After 100 years of educating children in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mills College Children’s School will close after the 2025-26 school year.

Besides its college campus — acquired by Northeastern in 2022 — Mills College, now Northeastern Oakland, is also home to Mills College Children’s School, a laboratory school that has taught thousands of students since opening in 1926. The Oakland-based private school’s focus on diversity and experimental learning, as well as its close link to Mills’ early childhood education master’s program, has made it a stand-out in early education and beloved among parents.

After months of uncertainty, officials announced the school would shut down in June, frustrating parents and raising concerns about whether Northeastern will carry on programs some see as core to Mills’ identity.  

When Northeastern bought Mills College in 2022, tensions flared over the merger’s impact on Mills’ legacy as a historically women’s college. While some hoped the merger would resurrect the financially struggling institution, many students and faculty expressed concerns that Northeastern would scrap programs central to the historic college and erase its culture.

Parents have long feared that Mills College Children’s School, or MCCS, would become a casualty of the merger. Now, that fear is becoming reality. On June 20, Dean of Mills College at Northeastern University Beth Kochly announced MCCS will close after the 2025-26 school year, according to an email obtained by The Huntington News.

“I feel heartbroken,” said MCCS parent Maha Ibrahim. “And not just that it’s happening, but the way [Northeastern administrators] have treated us since they came.”

Before Kochly announced the closure, the school limited tours to prospective students and decreased enrollment, according to two parent-volunteers involved with recruiting prospective families. Parents also reported that the number of available classrooms decreased. When one parent drafted a letter explaining her concerns and requesting a meeting with Northeastern administrators, it garnered close to 100 signatures from parents and staff. Administrators did not respond to the request to meet, according to Christopher Lee, an MCCS parent.

On its website, MCCS is described as “a progressive independent school with a constructivist model of education.” Because of its link to the Mills College School of Education, MCCS says it pays unique attention to children’s early years. Many of the teachers have degrees in early education, and some educators are student-teachers from the college’s early childhood education master’s program.

“It is a place where all kinds of kids can be successful,” said Ainka Fulani, who was formerly a MCCS student-teacher during her time as a graduate student in the early childhood education master’s program. “People have decided to send their children there for a reason.”

Last year, Ibrahim had one child in the “blue room,” one of the school’s three classrooms where two grades are combined. The rooms are filled with toys, drawings and wooden chairs, and their doors open to an outdoor classroom, nature trails and a eucalyptus forest. 

“It is phenomenally beautiful,” said Lee, who attended the school as a child. The school “checked every box” for his family. MCCS is known for its diversity, something multiple parents pointed to as unique among Oakland private schools. The school also emphasizes social justice-centered learning. 

“It’s one of the most racially and ethnically diverse spaces I’ve ever seen in Oakland,” Ibrahim said. 

When Northeastern first merged with Mills College, Fulani said that from a parent’s perspective, there weren’t many noticeable changes. Ibrahim was “excited” about the new students on campus. 

But in 2023, Northeastern gave multiple tours to prospective MCCS families. Then, it suddenly canceled all future tours that season, two parent volunteers said.  

“I volunteered and did speak with multiple prospective families. So I know there was great interest, and I know people applied, and I know people were disappointed when they were told that there would be no new admissions,” said Fulani, who is also the parent-family association president. 

For the 2024-25 academic year, the same pattern repeated. Tours began in November 2024 and were meant to continue until February, but Interim Head of School Jennifer Bond emailed parent volunteers Jan. 28 informing them that all subsequent tours were canceled. She also announced that MCCS would not be accepting new students for the 2025-26 school year, with exceptions for siblings of current students, according to an email obtained by The News.

The notice spread quickly and raised alarms for parents. 

“They would never answer our questions or tell us why [changes were happening]. It was just so obvious they were squeezing us out,” Ibrahim said. 

On Feb.10, 93 parents and staff signed onto an email written by MCCS parent Elizabeth Dwoskin. The email urged Northeastern to preserve MCCS and share any “anticipated timeline” for MCCS’ future so as to minimize disruption for families and staff. 

