Beyond Tuition: How Auxiliary Programs Drive Revenue and Enrollment for Independent School

Walk across almost any independent school campus in July and you will find it busy. Maybe the science lab hosts a robotics camp. The gym echoes with a basketball clinic. Down the hall, a group of eight-year-olds is learning to throw pottery. And outside, the fields are alive with activity. For many schools, these summer programs began as a convenience for working families. Increasingly, they look like something more.

The auxiliary directors we work with want to talk about training, but our conversations often evolve to include enrollment numbers, hiring challenges, and the growing expectation that summer and after-school programs will carry real financial weight. These conversations sparked our curiosity about a bigger question: what happens when a school treats auxiliary programs as a core part of its financial model rather than a side project? The people leading auxiliary programs for independent schools have been answering that question for years.

The Gap Tuition Alone Can't Close

At the 2025 SPARC Symposium, NBOA President and CEO Jeff Shields framed the challenge plainly. Independent schools are mission-driven nonprofits, but they are also businesses, and as he put it, "not-for-profit does not equal for-loss."

His illustration will be familiar to any CBO. Picture a school of 500 students where it costs $30,000 to educate each child, published tuition is $28,000, and the average tuition remission is $4,000. That leaves a $6,000 gap per student, or roughly $3 million a year. According to the data Shields shared, that gap is widening even as enrollment grows, and annual giving per student has declined.

This is the context in which auxiliary programs are drawing new attention.

Auxiliary Programs as "Living Endowments"

The same SPARC data tells a more hopeful story on the auxiliary side. Auxiliary expenses per student rose 5.4 percent, while revenue per student rose 12.8 percent. On average, auxiliary revenue now outpaces what schools earn from either annual giving or interest and investments.

More recent data suggests that growth has continued. In September 2026, SPARC published an analysis of five years of its Compensation and Position Survey. In 2022, about 42 percent of responding schools reported more than $500,000 in annual auxiliary revenue. By 2026, roughly 78 percent did, and the share reporting $1 million or more rose from about 16 percent to 53 percent. SPARC's David Sullivan describes this as a shift away from a loose collection of individual programs toward something closer to a school enterprise: an interconnected portfolio with its own strategy, shared systems, and a direct relationship to the school's broader goals.

Breakwater School in Portland, Maine, offers a vivid picture of what that can look like over time. When Sullivan, now a senior advisor at SPARC, became head of school, Breakwater faced a $350,000 deficit on a $2.5 million budget. On the Independent School Moonshot podcast, Sullivan described how a major donor encouraged him to think of auxiliary programs as a living endowment. Rather than waiting on large gifts to build a traditional endowment, the school could generate steady, recurring revenue by serving its community.

The programs lost money at first. Within two years they broke even, and then they grew by about 20 percent annually. Eventually, auxiliary revenue rose from less than 3 percent of Breakwater's budget to 25 percent, and the deficit gave way to consistent surpluses. The benefits extended to fundraising as well. In a 2026 SPARC post on the auxiliary and advancement relationship, Sullivan noted that about a third of Breakwater's annual fundraising came from its auxiliary community or was connected to its auxiliary efforts.

What strikes us about the living endowment idea is that the revenue is earned, not given. It renews each season, provided families keep coming back. 

None of this is new. As far back as 2015, NBOA's Net Assets magazine profiled schools earning net income from after-school clubs, tutoring, facility rentals, a driving school, and even a spirit store. Sidwell Friends School, for example, reported netting about $150,000 a year from facility rentals alone. What has changed is the urgency. The practices those schools pioneered a decade ago now look less like experiments and more like a model.

A Front Door to the School, and a Business of Its Own

Auxiliary programs also open the campus to families who might never have considered it, and schools have understood this for years. When Net Assets profiled the Congressional School of Virginia in 2015, roughly 85 percent of its summer camp participants were not enrolled students, a result the school's director of co-curricular activities described as intentional. At Oak Hall School in Gainesville, Florida, the summer program director reported that a few camp families became tuition-paying students most years. For those families, camp was a low-stakes way to test the water.

