Dear WMS Community,

As we wrote you toward the end of 2020, the pandemic had led to a decrease in enrollment and an increase in expenses and that “the net effect of the decreased enrollment and the increased expenses for the school is that, for the first time in its 45 year history, WMS will have a significant operating deficit. We will be infinitely grateful for any contribution you can make to the school to help reduce this deficit.”

You responded with great generosity and helped us to make a serious dent in our deficit.

But we still need your help, and there are two specific areas for which we are asking that you think about contributing.

First, ventilation is centrally important in maintaining proper airflow and reducing the possibility that airborne virus spores can affect those who are in the school.

We want to improve ventilation at the Duane Street site, increasing airflow by installing operable windows facing Duane Street. To that end we hired an architect and window replacement company to provide us with a plan. The replacement is expensive and the procedure is somewhat complicated because the Duane Street building is landmarked, so the whole process has to go through a Landmarks Commission’ s vetting process. We expect the total cost of this work will be slightly in excess of $150,000 and would very much appreciate any contribution you can make toward resolving this issue.

The second area has to do with tuition support that we offer to our families who may be in need. The pandemic has had a serious impact on the finances of a number of our families and we have distributed more than $267,000 for this current school year, depleting our aid reserve. We do expect to be able to meet any financial aid requests for the coming year, by advancing some unrestricted funds. But this essential financial support pool is very important and any dedicated contribution you can make will help us restore the fund.

This year has been obviously difficult but we feel we have well met the challenges and can begin to see the normalization of our activities and our finances. Contributions you can make in these two areas, and the contributions will be restricted to these two areas, will provide a major benefit to achieving that normalization.

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Thank you once again,

Ronnie