Building on Our Strengths Forging an Inspired Path to the Future

as you take over as board chair? St. George’s is in a great position right now. With Alixe [Callen] entering her fifth year as Head of School, she and her team have achieved fantastic results that have made the school stronger than it has ever been. Alixe and I share a strong belief in data, and the numbers speak for themselves on the strength of our school. Applications are up more than 50% over the last five years, with more than 1,000 applications for roughly 100 spots for the incoming class. Despite all of the challenges posed by the pandemic, Alixe and her team kept the school open, and our students demonstrated incredible resilience and determination despite the limitations that were put in place to keep the community healthy and safe. We’ve had another great year for college placement in one of the most competitive environments ever. Discipline incidents have continued to decrease as students continue to build a true sense of community and responsibility on the Hilltop. Equally as important, Alixe and her team, as well as the Board of Trustees, continued to increase the commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Building on our progress and creating a welcoming and inclusive educational environment with a diverse student body that reflects our society as a whole will be one of my top priorities as chair. I want students from every background to want to come to St. George’s because they see it as a place where they can thrive in and outside of the classroom.

Likewise, our financial position has never been stronger. Our endowment is over $200 million, and our annual giving sets a new record each year. We completed the renovation of our historic Memorial Schoolhouse, which I hope everyone will get the chance to see at our 125th anniversary celebration in May. We are investing this financial strength in the areas that build on the continued success of St. George’s: (a) in our faculty and administration as we continue to increase compensation to attract the best teachers and administrators; (b) in our financial aid, which has increased almost 25% over the last five years as we seek to bring the best students to SG; and (c) in our capital budget, which has almost doubled over the last five years as we seek to catch up on years of deferred maintenance to restore the fantastic “bones” of our

campus. Rest assured our goal is not to win the prep-school-building arms race but to literally dig out of the hole that was created over the previous decades, during which, despite best efforts, we were only investing 20% of our annual depreciation back into our facilities, which is simply not sustainable.

Trustees, working with Alixe, have finalized our Strategic Plan, which charts a path for St. George’s over the next three to five years and envisions where the school will be in 25 years. The plan focuses on a number of evolutionary and innovative initiatives to prepare the school for the future. Leslie Heaney, our previous board chair, led the development of this plan that invests more in our students, faculty, and facilities than St. George’s has ever done before. I cannot thank Leslie enough for her leadership in this and many other efforts. Leslie’s extraordinary commitment to St. George’s has been instrumental in putting the school in its most competitive position in history. As board chair, she inherited a school in crisis over past sexual misconduct, acknowledging the real pain and anguish of survivors. Leslie has made sure we learn from that painful past while also taking the steps needed to ensure an even brighter future. I look forward to building off the strong foundation she put in place.

chair? The Strategic Plan highlights many of the major initiatives of the Board of Trustees. One of these is the increased sustainability of St. George’s to reduce our carbon footprint dramatically. We are exploring an interesting solar structure, whereby the school would add solar panels to the roofs of many of our buildings, reducing our climate impact while lowering our energy costs. Similarly, we can significantly reduce our energy footprint by restoring and enhancing many of our aging buildings, beginning over the next five to 10 years with our dormitories. Our location on Aquidneck Island results in high natural gas costs, and the days of seeing dorm room windows open in the middle of February need to be put behind us. This will require some meaningful investments, but I’m confident the environmental and financial returns on these investments will be worth the cost.

Another area I look forward to discussing with our entire community is our long-term plan to enhance our campus facilities so that they are suitable for today’s educational mission. Over the last 10 years, we have invested more than $50 million in our core academic facilities through major projects on the Hill Library, the construction of worldclass STEM facilities in our Academic Center, and the complete renovation of our 100-year-old Memorial Schoolhouse. These key investments have yielded significant academic benefits for our students and faculty as we look to constantly improve on our core mission of providing a superior educational product.

The next step in this process is to hone in on the elements of our campus that are crucial to Alixe’s focus on strengthening our sense of community. This effort will entail improving our dorms — not only for efficiency but also for livability — to match the more collaborative learning processes that take place outside the classroom at today’s schools. The architectural center of SG — Arden/ Diman/Eccles, Old School, and King Hall — is truly phenomenal, but the buildings are dated, which is sometimes hard to see, as people’s eyes are constantly drawn to our beautiful view of the Atlantic. We have devised a 15-year restoration plan to preserve our history while modernizing those facilities to make them more sustainable. On top of that, we’ll improve our faculty housing as well as our wellness facilities, starting with the addition of a new fitness center. We are a community of more than 500 people (385 students and more than 130 faculty and administrators), and the physical, psychological, and spiritual health of our community is vital to making St. George’s a thriving school.

