HiveCheck is the outside diligence lens on any independent school — the report you wish you had before a campus visit, before briefing a finalist, or before sizing up a school and its market from the outside. Every panel pulls from a public source: federal filings and datasets, open map data for drive times, and the enrollment figure a school publishes on its own website, cited with the page. Nothing is licensed, nothing is invented.
Up to nine years of IRS Form 990 financial data: revenue, expenses, net assets, total assets, revenue minus expenses, comp ratio, tuition dependency, net assets ÷ expenses, and HiveCheck's estimate of the Composite Financial Index (CFI).
Source: IRS Form 990 public extract.
Closest-match peers by size, location, and associations. Percentile per metric. Recut the cohort inside the report. School value vs peer p25/p50/p75/p90 on revenue minus expenses, tuition dependency, comp ratio, and net assets ÷ expenses. Percentile reported with n_peers explicitly disclosed.
Source: derived from the same 990 universe.
The area around the school. The 45-minute market is counted neighborhood by neighborhood: every Census block group within an exact 45-minute drive of the campus. Total population, median household income, education attainment, K-12 cohort size, with the school's home ZIP (or metro or county) for reference.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Can families in the school's real draw area afford tuition. School's 990-derived net program revenue per student (usually after financial aid) against the population-weighted median household income across its ~45-minute drive-time catchment, with a plain verdict.
Source: U.S. Census ACS 5-year + school's IRS Form 990.
What the school itself reports raising, from its own 990 (contributions and grants, averaged), plus a state scholarship tax-credit lever where the state offers one, plus the local giving climate.
Source: IRS Form 990 + IRS Statistics of Income.
Saturation and concentration in the catchment: independent-school density by grade band, public and charter alternatives, and state-level ESA / voucher status.
Source: NCES PSS + NCES CCD + state ESA registry.
990 tuition-revenue trend as the enrollment spine, with a county-level births feed showing the incoming K cohort pipeline.
Source: IRS Form 990 + U.S. Census county births.
The state labor market: the unemployment rate and the year-over-year employment trend.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Schedule J head-of-school compensation (individual names withheld by policy), Schedule L related-party transactions, and Schedule O governance disclosures.
Source: IRS Form 990 Schedules J / L / O.
Five interview-ready questions generated from that school's own filings — most anchored to a specific number so a candidate can defend asking them.
Source: generated from the school's IRS Form 990 series.
Which schools are included. HiveCheck covers 1,639 U.S. independent K–12 schools that file their own IRS Form 990. A school is included because its filings are public: schools don’t sign up, and being included doesn’t mean a school is affiliated with HiveCheck or has endorsed it.
Independent schools that operate as 501(c)(3) nonprofits file IRS Form 990 annually. The IRS publishes the full text on its public extract repository. We download, parse, and normalize those filings into a structured database. Schedule J gives us head-of-school and top-5 compensated executive comp. Schedule D gives us endowment history.
The U.S. Census Bureau publishes the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates down to the ZIP-code area (ZCTA) and the block group, the smallest area with household income (about 1,500 people). Each school’s 45-minute market sums the block groups within an exact 45-minute drive; its home ZIP, or the metro (CBSA) or county, gives the local reference.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is the source for the labor-market panel. We surface the state-level unemployment rate and the year-over-year employment trend for each school’s state.
No marketing material is ingested and no third-party data is licensed. The one thing we read from a school’s website is its published enrollment, cited with the page and the date we read it. If a school’s viewbook says one thing and the Form 990 says another, we surface the 990.
The Composite Financial Index (CFI) combines four financial ratios into one score on a scale of −4 to 10. It was developed by KPMG and Prager, Sealy & Co. (Strategic Financial Analysis for Higher Education, 7th ed., 2010, with Attain) and is used across higher education and, through NBOA, by independent schools. The CFI’s authors treat 3 as the threshold of financial health.
HiveCheck follows the method as two of its co-authors, Phil Tahey and Ron Salluzzo, apply it to independent schools: the published weights (35% primary reserve, 35% viability, 20% return on net assets, 10% net operating revenues), with the operating result measured against the 4% threshold they set for schools, which rarely report an operating measure.
Primary reserve and viability count expendable net assets: total net assets less permanent endowment and less buildings net of their debt. The 990 doesn’t report that figure, so HiveCheck estimates it from the balance sheet (Part X) and the endowment detail (Schedule D Part V). On 1,469 returns from 2016–18 that also reported permanent restrictions from the audit, the estimate matched them at a median ratio of 1.00. The operating result is revenue minus expenses on the 990, which includes gifts and realized gains.
A school with no long-term debt gets viability’s top score only if its expendable net assets cover about five months of expenses; otherwise viability is left out and the other three ratios are reweighted. The report shows the score both ways. Debt under 5% of a year’s expenses counts as none; that line is HiveCheck’s, because the sources leave it open.
The CFI was built to follow one school over time, so every report shows the school’s score for each year on file. HiveCheck found no published study that tests the CFI’s weights or thresholds; it is a practitioner framework. Research on a related federal measure finds that single-year snapshots miss many college closures, and low enrollment is the strongest predictor of private-school closure, so read the CFI alongside its trend and the enrollment and market panels. The 990 covers one legal entity, so an endowment held by a separate foundation doesn’t appear. The range labels (5+ strong; 3 to 5 adequate — monitor; 1 to 3 watch; 0 to 1 re-engineer; below 0 distressed) are HiveCheck’s.
HiveCheck is not affiliated with or endorsed by NACUBO, NBOA, KPMG, or Prager, Sealy & Co.
