With our first graduation, we decide that the education would be vastly improved if students started in seventh grade. We are no longer desperate to show quick results, so in the summer of 2013, we recruit our first seventh-grade class.
Since the population is now excited about Abaarso, we try a financial experiment with the applicants. After running successful exams in both Hargeisa and Burao, we tell the high scorers that the tuition is $1,800, as that is the cost of running the school, and we can’t guarantee them a spot unless they commit to the full $1,800 and send the first $300 within a couple weeks. If they can’t pay that much, then they should tell us the best they can do, because there is no telling when the financial aid will run out.
By “we” telling them, it is actually little Muna who did, the still-tiny girl who’d come to us as a twelve-year-old ninth grader—the one who told me not to worry because she was taking her medicine. We still don’t have local staff who can do such things, and I still don’t speak Somali, so Muna is as good a choice as any. I explain the situation, then I show her the famous “Show Me the Money” scene from Jerry Maguire and give her the list of students to call.
One by one she makes the calls and handles the follow-ups, staying at it for a few weeks. In some cases, when we know she is talking to a top scorer, we negotiate. In others, we play hardball and make them come back with their best. When all is said and done, the results are remarkable. We have filled the seventh-grade class, only losing one student. Of course, we’ve made a few financial concessions, but nothing like we’ve previously done. Many families who originally said they could only pay a few hundred dollars now agree to pay much more and even send the money. We are bringing in the seventh grade at approximately three times the tuition of the other classes, and pretty darn close to breakeven. A couple months later, we recruit our new ninth grade, and they come in the exact same way.
An obvious question, and one I’ve been asked many times, is How is this possible? After all, we are dealing with one of the poorest countries in the world. The best explanation I can give is that the same clan system that had caused us so much grief is now smiling down upon us. The parents themselves aren’t generally paying. But, with Abaarso’s reputation, they are able to go to clan members around the world and ask for money. They just need the desire and the pressure to do so. After all, wouldn’t Billeh say yes to any Musa Ismail who had the chance at such an education? Wasn’t such an opportunity exactly what had given him the chance so many decades ago?
We also have Ava. Ava came as a math teacher a couple of years before but is quickly taking on administrative responsibilities. In pure brainpower, I consider her the smartest teacher we have ever had, and her college career supports the claim. She graduated from college in three years with only a rounding error away from a 4.0. As the new assistant headmaster, she makes sure our accounting is booked daily and that we budget and compare the results versus forecast. With that, she can quickly home in on any problems before they get out of control.
One significant success is our auto fuel costs, which were running well over $1,000 monthly before Ava took over. They’d increased dramatically with no reasonable explanation, but because our financial management was poor, we didn’t even know it until long after the fact. Ava pinpointed the inefficiency and got fuel spending down to $500 a month, where it has stayed ever since. Needless to say, some folks had been taking advantage of us before. We were able to make similar improvements across the board, and despite a 50 percent increase in the student population, the school’s operating expenses went up by only 5 percent.
In addition, Ava started properly enforcing tuition payments on all students, not asking them for more than they could pay but making sure we collect what we are supposed to. This makes another big impact on the tuition money we are taking in, which is now $200,000, versus just $72,000 the year before. On the whole, Abaarso would go from losing $182,000 in the prior year to losing under $70,000, and the path to achieving breakeven is now clear. As more students come in under the new tuition policy, and the old ones cycle out, the school will get closer and closer to covering its costs. As I write this in 2016, we are projecting the operations of Abaarso School to be within $10,000 of breaking even.
Another first for us is the acceptance of several students from the Hargeisa Orphanage, among them Rooble, a slightly built boy of thirteen, who will be a member of our first-ever seventh-grade class, and his older brother, Saeed. Rooble and Saeed are two of the students who were taught by Suzanne and her troop of volunteers, which makes their presence on campus all the more special for their elder classmates, who had once tutored them. In time, the orphanage tutoring comes full circle, with former orphanage kids like Saeed joining our crew who tutor there each week. Rooble, Saeed, and the others from the orphanage have been academically competitive while making a wonderful contribution to the school. While Abaarso must be financially sustainable, and we will continue pushing families to pay what they can, we will never stop taking society’s neediest. After all, Abaarso was once carried on the back of a homeless nomad.