Initiatives and Opportunities The beginning of a new school year is always marked by high energy and great expectations. This fall, our first School Meeting was electrifying as students gathered and celebrated the Hess Center for the Arts, which opened after a year of renovation and additions; all the disruption to class schedules, campus traffic patterns, classrooms, performance and meeting spaces was suddenly worthwhile in the joy of that moment. Imagine Deerfield enabled the Academy to invest in the physical structure of the Hess Center, but it’s translating into an investment in so much more: The Hess Center has raised interest in the arts to a new level on campus, and it’s attracting prospective students who wish to learn and perform in a world-class facility. The Hess Center isn’t the only campus initiative enabled by the campaign, but it has directly inspired thoughtful consideration of the integration of spaces and learning in new ways. For example, over the past year, a committee convened to study our 50-year-old library through this lens. They visited a wide array of libraries at other private schools and colleges, and worked with architects to design a renovation plan with spaces that will encourage creative thinking and stimulate collaboration among the students and the faculty. The Center for Service and Global Citizenship, also an Imagine Deerfield initiative, is now located in the library and engaging
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students in thinking about the challenges their generation is facing on a local and global level, educating themselves and others on these challenges, and taking action to find solutions to these problems. Eventually, the offices of College Advising and the Academic Dean will join the “innovation space” already in existence, creating a dynamic academic hub for the campus. The opportunities we can offer our students depend on our donors, and once again donations to Imagine Deerfield were very generous. Those donations, along with our investment returns for the 2013-14 fiscal year, resulted in another solid fiscal year for the Academy. Operating budget expenditures for the year (net of financial aid) were $47.6 million, an increase of only $100,000 over the prior year’s spending of $47.5 million; savings came from a reduction of $1.1 million of one-time general institutional expenses, while support for instruction and students increased by $725,000 or almost five percent. Thanks to another year of strong donor support for the annual fund and disciplined spending, once again the operating budget needed less support from the endowment than anticipated.
Brent M. Hale
A Report by Associate Head of School for Operations and Chief Financial Officer Keith Finan