Not every school weighs this benefit the same way. In the same article, University School's finance director said his school views facility rentals more as an admissions tool than as a source of income. Beaver Country Day School's summer director, by contrast, described generating a net positive number for the school as the heart of his job.

We find this tension useful rather than something to resolve. The admissions benefit is real, but a program that runs profitably, retains families from year to year, and earns referrals is valuable whether or not a single camper ever enrolls full-time in the school. For many schools, the auxiliary line stands on its own.

Either way, both outcomes depend on the same thing: families having an experience good enough to repeat and recommend.

Reputation Starts with Training

Betsy Neiva, who has led auxiliary programs at The Philadelphia School and Germantown Friends School, offered an observation in that same Net Assets feature that has aged remarkably well: "If you run really high-quality programming, the money is the easy part." In her view, parents are discerning customers. They may enroll for convenience, but they return for quality.

Quality in auxiliary programs is delivered almost entirely by people, and auxiliary staffing has long been one of the field's biggest challenges. At the time of the 2015 feature, Beaver Country Day's summer program employed 225 people to serve 1,400 children each summer, with staff ranging in age from 16 to over 60, all of whom had to be recruited, vetted, and trained. The challenge hasn't eased with time. In SPARC's 2026 survey, auxiliary directors ranked insufficient staffing among their most significant challenges. Many counselors are working their first job. Some have never worked with children. And hiring rarely follows a tidy timeline. The counselor hired in March and the one hired the week before camp opens both need the same foundation.

This is where the revenue case and the training case meet. Every returning family, every sibling who signs up next summer, and every referral a parent makes at pickup depends on staff who know how to keep children safe, recognize and report concerns, maintain healthy boundaries, and build an inclusive culture. When training is inconsistent, the experience is inconsistent, and inconsistency is costly in a business built on re-enrollment and word of mouth. Parish Episcopal School's auxiliary director noted that the best marketing begins with families a school already knows, which means the reputation a program earns this summer shapes next summer's revenue.

In-person orientation remains essential. It is where staff learn the relationships, the campus, the culture, and the particular rhythms of a program. But orientation works best when everyone arrives from the same starting point. A short online foundation completed before day one lets directors spend their in-person time on real scenarios and relationships rather than repeating basics for whoever missed the first session. It also creates a record of who completed what, which matters to CBOs and HR directors for reasons that go well beyond reputation. (If you have ever wondered what happens when a school can't produce training records during an audit, the stakes are worth understanding.)

Questions Worth Asking About Your Own Program

There is not a single right model for auxiliary growth, and the schools doing this well have arrived at their approaches in different ways. These are the questions we find ourselves asking, and we would welcome hearing how your team answers them:

• Does auxiliary revenue receive the same strategic attention in your budget conversations as tuition and advancement?
• How many families return from one season to the next, and what do you learn from the ones who don't?
• How are staff hired after orientation brought up to the same standard as everyone else?
• If asked today, could you show which staff members completed which training?

Closing these gaps doesn't require rebuilding your training curriculum from scratch every spring.

Supporting the People Who Make It Work

Litix Academy's Camp, Auxiliary & Afterschool Suites were built by former educators, camp counselors, and camp directors who know how much rides on seasonal staff. The training gives every staff member the same foundation before they arrive, in under an hour, on any device. Modules cover mandated reporting, healthy boundaries and communication, bullying prevention, anti-hazing, respectful and inclusive camp culture, and universal precautions and anaphylaxis. Schools can add their own handbooks and policies, and completion tracks itself.

We don't replace in-person training. We strengthen it. As Hal Turner, Director of Auxiliary Programs and Campus Management at the McDonogh School, shared, the modules helped promote a positive and safe camp environment for his staff.

Ready to streamline your seasonal staff onboarding? Book a demo or reach out to our team to learn more.