The Primary School opened in 2016, just a couple miles from Facebook’s headquarters. Its mission was to serve as a tuition-free hub where children from low-income families could be educated and have access to health care and social workers under one roof.
Dr. Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician married to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, worked with Meredith Liu, an educator and friend, to build the school in East Palo Alto, Calif., a diverse town that rarely reaps the benefits of its far wealthier Silicon Valley neighbors.
They talked about how low-income children were more likely to have experienced trauma early in life, and how that trauma would have lasting effects. The Primary School, its website declared, tried to overcome the systemic racism and poverty that hurts communities of color.
This week, however, school officials stunned families when they told parents the campus will shutter in the summer of 2026.
Emeline Vainikolo said she and other parents were invited by school administrators to a breakfast of bagels, fruit and Starbucks coffee and were abruptly told of the closure, but given no reason. They were left staring at one another “dumbfounded,” she said. Her son, a kindergartner, later relayed a reason that he had gleaned from his teacher, she said.
“‘Mommy, the guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore,’” he told her.
The guy in question is Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, who has joined many of his fellow Silicon Valley tech leaders in trying to court President Trump this year. That has included a pullback on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at their companies and philanthropic organizations.
The closure of the Primary School and a sister campus in the East Bay has led families to wonder if the timing was a coincidence. Their schools were established in a different era when tech leaders were pouring resources into racial justice and diversity measures that were intended to reduce societal inequality.
The Primary School was one of the first beneficiaries of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded by Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan 10 years ago and is still run jointly by them as co-chief executives. The initiative gave about $100 million in grants to the school and related groups from 2018 to 2024.
The school started with just preschoolers, but was expected to eventually serve toddlers through eighth graders, adding one grade every year. The 2025-26 school year will be the first time it has offered eighth grade — and the last.
When 35 students complete the eighth grade, the Primary School, as well as the East Bay campus, a newer counterpart in San Leandro, Calif., will shut down. The two sites serve about 550 children.
School leaders and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have said little about the reasons for the closures. The Primary School posted the news on its website Monday after the parent breakfast, but did not state the reasons.
It did say the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $50 million in the affected communities, as well as education savings accounts for the schools’ students and “transition specialists” to help families find new schools. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative directed reporters to the school’s statement.
If the school was an experiment, it did not go smoothly. Parents said that teacher turnover was high, though school officials said retention over the past two years was “good.” The community was saddened in 2023 when Ms. Liu, the school’s co-founder, died.
The program also struggled to attract funding from donors other than the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Jean-Claude Brizard, a former superintendent of the Chicago school system who is chairman of the board of directors for the Primary School, said the program had sought public funding for its operations so that it wasn’t totally funded by the Zuckerberg family.
“If something is fully reliant on philanthropic funding — or even frankly 50 percent — that is not sustainable long term,” Mr. Brizard said in an interview.
But the school had struggled to make enough demonstrable progress that it could convince public funders, or even additional private backers, to support it, he said.
“I’m the one who advocated that we also put on the table the nuclear option,” he said. “Is it time to disband? Is it time to begin to move the assets away to the community?”
Carson Cook, the Primary School’s senior manager of strategy and advancement, declined to say much in an interview in the school’s central office, located in a strip mall anchored by a Nordstrom Rack a short walk from the campus.
“Yes, we’re going to wind down,” he said. “But there’s a lot of motivation to just make it a great year.”
Asked when the administration learned that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was withdrawing support, Mr. Cook said, “No comment.” And asked whether he thought Mr. Zuckerberg was pulling his money because of the president’s focus on eliminating D.E.I. initiatives, Mr. Cook replied, “I have no comment on that.”
In 2020, the Primary School made several antiracism commitments, including teaching about “identity development, diverse cultures and ideas” and designing ways for students to engage in social justice work, according to its website. It also created a D.E.I. task force that year to ensure the school was living up to its commitments.
Mr. Cook did not allow a journalist to enter the school. Its administrative offices include a sign with a rainbow proclaiming it “a safe space” and a large poster featuring words from Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration in 2021.
Mr. Brizard emphasized that the closures were not part of a D.E.I. retrenchment by Mr. Zuckerberg. And officials with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pointed to their continued investment of $50 million to support families in the East Palo Alto and San Leandro areas as an example that it remained committed to the same cause.
The wind-down comes more than a decade after another education experiment by Mr. Zuckerberg. In 2010, he contributed $100 million toward revamping public education in Newark, an amount matched by other contributions. That effort benefited charter schools but also frustrated parents, activists and teachers.
Parents in East Palo Alto said on Thursday that they did not know what was behind the school’s closure, but they were frustrated by the announcement. One mother, who asked not to be named because of her immigration status, said the school has been a great fit for her 6-year-old son, who has autism. She said the teachers have given him special attention and ensured that he has not been bullied.
She was especially grateful to Dr. Chan for starting the school and fulfilling her promises to provide a high-quality education to all children. Until this week, anyway.
“Overnight, she gave us a complete reversal that none of us could have imagined,” she said in Spanish. “That’s all we ask with our heart — that she support us and not leave us halfway with our children.”
Ms. Vainikolo and her two sisters send a total of six children to the school. She is pregnant with a baby boy, due in June, and had hoped until the closure announcement to send him to the school along with his siblings and cousins.
“He’s a billionaire,” she said of Mr. Zuckerberg. “Why would he want to close this?”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
