Return to Virginia Business - February 2003

Is bigger better?
Elite schools rush expansions to snare top students

Ed Silansky has grown accustomed to the reactions of first-time visitors to his daughter’s basketball and lacrosse games at the private Flint Hill School in Oakton. “The first impression is, ‘Wow, what a wonderful place.’” The coed prep school moved to a new 130,000-square-foot, $25 million campus 17 months ago that’s loaded with fancy trappings, such as atrium ceilings, a 9,000-square-foot, two-story library, dance and art studios and new athletic facilities that this year will let Flint Hill field its first football team in a decade. “It provides you with most of the advantages of a small college,” Silansky says.

Pricey private schools in Virginia and much of the nation are in the midst of an unrivaled building boom, driven mostly by fierce competition for students. Parents are willing to pay top dollar at prep schools with fabulous plants so their children might win admission to the Ivy League and other top colleges. Tuition for Flint Hill’s high school, for example, is $17,850 this year. In the fray, fueled by Baby Boomers having their own kids, independent schools have to stand out, or at least keep up with the competition.

These days many prep school administrators are proudly showcasing science labs that rival those of many colleges, or sports centers capable of hosting national tennis tournaments. “You’ve got to offer the right kind of programs to get those kids in, whether it’s top kids in arts or drama or dance or athletics or Latin,” says Ruth Little, Flint Hill’s admissions director. “You can’t just offer one or two things and think you’re going to get your kids into the best [college] for them.”

But do Ivy League schools really care about the tennis complex, bathrooms with a Romanesque design or massive atriums? Obviously not — some of what schools are spending their fundraising dollars on is purely about status, not SATs. Ivy League schools and other highly selective colleges take public school kids all the time. Student experiences in and out of the classroom are most important, though a student at a school with more offerings has more opportunities to get a leg up on the competition. “We admit applicants and not schools,” says Robert Mitchell, spokesman for the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which includes Harvard College. Still, Mitchell says “it is understandable that schools compete against each other” to offer students any possible edge. The same thinking applies to elite, non-ivy colleges. “We want to see applicants who take advantage of a wide variety of academic and extracurricular activities if they are available,” says Georgetown University spokeswoman Julie Bataille Green. Students are not penalized, she says, if their school does not offer programs such as advanced placement classes or ballet.

Some schools are taking on capital projects to expand their enrollment capacity, often because that’s the only way they can start offering a diversity of programs. Flint Hill, which has gone from 720 students in 2000-01 to 890 this year, plans to add another 60 students next year and grow enrollment to 1,100 over the next few years. It built a new campus in part because it needed the space — the school’s 18 sports teams shared a single home field and borrowed tennis courts and track fields from other area schools and facilities. “We were spread all over the place,” says Operations Director Ann Peterson. But it also needed to grow so it could add programs such as dance, jazz band or even the football team. “We knew that to run a good program we needed more kids and more facility to do it,” Peterson says. “There’s a certain critical mass that you need, and we didn’t have it.”

A number of Virginia’s independent schools are growing. At St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, the 70,000-square-foot sports and fitness center due to open in March with a new eight-lane swimming pool, a track, sports medicine center and room for kickboxing and yoga will replace a 30-year-old gym that had a single volleyball court and a fitness center “that was pitiful,” says Sue H. Schutt, the school’s development director. The new facility will allow all 815 girls and faculty at the K-12 school to gather in a single place for the first time.

The Jane L. Goll Center for Arts and Athletics at the Westminster School in Annandale will nearly double the size of the K-8 coed school, adding a new gymnasium, a library with a brick patio that will allow students to sit outside and sketch nearby woods and the school’s first computer lab. The new space offers arts and music rooms, allows the existing gym to be converted to a dedicated theater and frees up space in the existing building for expanding the kindergarten. “In a lot of ways this is our statement about our commitment to the arts and athletics and how important we think that is to the development of the child’s spirit,” says Headmaster Ellis Glover. “We’re doing all of this and it won’t bring us any more income. We’re not going to have more students, but the program will be so advanced.”

St. Catherine’s brother school, all-boys St. Christopher’s, is also upgrading its athletic facilities after putting on a $35 million addition to its lower school, adding a $4 million science center and renovating many academic and other buildings all in the last few years. Yet both schools only turned to sports and extracurricular upgrades after renovating and expanding academic facilities during the 1980s and 1990s. “It’s academics first for us,” says St. Christopher’s Development Director Delores Smith. The current campaign by the boys’ school seeks to raise $30 million, $10 million of which will be used for faculty salaries and scholarships.

Many school leaders also cite the rising cost of technology from wired classrooms — where high-tech whiteboards have replaced the traditional chalkboard — to wireless connections. Flint Hill, for instance, budgeted $1.3 million when it upgraded its computer and telephone network, and installed workstations in each classroom.

In many cases, schools are also using other schools’ capital expansions to justify their own plans and pepper alumni and students’ families with requests for donations. The all-boys Georgetown Preparatory School in North Bethesda, Md., for example, is so keen on keeping up with plant improvements at competing private schools that it plans on selling off some of the prime acreage, including part of a golf course, that it owns near the Capital Beltway to help pay for new facilities, including a gymnasium. The long-term price tag is $43 million, plus $20 million for maintenance. The school gets some students from Virginia.

Most schools launch major fundraising drives for specific projects such as a new library or sports center. But fundraising is increasingly becoming a full-time business for private schools much as it is for colleges and nonprofits. “You really never get out of a capital campaign mode,” says Schutt of St. Catherine’s, which raised $18 million in a campaign that ended in 1998 and is now seeking another $25 million. Many schools are also resorting to issuing tax-exempt bonds to finance improvements as well.

From the outside all the attention seems focused on shiny new buildings or sports facilities, which administrators say they are forced to continually upgrade. That certainly appeals to prospective students’ families and gives parents the sense that they are getting their money’s worth. Still, schools say, there continues to be an emphasis on attracting the best faculty. Many, like St. Christopher’s, are using capital campaigns to endow funds for hiring new faculty, raising salaries and additional scholarships. Flint Hill’s expansion also meant it needed to hire additional teachers. “It doesn’t matter how good the facilities are if you don’t have the quality teachers,” says Flint Hill Development Director Gordon Oliver. And it doesn’t matter how good your teachers are if you can’t fill the classrooms.

Return to Virginia Business - February 2003