The ripple effects of the still unexplained shutdown of The Primary School in East Palo Alto are being felt in the city's Ravenswood City School District, which now has to absorb around 400 extra students.

There are definitely a lot of low-income families around East Palo Alto and San Leandro who would like to know why centibillionaire couple Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan decided to give money to open a tuition-free private school called The Primary School, with two campuses, in 2016, only to shut the thing down ten years later. And it can't be about how much it cost, given that it was under the auspices of their Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and they are worth $220 billion — i.e. around as much as Jeff Bezos.

CZI announced the closure, without explanation, in April 2025, and now the school is winding down operations, with the closing date coming up in June. But as SFGate is reporting, the 400 elementary and middle school students at the East Palo Alto campus now will mostly end up in the hands of the Ravenswood City School District.

CZI kicked down $50 million to aid in the transition following the closure of the Primary School, with $26.5 million allocated to the Ravenswood district. This isn't enough, officials say, to upgrade and expand some dilapidated school facilities to accommodate a sudden 20% jump in enrollment.

Thus, there is a $70 million bond measure on the ballot for November, as Measure A in San Mateo County, which will raise property taxes by $27.50 per $100,000 over 27 years, to cover the bonds. Money from the bonds will go to upgrading school facilities for the future, including building more permanent buildings to replace portable buildings that are being employed to accommodate the influx of new students.

As The Almanac reports, the Ravenswood district previously got a $110 million bond measure passed in 2022, which helped fund the construction of the new Belle Haven Elementary School.

The Ravenswood City School District serves a particularly underprivileged population, with 91.8% of students identifying as low income, the Almanac notes. The school district regularly shows poor test scores in math and English, but also around 56% of students in the district are English learners.

Having been receiving a private-school education, the displaced students from The Primary School are likely to perform better than the students they'll be joining in the district, but this also calls to question how much they will be able to thrive in a less demanding school environment.

The whole situation raises huge questions about the responsibility of Chan and Zuckerberg for these underprivileged students they're abandoning, and the under-funded school district that 400 of them are being left with. The couple, and CZI, could certainly afford to keep the Primary School open, and a year out, with no explanation for the closure, the whole thing smells fishy.

One possible clue lies in the fact that, during the pandemic, Chan and Zuckerberg separately established a smaller home-based school on their property, serving their two school-age daughters and 12 other children. It seems likely that the daughters would have attended The Primary School were it not for the pandemic coming along, and now that the centibillionaire couple has no need for this school anymore, perhaps they decided to jettison the whole thing and save a few million bucks?

They also have a third daughter, Aurelia, who would have just turned three this month.

That private home school on their property is reportedly called BBS, or Bicken Ben School, possibly named after the family's pet chicken. Zuckerberg and Chan were having to answer questions about the school last summer, after the New York Times wrote a series of pieces about how their ever-growing compound in the middle of Palo Alto had been irritating neighbors for years, in part because of the presence of constant security and traffic in and out by construction workers, and now school parents.

They insisted, through a spokesperson, that this was a home school, established through a pod of home-schoolers during the pandemic, and not a private school that would violate any local codes.

Previously: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Say Private School on Their Property Is a Home-School, Not Illegal

Top image: Priscilla Chan (L) and Mark Zuckerberg attend WSJ. Magazine 2025 Innovator Awards at MOMA on October 29, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by TheStewartofNY/WireImage)