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Elon Musk’s pre-kindergarten Montessori school in Texas can now open its doors.
The school, which has been in the works since last year, received its initial permit from the Texas childcare regulator on Thursday, according to the agency, paving the way for Elon Musk to start building out ambitious, STEM-focused education plans that could eventually entail multiple independent K-12 schools and even a college within the state.
The Montessori school—dubbed “Ad Astra” (Latin for “to the stars”) in a nod to Musk’s plans for interplanetary travel—is located about 40 minutes from Austin, in Bastrop county, where several Musk companies have operations. The independent school in Bastrop may eventually enroll up to 54 students in upper and lower elementary grades, with a dedicated faculty and an overarching mission to provide a learning facility “dedicated to STEM education at the highest levels,” according to documents of a Musk-funded non-profit reviewed by Fortune.
The first Ad Astra pupils in Bastrop will be between three and six years old and attend a pre-Kindegarten school that focuses on exploration and on tasks like coloring, collage-making, and studying maps and globes.
The school had experienced some initial application snafus and inspection delays, but after passing an inspection earlier this month, Ad Astra obtained its initial state permit on Nov. 14 and is now considered a licensed childcare program, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which regulates childcare centers in the state. The Ad Astra preschool can enroll nearly two dozen children, according to the agency, though it appears to only be expecting 16 initially, according to application documents the school submitted to the state that were obtained by Fortune via a Freedom of Information Act Request.
The Bastrop Ad Astra is Musk’s second major attempt to push into education. An earlier “Ad Astra” school was conceived roughly a decade ago when Musk approached his son’s then-fourth-grade teacher about starting a school for his own kids and those of SpaceX employees. The school opened in 2014 but after Musk’s children graduated, Ad Astra and its faculty spun out into an independent remote-only school called “Astra Nova” in 2020, according to an interview the cofounder gave in 2021. The non-profit entity that ran Ad Astra sold the mobile home, furniture, workforce and intellectual property to SpaceX, according to non-profit filings. In 2018, a new school called “Discovery” started operating on the SpaceX campus, which is run by a company called Xplor Education that simultaneously operates a Montessori school in Hawaii.
This time around, Musk’s school plans seem more grand. The Musk Foundation set aside nearly $100 million via a non-profit called the X Foundation that will build the initial primary and secondary school, and eventually open a university, should all go well, according to the non-profit’s filings. Ad Astra is the latest branch in a sprawling assortment of businesses and projects connected to Musk, the world’s richest person, who was recently appointed by president elect Donald Trump to oversee a new department of government efficiency.
Work and Play
For now, Musk is starting small—in a white farmhouse with a long porch off a busy farm-to-market road in Bastrop County, Tex.—one street over from where some of Musk’s company facilities reside and where the new headquarters of X (the social media site formerly known as Twitter that Musk acquired for $44 billion in 2022) will be constructed.
The Ad Astra pre-K school will be run by the CEO of Xplor Education, Greg Marick, according to preschool’s state application, and three other faculty members have been hired, as of this summer. And its approach to learning will revolve around exploration, with toddlers learning how to button things, color and draw, collage, construct words, and study globes and maps. Outside, there is a basketball court, and toddlers will be able to play with tricycles and balls, according to the documents. The curriculum itself—which entails periods for “work” and “play” and has children learning to sweep, apologize to others, and learn how to “solve a conflict”—is inspired by the work of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs, two psychologists and educators, to “teach young people to become responsible, respectful, and resourceful members of our community,” according to Ad Astra’s permit application. As a Montessori school, the school will likely also emphasize self-directed learning, hands-on experiences, and collaborative play. It’s unclear whether any of Musk’s six youngest children—who are under the age of five and who reportedly live in a Musk compound in nearby-Austin, according to the Wall Street Journal—will be attending.
In practice, it’s likely that Ad Astra may look rather similar to Hala Kahiki Montessori School of Lāna‘i, the Hawaii school that is also operated by Xplor Education. Some of Ad Astra’s enrollment application questions are near-identical to that of Hala Kahiki, and Ad Astra’s permit application seems to erroneously refer to the school as Hala Kahiki in at least one instance, when it says that students will work with local elders and professionals to “learn about the island community.”
It’s unclear how much parents will pay for their children to attend the Bastrop Ad Astra school. The tuition at the Hala Kahiki Montessori School is $968 per month, according to the school’s website.
In the X Foundation documents that describe the Ad Astra school in Bastrop, the plan calls for the lower and upper elementary school to expand beyond an initial 54-student capacity “based on the needs of the local community and on a timeline that provides for quality education and overall experience.” The school could also include distance learners according to the document, which in one instance misspelled Bastrop as Bastop.
Musk’s name is nowhere on the application materials themselves, though the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s fingerprints are all over the new school project. The X Foundation, which is funded by the Musk Foundation, owns the property the school sits on, and describes plans for the project in filings. Ad Astra’s initial state application was submitted by Jared Birchall, Musk’s financial advisor and longtime confidant. And Xplor Education, which is behind the “Discovery Preschool” near SpaceX’s campus in Hawthorne, Calif., has listed job postings for the new Bastrop school and has a “coming soon” page for Ad Astra on its website.
Musk and Birchall did not respond to a request for comment. When reached by Fortune, Marick said he was not authorized to speak with reporters and declined to comment.