The Nightingale-Bamford School, an elite all-girls school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is turning to its endowment to help finance a new athletics facility as it continues raising money for the project, a strategy that prompted Moody’s Ratings to downgrade its credit score. Moody’s cut the school’s issuer and revenue bond ratings to Baa1 from A3 and revised the outlook to stable from negative. Nightingale plans to use about $10 million of its unrestricted reserves for construction while fundraising continues, according to a Thursday report by Moody’s lead analyst Meredith Saylor.
Founded in 1920, Nightingale charges almost $72,000 in annual tuition and is known for helping inspire the bestselling books and television series Gossip Girl. The school’s endowment was $115 million as of December 2025, with about $98 million in unrestricted funds, according to its website. The school borrowed roughly $40 million in the municipal bond market last year for the athletics project and had almost $64 million of debt outstanding in fiscal 2025, according to Moody’s.
Plans for the state-of-the-art athletics facility include a 15,000-square-foot indoor turf field, two gymnasiums and a dance studio. The facility will provide “reliable, cutting-edge spaces that few schools in the city can offer,” according to the school’s website. The project’s total cost was set at $90 million, according to bond documents from last year. Private schools around the country are borrowing to upgrade their campuses as part of the growing competition to attract and retain students as tuition costs soar. So far this year, private schools have borrowed more than $500 million in the municipal bond market, Bloomberg-compiled data shows.
Source: Bloomberg Markets · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing