At first glance, The Primary School looks just as one might imagine a neighborhood school should: A mother carrying a toddler guides her older daughter up the walkway; a teacher waits to greet the girl. Nearby, classmates shout joyfully as they rock a seesaw back and forth. Inside, in a classroom decorated with student art, children gather on a colorful carpet for story time.

But the traditional trappings are only part of the story at The Primary School, an ambitious experiment in reinventing education to better serve lower-income students and students of color and their families. The school, which opened its doors in East Palo Alto, California, in 2016, integrates academics with health care and family support services, all of which is offered tuition free. “We knew the education system was broken,” says Meredith Liu (MBA 2010), president and COO of The Primary School, which she launched 2016 with physician and educator Priscilla Chan. “So we asked, what could we do if we started over?”

Liu, who attended public school in Washington, DC, recognized from an early age that the country’s school systems were inadequate to serve the needs of many children. She witnessed the seemingly intractable achievement gap between white students and students of color. She saw teachers and administrators struggling to provide the support that communities needed beyond the classroom. Liu went on to study public policy and management, which offered the experience she thought would help her address the problem. But it wasn’t until she took a job as dean of enrichment at Codman Academy, a Boston charter school, that she truly understood the challenge.

“It’s easy to think, ‘Well, I’d like to change the education system,’ but unless you are actually on the ground—doing the work and seeing what the needs are, every day, of teachers, students, and families—then you just don’t understand,” says Liu, who later worked on education policy in the government and nonprofit sectors. Her experience at Codman taught her that schools had to take a holistic approach to supporting students. A student whose mother had lost her job, say, or whose father was ill, needs more than just academic instruction to succeed.

Chan came to the issue of education as a pediatrician. She believed that children who were not healthy—those who came to school hungry, for instance—were not well equipped to learn. As she prepared to launch the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization that she founded with her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Chan visited Codman Academy, one of the few schools in the country with a health center. There, a former colleague of Liu’s connected the two women. “We both embraced the idea of health and education coming together,” recalls Liu.

After several years of research, Liu and Chan developed three guiding principles, which Liu says sets the school, funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, apart from other models. First, while the typical school admits students at age five, The Primary School enrolls students as close to birth as possible. “We know the majority of brain development happens in the first few years of life,” Liu explains. In the future, she hopes to begin providing parental support before a child’s birth. Second, the school partners with a local health center, which has facilities on-site. Last year, 97 percent of the school’s students received an annual doctor’s checkup visit as well as dental and vision screenings. The children also brush their teeth each day after lunch. Finally, the school is committed to engaging parents, offering coaches and discussion groups to help them navigate parenting challenges and achieve their own financial, education, and wellness goals. The early data on these family-support services have been positive, with 83 percent of caregivers reporting that they feel better prepared to manage their parental responsibilities and 92 percent reporting that it is easy to ask for help for their children.

This year, a second location of The Primary School will open in Hayward, California. Liu may be even more excited, however, that plans are now under way to pilot the family-support model at a handful of schools nationwide. “The question is, can these ideas be replicated by other organizations? This is about millions of children, not just the several hundred we serve every day at The Primary School. We want to change the system,” she says.

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