As I mentioned earlier, I am also excited to continue to push harder on our ongoing DEI initiatives. Our community has been deeply impacted by the issues around race and social justice that our country is experiencing. Although substantial progress has been made with our DEI Strategic Plan, the trustees are excited to work with the administration to increase our commitment in this area. We believe that our students benefit by living in a community that reflects the diversity of the world they will need to lead.

In my career as an investor and an entrepreneur, I have worked with thousands of people across many companies that have many consumer brands. In building many of these brands, I have enjoyed working with diverse teams that have brought different individual perspectives from their personal experiences to the group. That diversity most often has led to better ideas and growth.

At my current firm, Yellow Wood Partners, we have more female investment professionals than male professionals. That may not seem

like a huge accomplishment, but in an industry where less than 15% of professionals are female, we are an outlier. When we started the firm 10 years ago, we had the explicit goal to hire a diverse group of people. This goal has served us well as we have built some fantastic brands that cater to a growing multicultural, global environment.

In some ways, St. George’s School is a brand and, if you agree, it clearly is the best brand with which I have ever been associated. All of our key stakeholders — students, families, alumni, faculty, administrators, and the Newport community — may view the brand through different lenses, but I believe we all feel strongly that SG stands for something greater than each individual’s involvement with the school. St. George’s purpose as a boarding and day school is to provide a superior education for students from all over the world living in a small, diverse community — to prepare them for college and, eventually, the world beyond. The school has done this for over 125 years, and despite ups and downs, the brand continues to get stronger.

My family is a strong believer in education, and we direct most of our philanthropic efforts and means to supporting various educational institutions. It is through learning that people grow, as we all search for some kind of wisdom in our lives. Our school motto is Sapientia Utriusque Vitae Lumen. I never studied Latin, but my son, Bower ’20, who took four years of Latin at SG, tells me it translates roughly as “Wisdom, the light of every life.” This is a perfect way to describe our goals for St. George’s. I love the concept of wisdom, as it can mean many things to different people, incorporating knowledge, experience, and good judgment all into one word. A good secondary education can provide students with a stepping-stone on the long path to wisdom. St. George’s provided that to me as a student, as it has to thousands of other alumni. I feel very fortunate to have had great teachers during my time at SG who inspired and challenged me. That goal of helping kids on their own path to wisdom drives me to be involved at St. George’s almost 40 years after I first drove up to the red doors of Old School. I don’t know what drives other members of our community to keep St. George’s in their hearts and minds, but despite the challenges and triumphs the school has had over the last 125 years, I am hopeful that all of you will join me and my fellow trustees in doing everything we can to support Alixe and what she and her team are building. We have a great opportunity to take St. George’s to the next level and provide more bright, talented kids with the chance to benefit from this special place.

For those just learning about today’s St. George’s, I believe the most important thing to understand can be summed up in two simple sayings we have on the board: “Once a Dragon, Always a Dragon” and “Dragons Forever.” No matter where you are, or what your experience was at St. George’s, I would encourage you to come back to the Hilltop to see it thriving today. You will be inspired to see the students on campus and the incredible educational opportunities the school offers. We have a lot of work to do, but as I mentioned, SG has never been in a better place. I look forward to sharing that with you in whatever way possible during my time as board chair. I look forward to leaving SG in an even better place when I am done, and I hope everyone in our community will join me in this effort.

King Hall? To be truthful, no particular meal stands out from my time as a student. We definitely didn’t have the salad and sandwich bars that are there now, as we pretty much always had to go through the line to pick up whatever was being served. The one thing I do remember is Ms. Pierce’s high-pitched voice saying, “Eat your vegetables!” It was sometimes a tough sell with what was in the trays.

Everyone loves the view over Second Beach and Sachuest Point from the stone walls in our front fields. It is truly spectacular. That spot is special for me as well, but I also love the view looking back up to campus at sunset. The beautiful oranges, reds, and yellows of the sky make a fantastic backdrop to our chapel, which is truly the heart and soul of our school. That view is unrivaled and always restores my belief in the permanence, purpose, and ever-reaching goals of St. George’s. 