During the 2015-2016 school year,
around 8,000 students were enrolled in Brookline’s public schools. In Brookline
High School, for example, around 1,800 students were enrolled in 2015-2016; and
it’s anticipated that by 2023 Brookline’s public school system will need to
find enough public high school classroom seats for 2,600 enrolled public high
school students.
Brookline’s public school students,
however, are not the only elementary, junior high school or high school age
students enrolled in a school in Brookline. At 20 Newton Street, on a 36-acre
campus hilltop estate, opposite Larz Anderson Park and the Antique Auto Museum,
around 825 students are enrolled, for example, at a “non-profit” private school
called Dexter Southfield, whose entrance is located on St. Paul’s Avenue off
Newton Street.
In 1966 the then all-male Dexter
School purchased its 36-acre Newton Street property for $520,000 and soon began
constructing a Brookline campus containing 69 classrooms in four buildings,
athletic facilities and art studios. In addition, Dexter Southfield also has a
Rowing Center, located on the Charles River, just 4 miles away in Dedham.
According to the Exempt Property
Record Card data for 20 Newton Street, that’s posted on the Town of Brookline
Assessor’s Office website, the valuation of Dexter Southfield’s Brookline real
estate increased from $37.2 million in fiscal year 2007 to $78.3 million in
fiscal year 2017, yet its fiscal year 2017
town real estate tax payment bill was zero dollars. In addition,
according to its Form 990 financial filing for 2014-2015, the value of the
“non-profit” Dexter Southfield private school’s endowment fund on June 30, 2015
was over $30 million.
An “Upper School” secondary school
was not established on Dexter Southfield’s Brookline campus until 2002, when
the school was still called the Dexter School; and following its merger with
the Southfield private all-female day school in 2013, the name of the private
school was changed to Dexter Southfield. Despite this 2013 merger, however,
according to Dexter Southfield’s website, “the school will always operate
under”” a “core belief that boys and girls benefit from distinct paths of
learning;” and except for some selected special advanced high school level
classes, all pre-8th grade classes and most secondary school classes
apparently don’t include both male and female students in the same classroom.
Dexter Southfield’s website also notes that “transportation to and from the
School” for its students “is provided by our fleet of faculty-driven school
buses from central locations throughout Greater Boston, Metro West, and the
South Shore.”
The Town of Brookline doesn’t charge
an admissions fee for any Dexter Southfield private school student, parent,
teacher or administrator who might wish to play across the street in
Brookline’s Larz Anderson Park on weekdays or weekends. But Brookline parents
in the neighborhood whose sons or daughters were accepted for admission to
Dexter Southfield’s campus were generally required to cough up a tuition fee of
$43,175 for a 6th, 7th or 8th grader and
$46,670 for a 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th
grader, in order for their child to be allowed to enter the Dexter Southfield
classrooms during the 2016-2017 school year.
Among the special educational
advantages provided the 825 private school students enrolled at Dexter
Southfield is that only 14 other students are generally sitting in each class
that a student takes. So, presumably, each classroom teacher can provide more
special attention and personal instruction to individual Dexter Southfield
private school students than what a Brookline public school student might
receive in most Brookline public school classrooms, where the average class
size is 21 students, rather than 15, like it is in Dexter Southfield.
The Dexter Southfield private school
claims in its Form 990 financial filing for 2014-2015 to be non-discriminatory
in its admissions policy. Yet its website indicates that only 15 percent of its
students are “students of color;” and, as late as the 2013-2014 school year,
The Handbook
of Private Schools indicated that only 2 percent of Dexter Southfield’s
male students were African-American in racial background.
Not surprisingly, Dexter Southfield
is governed by a board of trustees whose members include folks with business,
professional or family links to corporations, Wall Street investment banks,
corporate law firms and various tax-exempt “non-profit” institutions that might
be considered economically exploitative by some of Brookline’s 21st-century
working-class and middle-class residents.
K & L Gates corporate law firm
partner William Shaw McDermott, for example, has been the president of Dexter
Southfield’s board of trustees since 1991; and according to the website of K
& L Gates, the law firm’s corporate clients include The Goldman Sachs
Group, Halliburton, Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Wells Fargo,
Starbuck’s, Duke Energy, E.I. DuPont du Nemours, United Technologies,
Honeywell, Viacom, CBS, One Lincoln Street Boston, John Hancock Financial and
Education Management Corporation. McDermott also is a member of the Harvard
School of Public Health Leadership Council and has been a trustee of Deaconess
Hospital or overseer of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital since 1990.
