How to Fund New Electives Without Raising Tuition

TL;DR

• A new elective program almost never needs a tuition increase. It comes out of a line you are already spending, a course fee your families already understand, or school-choice dollars they already hold.
• The number that decides it is per-seat, not per-hire. One elective teaching line costs $47,000–$70,000 a year in salary and benefits. Twenty-five seats of a full online elective catalog costs $3,225.
• Walk into the board meeting with a funding source attached, not a request. The one-page version is at the bottom of this post.

Every head of school I talk to has the same conversation in February. Somebody wants to add a course. Somebody else says we cannot afford it. And the discussion collapses into the only lever anyone can see, which is tuition.

Tuition is the worst lever you have. It is the slowest to move, it is the most public, and it costs you families at the margin who were already deciding between you and the district. Raising tuition 3 percent to fund one new program is a rounding error on your budget and a real number on a family's kitchen table.

There are better lines to pull. Here are five, in the order I would try them.

Where does the money for a new program usually come from?

Not from growth. Tuition is roughly 84 percent of the average independent school's operating budget, which means most schools are running a machine with almost no slack in it. If you are waiting for a surplus to appear so you can fund electives, you will wait.

What actually funds new programs at small schools is one of five things: reallocation, a fee, outside dollars a family already controls, a designated gift, or retention. Each one is a different conversation with a different person. None of them is tuition.

Option 1: The line you are already spending

Start here, because it is usually the answer.

Pull your master schedule and find the sections that are underfilled. A section of eight students taught by a full-time faculty member is the most expensive thing on your campus per student, and it is invisible in your budget because it is buried inside a salary you were paying anyway.

Run the per-hire math honestly. An elective teaching line costs $47,000–$70,000 loaded, and it typically covers 75–100 students across three or four course titles. That is $470–$930 per student, and it buys you exactly the three or four titles that one person is qualified to teach. We wrote the full version of that calculation in the per-seat cost of a private school teacher.

The move is not "fire the teacher." The move is to stop spending a teaching line on the elective slots and spend it on the core sections you cannot outsource, then cover the electives per seat. That is a reallocation, not a new expense, and it is the version your business manager will actually approve. There is more on the mechanics in how private schools add electives without hiring teachers.

Option 2: A course fee, the way you already do lab and athletics fees

Your families already pay fees that are not tuition. Lab fees, technology fees, athletics fees, band fees, testing fees. Nobody treats those as a tuition increase, because they are attached to a specific thing the student receives.

An elective seat fits that structure cleanly. It is a discrete course, with a discrete cost, that a specific student enrolls in. A course fee equal to the seat price, charged only to enrolled students, funds the program at exactly break-even and never touches the family who does not enroll.

Two guardrails. Keep the fee at cost rather than marking it up, because the moment it becomes a revenue center it becomes a tuition increase with extra steps. And check your state's rules if you participate in a choice program, since some jurisdictions publish specific guidance on what a participating school may charge above tuition.

Option 3: ESA and school-choice dollars families already hold

This is the option that changed most in the last two years and the one small schools are slowest to use.

Seventeen states now run programs that make public funds available for private education expenses regardless of family income, and enrollment in them has grown sharply. Vouchers generally apply to tuition. Education savings accounts are broader, and in many states cover fees, curriculum, materials and coursework, not just the tuition line.

That distinction matters for you. If a family in your school holds an ESA, a course fee for an elective may be an eligible expense under your state's rules even when it sits outside tuition. That is real money already sitting in your families' accounts.

Do not take my word for what qualifies, and do not take a vendor's. Every state writes its own approved-expense list and its own vendor rules, and they change between sessions. Ask your state program administrator directly, in writing, before you build a budget on it.

Option 4: A restricted gift or a designated ask

Donors do not fund operations. Donors fund things with names.

"Help us close the budget gap" is a hard ask. "Fund the career pathways program for grades 9 through 12 for one year, $3,225" is an easy one, because it is small, it is specific, it is finite, and the donor can picture the student. A single board member or a single local business often covers an entire elective catalog for a year at that number, and many will renew if you send them one page of what happened.

