Wonder Needs Your Help

In 2024, we acquired Wonder, a beautiful tall ship schooner that is the former flagship of Miami. We sailed her over 6,000 miles from Key Largo to Detroit and then back to Key West, completing the voyage in December 2024. We planned to do some regular ship maintenance, such as painting the bottom of the boat, before beginning our first winter season in Key West. Unfortunately, during the bottom painting process we discovered extensive rust in Wonder's hull that had been concealed from us and from the Coast Guard. This led to us canceling all of our plans for 2025 while we came up with a repair plan (and Thane and Lindsay moved and had a baby). As of January 2026, hull repair work has begun in earnest and we are on track for setting sail in May 2026 to launch The Voyaging Institute, the business side of Wonder that will help support The Planet School's goal of eliminating tuition. Help us do it!

To be clear, this is not a crowdfunding campaign. This is happening. We will be using our savings, taking on debt and selling our truck to make this happen. We have already absorbed the enormous unexpected cost of 2025: the initial welding work, keeping Wonder in yard, and lost revenue from canceling our partnership with the Alpha School and others. We used 2025 to come up with a budget and repair plan that we feel very confident that we can execute. This fundraising page is the home to our very first "Annual Campaign" during 2026, which is our first year since receiving our tax-exempt status in August 2025. We are theming our campaign around the very tangible need to get Wonder into working order.

Our Mission

Making private education tuition-free is a strategically driven decision with a charitable outcome. The data shows that the vast majority of students cannot afford private education without financial aid. Indeed, of the US private schools we reviewed in 2024, over 60% of financial aid recipients were families making over $250,000 per year. According to the US Census Bureau, the median household income in 2024 was $83,730. As a result, most students do not even apply to these schools. This should not be surprising: the pricing of private education as a product sends a very clear market message on who its intended customer is. We believe that the only way to encourage applicants from the full socio-economic spectrum is by eliminating tuition entirely. If we do this, we will receive applications from simply the best students, not just the best students who are also wealthy. The quality of a student body is one of the most essential ingredients to a great school and if we can remove tuition, we believe we will be unmatched on this front. Furthermore, removing tuition implies (and requires) that we will have stabilized other revenue streams, meaning that we will be able to pay our faculty top salaries and attract the best faculty in the world. With a tuition-based business model, the drive to keep tuition low means that faculty salaries have a built-in ceiling.

Because of the social good created by great education, we believe that charitable tax-deductible contributions can be one of these revenue streams. This is not a novel idea—nearly all private schools are non-profits with a heavy focus on "development" (i.e. fundraising). The Planet School Education Fund is our entity that pursues this strategy. What is novel is that this will not be our primary strategy or even our secondary or tertiary strategy. Too often, we have watched non-profits sink through an over-reliance on charitable giving. We do not intend to fall into this trap at The Planet School. Our primary revenue strategy is operating our campuses and school assets as businesses, businesses that we involve students in. The Voyaging Institute is an example of one such business. When Wonder is not hosting Planet School students as our Ocean Campus, it will operate as part of The Voyaging Institute. This creates a positive feedback loop: authenticity of curriculum is enhanced by getting students to participate in real-world projects, such as the Ocean Pi science project we run on Wonder.

If you believe in what we are doing, we would be grateful for your financial support. All donations are fully tax-deductible and a receipt will be emailed to you automatically upon donation.

We invite you to read more about our approach on our Planet School Economics page.

2026 Annual Campaign

Activate our Ocean Campus: Wonder