Three years ago, when it was time for Zoë and Nicholas’s son, Max, to start kindergarten, the couple found themselves in a bind. “Our zoned school wasn’t an option, in my opinion,” says Zoë. The school had low scores, lacked diversity and went only through the second grade, meaning Max would have to transition to another elementary school in a few years. The family lives in a Morningside Heights two-bedroom co-op they bought in 1999 for $125,000. They considered subletting for a year and renting in a better school district. They also looked into relocating to Brooklyn, “but we both work in the city and that would mean even more time away from Max.”

In the end, they applied for variances and lottery programs at seven other public schools, and also applied to five private schools. Max was wait-listed at one public school, but got into one of the privates. The yearly tuition of $24,000 posed a hardship for the couple, both librarians, who have a combined income of about $100,000, but not an unfamiliar one: They’d been paying $20,000 a year for full-time day care and summer camp ever since Max was a baby. “We were just surviving financially with those expenses. We had no money left over to invest in our retirement or save or travel. We couldn’t even afford a washer and dryer,” says Zoë, noting that the only reason the child-care expenses didn’t send them into massive debt was that they had such low living costs (mortgage and maintenance were $1,300 a month; necessities like food and utilities were another $700) and no school loans. But at least some of the child care was tax deductible. Education costs in kindergarten through grade 12 are not.

“The tuition would’ve eaten up more than a third of our after-tax income,” says Zoë. So when she learned that Max had gotten into the public Manhattan Children’s School, she pulled him out of the private school, losing a $2,500 deposit in the process. Now in third grade, Max “loves his school, and we feel so much freer,” says Zoë, who adds that it took two years to pay off the $10,000 credit-card debt they’d amassed while Max was in preschool. “We have money to travel, and we’re not constantly servicing the debt. It’s nice not to have that money worry hanging over us all the time.”

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