On every school page, the Community & Market section carries two HiveCheck reads: Paying Capacity (can families in the school’s draw area afford tuition) and the Fundraising Profile (what the school actually raises, and the giving climate around it). They answer different questions owned by different offices. Both are computed over the school’s 45-minute drive-time market — the real area a school draws from — not a single ZIP code.
These are HiveCheck reads built from public data, not federal statistics. They describe the market around a school, not the specific families it enrolls: a boarding school or a magnet day school draws well beyond its catchment, and the read should be weighted accordingly.
Every school’s market is counted neighborhood by neighborhood. We compute the driving time from the school’s campus to the population center of every nearby Census block group (a neighborhood of about 1,500 people) and count the neighborhood when the drive is 45 minutes or less. Drive times come from openrouteservice, run on current OpenStreetMap roads with typical speeds and no traffic. Private schools count the same way, by their own drive time.
Families who can likely afford tuition adds up, neighborhood by neighborhood, the school-age children (5–17) times the neighborhood’s share of households earning $200,000 or more (U.S. Census ACS 2020–2024).
TWO SUPPLY FIGURES
All private schools are every school in the federal NCES Private School Universe Survey (about 22,000 schools in the NCES file HiveCheck uses): independent, religious, Montessori, special-education and others. Schools HiveCheck covers are the 1,639 independent schools in its coverage, nonprofits that file their own IRS Form 990 (about 70% are NAIS members), a subset of all private schools. Many religious schools, including most Catholic parish and diocesan schools, don’t file their own 990, so they count among all private schools but aren’t in HiveCheck’s coverage. Both figures are K–12 seats per 100 affording children, withheld where fewer than 1,000 affording children live within the drive.
CAVEATS
Drive times assume normal road speeds, not rush-hour traffic. A neighborhood whose center sits on roads cut off from the public network (a gated community behind a private gate, an island without a car link) can’t be reached and is left out; that is about 0.13% of the U.S. population.
Paying Capacity answers one question: at this school’s tuition, how deep is the paying pool in its real draw area? It compares the school’s net program revenue per student (a rough stand-in for tuition after aid) to the typical family income across its ~45-minute drive-time catchment and returns a plain verdict, not an abstract score.
THE VERDICT
Net program revenue per student (usually after financial aid) as a share of the typical catchment family income:
INPUTS
Net program revenue per student is the school’s IRS Form 990 program-service revenue divided by enrollment — a rough estimate of the average price after aid, not the sticker price, and it can include camps or room and board. Typical income is the population-weighted median household income across the Census neighborhoods (block groups) within a 45-minute drive of the school (U.S. Census ACS 2020–2024). A supporting stat shows the share of households earning $200K+ — the base that can cover tuition without aid.
CAVEATS
A draw-area read, not a household-level guarantee: real paying families come from the higher-income tail of the distribution, and the median is the anchor, not the enrolled family. The tuition figure is a 990-derived estimate that trails a recent tuition change. When a drive-time catchment isn’t available, the read falls back to the school’s home ZIP and is labeled as such.
SOURCES
U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, and the school’s own IRS Form 990 (net revenue per student). Census small cells are suppressed at source and never imputed to zero.
Independent-school fundraising is relationship-based — parents, grandparents, and alumni, then grants — and those donors often don’t live nearby. So this panel leads with what the school itself reports raising, and treats the surrounding area’s wealth as context, never as a donor base or a forecast. It reads in three layers:
HOW THE LOCAL CLIMATE IS READ
We sum the charitable giving reported by households earning $200,000 or more in each ZIP area within the drive — a pool (a sum, never an average), so a single wealthy enclave shows up rather than washing out against the metro. A ZIP area on the edge of the drive counts in proportion to the share of its residents who live inside it, and counts as a pocket only when most of them do. ZIP areas are tiered high / mid / lower by absolute giving and cross-checked against Census income, so a suppressed-but-wealthy ZIP surfaces as a “possible pocket.” We read the $200K+ bracket and drop itemizer rate entirely: after the 2018 standard-deduction change, itemizing signals a tax-filing choice, not generosity, and only the $200K+ bracket still itemizes enough for the IRS charitable data to be honest.
HOW TO READ IT
The local pool is the area’s giving, not the school’s donor base and not a fundraising forecast — even a locally-anchored program captures only about 1–3% of a pool like this. “No high-capacity communities” is a real finding about how local wealth is distributed, not missing data. A loyal alum or grandparent in another state won’t appear here, which is exactly where the development office’s own records matter more than any map.
SOURCES
Source: IRS Statistics of Income. The school’s own IRS Form 990 (contributions and grants) and U.S. Census ACS 5-year estimates (income cross-check). IRS Statistics of Income data is released on roughly a three-year lag; suppressed small cells are never imputed to zero.
The IRS publishes 990 data on a roughly 9-to-18-month lag from the school’s fiscal year end. For most schools we have filings through FY2025, with newer years rolling in as the IRS releases them. Every panel surfaces the through-year prominently. Fiscal years are labeled by the year they end, the way business officers label them: FY2025 is July 2024 through June 2025 at most schools.
ACS 5-year estimates refresh in September each year. BLS QCEW data lags by about six months; CES is current within the month. The data-freshness footer on every report shows the latest period we have on file for each series.
CURRENT DATA STATE: COVERAGE THROUGH FY2025 · 1,639 SCHOOLS · 11,995 FILINGS · LAST REFRESHED 2026-08-31
Lomuscio Labs is a small AI strategy and product practice based in Asheville, NC, rooted in independent-school leadership. The independent-school dataset behind HiveCheck was built over the past two years as an internal tool. We opened it up after sharing it with candidates, Heads, trustees, and search consultants.
Individual plans run month to month, so you can subscribe for the months you need. Every report says plainly where the public data is thin.