisdictions with a common vision could either grant ~$200,000 cash per school per year for a limited startup window (say, 3 years), or build a large fund and distribute dividends to as many schools as the yield allows. (This is a proposal, not a description of current policy.)

5. A pay-it-forward cycle. Onboarding new schools is not “pick a curriculum and open Monday.” At St. Andrew our curriculum is eclectic; the harder work is talent, vision, board training, and capital—typically a 1–2 year pipeline. Then imagine a 3–5 year support window (~$200,000/year) while the school builds its own mini-endowment and enrollment. Once sustainable, schools pledge about 1% back into the foundation so smaller or out-of-the-way parishes can keep receiving help. Pay it forward.

Conclusion

I pray that God blesses Saint Andrew Academy in CA, Mount Tabor in MO, St. Constantine in TX, St. John Chrysostom Academy in PA, Christ the Savior Academy in KS, and every school putting faith and energy on the line—whether or not they know the work will last forever. May He help us advance Orthodox Christian education in the decades ahead.

Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy upon us and save us.

APPENDIX: A new tool: the federal scholarship tax credit

Check to see if your state is participating!

The big beautiful bill passed by Trump in 2025 allows for a $1,700 dollar-for-dollar tax credit when donated to a scholarship granting organization, or SGO: $3,400 for married couples, $1,700 for individuals. That means every Orthodox Christian who pays more than a dollar in taxes should be donating up to $1,700 every year that they would be paying in taxes to an SGO, in order to see some of those funds back in their tax credit, and those funds go towards the education of children.

This is a wonderful sort of redistribution mechanism that can get our public dollars into the hands of private schools at a national level. Now, states have to opt in, so check with your local governor and your local municipality here.

However, even if your school in your state can’t benefit, like my school in California, if every parent that is paying taxes out of our 40 or 60 families is donating, let’s say, $2,000, then that is $80,000 just from one parish!

Some of it might go back to us in the future, but for now it’s going to go to schools in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and so on. The organization to watch here is the Orthodox Christian Education Network: https://www.orthodoxednetwork.org/

Adapted from my YouTube talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmTYUNoMQKQ