EAST GREENWICH – Families of students attending Rocky Hill Country Day School will start to see discounted tuition bills by more than 25% next year.
The private school announced Wednesday a new reduced tuition model by lowering the costs to attend by approximately $10,000 for the 2025-26 academic year in the hopes to offer more families the chance to send their students to Rocky Hill. School officials say tuition for K-2 students next academic year will be $24,000; $27,000 for grades 3-5; $30,000 for students in grades 6-8; and $33,000 for students in grades 9-12.
Rocky Hill’s reduced tuition initiative is similar to what East Providence-based Providence Country Day School put forth for the 2021-22 academic year. At the time, PCD
decreased its tuition for all its grades 6-12 by 35%, with PCD Head of School Kevin Folan citing that tuition growth had “gotten out of control” and far exceeding the pace of household income increases.
While Rocky Hill and PCD both in recent years introduced tuition decreases, that practice is still rare as other local private schools have increased their respective tuition bills year over year. Rocky Hill will continue to offer need-based financial aid to families that qualify, the school says.
Dan Rocha, Rocky Hill’s interim head of school, told Providence Business News on Wednesday that, like PCD, people began looking at tuition costs as a barrier to admission. Families would dismiss the tuition out of hand when they saw such annual costs exceeding $40,000 for independent college preparatory education, Rocha said.
With the planned tuition reductions, Rocha said it will allow Rocky Hill to “open up” and allow more access to people who were looking for a college prep education at an independent school such as Rocky Hill that may not had been in their reach financially.
“This really does significantly impact the number of people who I think are looking for a college prep education at a point where the tuition is not a barrier to admission,” Rocha said.
Rocha told PBN the reduced tuition plan for Rocky Hill, which will likely remain as a permanent fixture at the school, had been part of the school’s overall planning to welcome its new head of school – Christine Heine, who begins her new role on July 1 – for close to a year. Rocha said he told the school’s faculty he wanted to “put a stake in the ground” in being a premier independent school to help it grow after he felt the small school was reaching a point it was getting too small.
Therefore, Rocky Hill’s new tuition decreases Rocha said will help the school leverage its campus space to increase its student body to approximately 360 to 400 students in the coming years without needing additional buildings. The school’s current student population is around 265, he said.
Such growth, Rocha said, will help create opportunities to expand extracurricular offerings to students, as well as further tie itself to Narragansett Bay via expanded sailing and related programs, while keeping class sizes on campus small.
“We are walking that line between being a small school and providing enough opportunities for kids to really see themselves in the high school environment here,” Rocha said.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on X at @James_Bessette.