When the Money Dries Up – How Priscilla Chan’s School Project Ended and 400 Children Were Left Behind

East Palo Alto, California – It was a promise born from the idea that wealth brings responsibility. When Priscilla Chan, pediatrician and wife of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, established a school for disadvantaged children in 2016, many saw her as a countermodel to the technocracy of Silicon Valley - a woman with heart, vision - and the means to realize both. Eight years later, the building stands empty, the school closed, 400 children without a place to learn. What remains is a community that feels betrayed - and an uncomfortable question: What happens when social innovation depends solely on private favor? The “Primary School” in East Palo Alto was meant to be more than just a place for learning. It was part of a holistic concept that combined education and healthcare under one roof - tailor-made for families who would otherwise fall through the cracks. Children affected by poverty were not only supposed to learn literacy and math but also receive medical care, psychological support, and be taken seriously in their entire life reality. “The social gap begins before birth,” the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative said at the time - and Priscilla Chan wanted to meet it with prevention, not just pity. The school became a model project. The media praised the commitment, education researchers followed the model with interest. Parents, often working multiple jobs yet bringing their children on time every morning, spoke of a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Teachers were well paid, the curriculum was innovative, the children received regular medical checkups. For many, it felt like a glimpse of the education system of tomorrow - even if only for a small segment of society.

But then came 2024 - and with it, a quiet turning point. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative announced it would withdraw from certain areas of education. The Primary School, it said, was now ready to “stand on its own two feet.” What sounded like a developmental step was in reality a retreat - with no sustainable funding, no clear handover to public institutions. Within a few months, the school had to close. The teachers lost their jobs. Parents were left standing before empty classrooms. The children were redistributed to public schools in the area - many of them now on their own again. “We relied on them - and they left us,” one mother said in an interview. For her, the school was not just a place of learning but a piece of security in a world full of uncertainty. The closure shows, many now say, how fragile social progress is when it rests on the goodwill of individuals - even if they are billionaires. Priscilla Chan has not yet commented publicly on the specific reasons. In a general statement from the foundation, it says they want to focus more on “scalable systems” in the future. What that means for real communities is made clear by the case of East Palo Alto: retreat under the guise of efficiency.

This is precisely where the political core of this story lies. The closure of the “Primary School” in East Palo Alto is not just the end of an educational project - it also reflects a new political reality in the United States under Donald Trump’s second term. Priscilla Chan’s project was based on inclusion rather than exclusion, early childhood education instead of performance pressure, healthcare for the poor instead of isolationist policies, and private capital for the public good instead of ideological control. But all of this runs counter to the ideology of the Trump administration, which views education as a national disciplinary tool - not as a space for social justice. Since 2025, Trump’s political allies - above all Education Secretary Christina Pushaw - have begun cutting federal support programs for social education initiatives, especially those related to diversity, poverty reduction, or mental health. At the same time, schools with authoritarian, “patriotic” agendas are being rewarded. In this climate, a project like the “Primary School” is almost an ideological anomaly - an initiative led by an Asian-American woman, focused on non-white children, in liberal California, with an integrative approach and open to modern health concepts like mental care and trauma prevention. All of this does not fit the image of the “Great American School” à la Trump: that school should be proud, white, performance-driven, and disciplinary - not empathetic, not multilingual, not “woke.” The decision by Chan-Zuckerberg to withdraw may therefore not only be an economic or strategic move but also a resignative one - an admission that in this political landscape, even billion-dollar initiatives no longer have a protected space. What remains is a city like East Palo Alto - left alone in a time when social coldness has become official government policy.