If your annual fund has a designated giving option, an elective program is close to an ideal designation. It is visible to prospective families, it shows up in your course catalog, and it produces student work you can actually show a donor at the end of the year.

Option 5: Let enrollment fund it

The cheapest funding source is the family you do not lose.

Run your own number here. Take your net tuition per student and ask how many students you lost last year to a school with a bigger catalog. One retained family usually funds the entire program several times over. That is the argument in why small schools lose students to public school, and it is the one that tends to land with a finance committee, because it is framed in the currency they already track.

The same logic runs on the admissions side. A course catalog is a marketing document whether or not you treat it as one, and prospective families read it. We covered how to write one in how to write a course catalog that sells your school.

What does an elective program actually cost per student?

Here are our numbers, so you have something concrete to put in a spreadsheet rather than a range.

Elective Genius is $149 per student per year for a school, $129 per student at 25 or more, and $109 per student at 50 or more, with a 10-student minimum. Middle school Explorer seats are $49 per student for all 24 exploratory modules in grades 6–8. Founding School pricing is $99 per student for year one for the first ten schools, and it has no close date.

So a school putting 25 high school students into the catalog is looking at $3,225 for the year. Fifty students is $5,450. A middle school wheel for 25 students is $1,225. Compare any of those against the $47,000–$70,000 teaching line and the funding conversation gets short.

If you want the full budgeting worksheet, it is in private school elective budget planning, and current pricing is always on the pricing page.

What are you actually buying for that number?

Fair question, and the honest answer is the one that decides whether the funding conversation was worth having.

You are not buying a video library. Each course is a sequence of lessons where the student works through the material in conversation with Meri, our AI tutor, which is built to push back on one-word answers rather than accept them. The student writes, reflects, and submits projects. Every high school pathway course carries 0.5 credit and is a full semester elective. Middle school Explorer modules run 4–6 hours each and are built for exploration rather than credit.

On your side, one supervising teacher watches the whole room from a dashboard. That person does not need to be a subject expert in cybersecurity or medical terminology. They need to see who is moving and who is stuck, and to grade the projects against a rubric. That is the design, and it is why the staffing cost does not scale with the number of course titles you offer.

We run all 55 courses at our own school, Rosedale Baptist, across grades 6 through 12. That is the only usage claim I will make in a post about money.

How do I present this to my board or finance committee?

One page. Five lines. In this order.

1. The gap. Name the specific courses you cannot staff and the number of students affected. Not "more electives." Say "we have no computer science, no personal finance, and no health science, and 34 students asked for at least one of them."
2. The two costs, side by side. The teaching line at $47,000–$70,000. The per-seat number for your actual headcount.
3. The funding source. Pick one from this post and name it. This is the line that turns a request into a proposal.
4. The academic answer. Who supervises, what credit is awarded, and how records are kept for your accreditation visit.
5. The exit. Pilot for one semester, with the criteria you will use to decide whether to continue.

That last line does more work than the other four combined. A board will approve an experiment with a defined end that it will not approve as a permanent commitment. Our six-step guide to running an elective pilot has the criteria we recommend.

Frequently asked

Can we start mid-year? Yes. A semester start is often easier to fund, because you are asking for half a year of seats against a budget that is already set.

What if enrollment changes after we buy seats? Ask any vendor how seats behave when a student leaves. Ours can be reassigned, and a seat freed at semester can serve a second student in the same year, which matters most in the middle school wheel.

Do we need a new staff position to run it? No. That is the entire premise. One supervising teacher covers the room.

Is this a tuition increase in disguise if we charge a course fee? Only if you mark it up. At cost, charged to enrolled students, it behaves like a lab fee.

About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Elective Genius and an administrator at Rosedale Baptist School, where he runs the same elective program he sells. He built Elective Genius because his own school could not staff the courses its students wanted, and he was not willing to tell them to wait.

Start a pilot

If you want to see the funding math against your actual headcount, we will run it with you. A pilot is one semester, one supervising teacher, and a 10-student minimum.

Start Your Pilot or book a school demo and bring your master schedule. The fastest version of this conversation starts with the sections you could not fill.