Hampton Roads Classical has closed its doors permanently after five years.

Vincent Carollo, who owns the campus on Benns Church Boulevard that the private school had leased, confirmed to the Times that as of June 1, the “school has dissolved and will not reopen.” Hampton Roads Classical Headmaster P. Andy Gist did not respond to the Times’ request for comments.

As of June 17, the Hampton Roads Classical sign had been removed and the school’s website had been taken down. Its Google listing also has changed to “permanently closed.”

“Our granddaughter especially misses it. … The school lost a few teachers over winter break.  She is devastated she can’t return to Hampton Roads Classical,” Therry Boland of Smithfield told the Times.

The nonsectarian school began in 2020 operating out of Hope Presbyterian Church, offering what its literature described as “a time-honored, trivium-based approach” emphasizing grammar, logic and rhetoric “rooted in the liberal arts and sciences, with an emphasis on the Western tradition and America’s founding principles.” Class sizes were small and Latin was introduced as early as the first grade.

In 2021, Hampton Roads Classical became licensed to use a K-12 curriculum developed by Michigan-based Hillsdale College.

By 2023, the school had seen a 20% uptick in enrollment over the prior three years. That year, Gist moved the school to the former James River Christian Academy, which operated on Benns Church Boulevard from 1975 to 2007. The 25-acre campus consists of two roughly 9,200-square-foot classroom buildings dating to the 1970s, one of which Hampton Roads Classical extensively renovated, and a detached 6,300-square-foot gymnasium built in the 1980s.

At its 2023 peak the school had just over 40 students in grades K-7 from across Isle of Wight County and nearby cities, including Hampton, Portsmouth and Suffolk. The school’s Internal Revenue Service Form 990 reports, which nonprofit organizations are required to file with the IRS annually, indicate Hampton Roads Classical may have seen a drop in enrollment at the end of the 2023-24 school year after several years of growth.

The filings report $166,665 in program service revenue for 2023-24 compared to just under $300,000 the prior year. The filings further show the school’s $32,036 surplus at the end of the 2022-23 school year having turned into a $23,457 net deficit by the end of 2023-24.

Parents looking for a private school in Isle of Wight have two other options. Isle of Wight Academy, founded in 1967, continues to enroll roughly 700 students in preschool through 12th grade at its campus at 17111 Courthouse Highway. Cornerstone Christian School, a startup that describes itself as a classical Christian hybrid school, now occupies the space Hampton Roads Classical had leased from Hope Presbyterian and expects to be operational by the start of the 2025-26 school year.