Sometimes it's tough being a billionaire when the public is training a watchful eye on you, particularly when that public notices you're doing something that may not be fully above-board in your quiet suburban neighborhood.
The New York Times last week pried into the neighborhood-level drama that's been ongoing in Palo Alto's Crescent Park neighborhood, which is home to the ever-expanding compound of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan, and their children and staff. In addition to assembling five adjacent properties a decade ago that they've been slowly transforming into a luxury family compound, the couple also apparently entertains at the property somewhat regularly, and they've bought up six other homes on their block for use as catering staging areas, guest houses, and one that is being used as a private school.
But because a school would not be a permitted use on this residential block, Zuckerberg and Chan are having to answer to the accusation that they've done something extra-legal here. And while they deny that they have, they reportedly agreed to shut down the school — known as BBS, or Bicken Ben School, possibly named after a pet chicken the family owned. But they may still run a daycare facility out of the same private home address.
This all comes from a follow-up report by the New York Times' Heather Knight — formerly a Chronicle columnist — who spoke to multiple neighbors and Palo Alto city officials in her reporting.
A spokesperson for the Zuckerberg-Chans, Aaron McLear, appears not to have given any on-the-record comment on the matter, but told Knight that the school was a home-school, formed out of a pod of home-schoolers during the pandemic, and it's continued on as a K-4 school for the couple's two school-age girls and 12 other children, for the sake of "stability." (The couple has a third daughter, Aurelia, who just turned two in March.) And the only reason it was listed in state filings as a private school was because of the limitations of the filing categories.
Knight found the LinkedIn page for a woman who appeared to be running the school operation, who is not named, who lists her occupation as "a private family office" that specializes in Montessori education.
It's not clear whether it's the couple's friends whose kids are part of this home-schooling pod, or whether it was assembled through other means. A neighbor who was happy to gossip with the Times, Michael Kieschnick, whose property is now bounded on three sides by the Zuckerberg-Chan compound and who has so far refused offers to sell to them, tells Knight that he heard from a staff member that Zuck and Chan were happy to have put together "a diverse set of classmates" as well as good teachers to prepare their girls for elite boarding schools later on.
This all of course looks pretty bad for Zuckerberg and Chan after the unexplained, seemingly sort of cruel yanking of funding for a private school for underpriveleged kids that they estalished in East Palo Alto and the East Bay — The Primary School, as it was called, has a preschool location in San Leandro as well as a middle school in East Palo Alto, and is set to shut down after this coming school year.
Could there be some connection there? Like, did those schools get established just so the couple could control the school environment their girls were going into, and to give them exposure to "diverse" classmates, and now that they have this home-school setup the Primary School was no longer necessary for that purpose?
The official word was that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which helped establish the Primary School in 2016, was ending its social advocacy work. But it was hard not to see the move as just another way Zuckerberg was looking to clear anything off his docket that had a whiff of DEI initiatives, to cravenly curry favor with the Trump administration.
Reportedly, June 30 was the last official day for BBS, but it's not clear whether this isn't just another example of the Zuckerberg-Chans telling officials what they want to hear, and then doing what they like behind the compound walls. That is allegedly the case with the compound itself — the city of Palo Alto denied their application to tear down houses and build a compound back in 2016, but they seem to have gone ahead and done just that.
Jonathan Lait, Palo Alto’s director of planning and development, reportedly emailed neighbors in Crescent Park assuring them of the school closure, but saying that the Zuckerberg-Chans were seeking a permit for a daycare facility, and that the rhythms of pickups and dropoffs outside the property may look similar in the future because of this.
Photo by La-Rel Easter