Despite being the board of trustees
president of a private school located in Brookline, however, K & L Gates
Partner McDermott has apparently been less interested in establishing an open
admissions and free tuition policy at the Dexter Southfield secondary school,
for all high school students whose families reside in Brookline that wish to
attend his school, than in being involved in Dedham, Massachusetts town
politics. Since 2005, McDermott has, for example, been the president of the
Citizens for Dedham Neighborhood Alliance; and he also is both a Dedham,
Massachusetts Town Meeting Member and the co-chairman of Dedham’s Master Plan
Committee.
Other members of the Dexter
Southfield board of trustees include: former Managing Director of The Goldman
Sachs Group Scott Barringer; Thomas H. Lee Partners
investment/stock-speculation firm Co-Chair and Dunkin Brands/Dunkin
Donuts/Baskin Robbins corporate board member Anthony Di Novi; and Welch &
Forbes LLC Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager Charles Thorndike
Haydock.
Kraft Group President Jonathan
Kraft—the son of the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots who also
owns a stake in the Ultimate Fighting Championship [UFC] mixed martial arts
promotion company, Robert Kraft—is also, coincidentally, a member of Dexter
Southfield’s board of trustees. Besides sitting on Dexter Southfield’s
governing board, Jonathan Kraft (whose father’s personal wealth was estimated
to be $5.2 billion in 2016 by Forbes magazine) also is a
Massachusetts General Hospital [MGH] trustee who chairs the MGH board of
trustees’ Finance Committee, a member of Harvard Business School’s Board of
Dean’s Advisers, the Williams College Investment Committee’s Chair and a
Williams College Trustee Emeritus, and a trustee of another private school, the
Belmont Hill School.
The tax-exempt Dexter Southfield
private school in Brookline claims to be “non-profit.” But according to its
Form 990 financial filing for 2014-2015 between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015,
Dexter Southfield’s total revenue of $36,077,974 exceeded the school’s total
expenses of $32,783,379 by $3,294,595; and the value of the school’s total net
assets increased from $24.5 to $24.8 million. Yet the tax-exempt Dexter
Southfield private school paid zero dollars in U.S. federal income tax during
the same period (although it has also apparently benefited from millions of
dollars in Massachusetts Development Financing Agency-issued tax-exempt bonds
financing in 21st-century).
The $36 million that Dexter
Southfield collected included over $29.5 million from tuition and fee payments
from families of enrolled students, over $2.4 million from grant contributions
and $2.2 million from stocks and bonds portfolio investment income.
Over $16 million of the $36 million
that Dexter Southfield earned from its “non-profit” private school operation
was used to pay salaries of Dexter Southfield’s 105 employees. Between July 1,
2014 and June 30, 2015, for example, Head of School Todd Vincent was paid a
total annual compensation of $331,664, including an annual base salary of $284,
652, by the Brookline private school (while the annual base salary of the
Superintendent of Brookline’s public school system is apparently just $170,115).
The Head of School’s wife was also employed by Dexter Southfield and paid an
annual salary of $62,500; and according to its Form 990 financial filing for
2014 “Head of School Todd Vincent lives in campus housing provided by the
school.”
In recent months, there has been much
discussion in Brookline about whether or not public tax money should be
diverted from unionized non-charter public schools in Massachusetts in order to
create more, generally non-unionized, publicly-funded charter schools in the
Commonwealth; and about whether or not a new public school building in
Brookline should be constructed for $95 million on the 2.7 acre Baldwin School
land site on Heath Street.
Yet until the well-heeled folks who
control Massachusetts private schools like Dexter Southfield are politically
pressured to help fund Brookline’s public school system more and to prioritize
serving community educational needs—by perhaps enrolling for free more
working-class and middle-class students whose parents live in Brookline and
sharing land space on its 36-acre campus with Brookline’s public school system—students
in under-funded and overcrowded Brookline public schools may be in danger of
not receiving, during the next 8 years, the same schooling advantages received
by Dexter Southfield students.