The email gave its recipients — Kochly, Senior Vice President for Global Network and Strategic Initiatives Mary Ludden and Dean of Northeastern University in Oakland Daniel Sachs — a 10-day deadline to meet with representatives from the group. 

“A school cannot endure without enrolling students, so it doesn’t require a great logical leap to foresee impending closure,” the email reads. “We also understand that Northeastern has put Mills in an untenable position by requiring the school to be more profitable, cutting financial aid while also blocking it from enrolling kids. But why are we, the constituents who spend tens of thousands of dollars for our children to attend this special private school, being left guessing as to Northeastern’s plans?”

Tuition varies from $22,036 to $28,087 for full-time care, depending on a child’s age and hours spent at the school, according to the MCCS website. The university did not specify the amount of financial aid the school gave out for the 2025-26 school year. 

When Kochly responded to the letter in a Feb. 12 email, she did not acknowledge the request to meet but assured Dwoskin that Northeastern had “no plans for closure in 2025.” 

“We are continuing our analysis of current operations, and hope to have a definitive plan to share in the next few weeks,” Kochly’s email response to the letter reads. 

As time drew on without a clear direction for the school, parents became increasingly frustrated and nervous. 

“I’ve worked for universities before,” Fulani said of the ignored meeting request. “You at least pretend that you respect people when they ask you for a meeting, and you take it. Even if you’ve already made up your mind about whatever the decisions are that you’re going to make, you at least have a dialogue.”

On June 20, parents received an update from Kochly that the school would cease operations after the 2025-26 school year. The email, obtained by The News, did not give a reason for the school’s closure. The same week, Northeastern Oakland had announced it would discontinue its early childhood education graduate studies program.

“While this news may be disappointing, we wanted to provide more than a full year of notice to allow you and your family to plan accordingly,” the June 20 email from Kochly reads.  

“To add insult to injury, [she closed] the messages [with], ‘If you have any questions, please reach out,’” Lee said. “It’s like, ‘No, we did for months, and you didn’t say anything.’”

Kochly redirected The News to the university’s media relations team, which also did not specify why the school was shuttering.

The announcement has left parents scrambling to find other childcare options in Oakland and has forced them to decide whether or not to keep their children at MCCS for a final year. Some families of elementary schoolers are choosing to pull their kids out early so that they have more time to adjust to a new school before moving on to middle school. Multiple parents said it is difficult to secure a slot at a well-regarded private school, especially for children not entering kindergarten or middle school.

Roger Rohrbach, a software engineer and MCCS parent, plans for his son to attend MCCS next year for third grade. Still, he is concerned that there will be a drop in the quality of education in the final year. 

Kochly told families this would not be the case in her statement announcing the closure. “I want to assure you that we will continue to maintain the highest standards of excellence and provide a supportive learning environment for your children through the end of the 2025-2026 academic year,” her email reads. 

The school has also been used for research purposes, including “formal studies” and “helping children investigate their own ideas and hypotheses,” according to its website. Mills professors and college students have collaborated with MCCS kids to develop prototypes for engineering classes and improve basic skills in first-year writing classes. Northeastern also told faculty that their children would be promised a spot at the school, serving as a recruitment incentive, according to a faculty member who was granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the university. 

“It could be such a jewel in the Northeastern crown if President [Joseph E.] Aoun came and spent a day and really looked at it and noticed it and was able to understand the value, not just for the children, but for Oakland and for the college students,” said the Northeastern Oakland faculty member.

And as MCCS begins its last school year, parents have begun to break the news to their kids that their school will be closing soon.

“There’s been a lot of tears. Everybody’s figuring out how to tell their children,” Ibrahim said. “The children are really confused. The ones that do know are, right now, the older ones. In their world, all grown-ups want kids to go to school and love school. So the idea that a grown-up would shut down their school is really hard to explain.”