At a March
19, 1998 meeting of the Brookline School Committee, Brookline’s Dexter
Southfield private school—which was then called Dexter School—received approval
for its proposal to expand its ninth-grade program at that time. A 1982 state
law had required that local school committees in Massachusetts vote to approve
the kind of program expansion that this private school was proposing.
But at this
same March 19, 1998 meeting, then-Brookline School Committee member Helen
Charlupski said, according to an April 2, 1998 Brookline Tab article by
Jeremy Pawloski, that the Newton Street private school officials “have
wonderful facilities, but they don’t share them with the town” and “there’s a
frustration with non-profits who do not see any responsibility to towns in
which they live.” The then-School Committee chairperson, Terry Kwan, also
observed that “this institution has been very recalcitrant about payment in
lieu of taxes to the town of Brookline.”
The same
1998 article noted that in 1997 then-Brookline Selectwoman Donna Kalikow and
other town officials had met with Dexter private school officials “in a
fruitless effort to secure community benefits for the town;” and that “an
example of Dexter’s lack of community involvement” was “the school’s failure to
allow the town to use its” then-new “indoor ice-skating rink at reduced
prices.”
Yet Dexter
Southfield may not be the only tax-exempt private school in Brookline that has
not, historically, provided either enough “payment in lieu of taxes to the Town
of Brookline” (to, for example, help fund Brookline’s underfunded public school
system) or enough “community benefits for the town.”
According to
the Town
of Brookline 1969 Tax Lists, a daughter of Lammot Du Pont, Mary Du Pont
Faulkner, apparently was assessed $15,043 in taxes on the property she still
owned in the 1960’s at 235 and 255 Goddard Avenue. But in 2016 the “non-profit”
Park School Corporation paid zero dollars in taxes on its private grade school
campus property at 171 Goddard Avenue, according to the data from an Exempt
Property Record Card that’s posted on the Town of Brookline Assessor’s website.
Yet between 2007 and 2016 the assessed valuation of the Park School
Corporation’s day school campus property increased from $25,906,000 to
$49,764,900.
As Jeremy
Pawloski noted in an April 19, 1998 Tab article, “though they use town
amenities, including police, fire and other municipal services, for free,”
Massachusetts’ constitution exempts private schools from paying property taxes.
Yet Pawloski also reported in the same 1998 article that “in Brookline…the town
has encouraged many local tax-exempt properties to make `payments in lieu of
taxes’,” but, according to then-Deputy Town Administrator Brian Sullivan,
“unfortunately for the town,” in 1998 “efforts to receive cash donations for
services” had “all but fallen flat.”
First
located in Brookline on Walnut Street when it was established (under a
different name) in 1888 and following the Park School Corporation’s formation
in 1923, the Park School was located in the 1960’s on 3.6 acres of land at
Kennard and Hedges Road (where the Brookline public school system’s Lincoln
grade school is now located).
But the Park
School’s board of trustees, which then included a grandson of Lammot Du Pont
and a son of Mary Du Pont Faulkner—Kim Faulkner—as one of its trustees, in the
late 1960’s “concluded that” its private school’s Kennard Road “site and
facilities were simply inadequate and that a new site should be acquired as
soon as possible,” according to the Park School Corporation 2007 Spring Bulletin.
So,
coincidentally, Park School Trustee Faulkner’s mother (who was born into an
extended family that was described by Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac as
“the wealthiest and most powerful dynasty in the United States” in 1991, “with
a family fortune of over $8.6 billion” at that time) then “gave Park the
incredibly generous gift of 14 acres of woods and fields on Goddard Avenue;”
and “ground was broken in December 1969 to build the `new’ Park School,”
according to the same 2007 Spring Bulletin. The donor of
“the incredibly generous gift” received by the Park School, had previously
inherited $250 million from her late father, Lammot Du Pont (who died in 1952),
according to Gerard Colby’s Du Pont Dynasty book.
In September
1971, the Park School then opened on 14 acres of its current 34-acre campus,
just across the street from Larz Anderson Park
(but on a different side of the park than Dexter Southfield’s campus);
and the additional 20 acres of its Brookline campus were acquired when Mary Du
Pont Faulkner donated 10 more acres of her Goddard Avenue property to the
tax-exempt private school in 1980, and her son and daughter-in-law gave the
Park School a first option to eventually buy the last 10 acres of the day
school’s campus.
In recent years,
around 540 grade school students have been enrolled in Brookline’s Park School
private school and nearly 5,500 grade school students have been enrolled
Brookline’s public schools. But although it paid less than $101 for the initial
14 acres of its Brookline campus that it received as a gift, the Park School
has apparently not been eager to establish an open admissions and free tuition
policy for all grade school age children of Brookline residents, whose parents
might wish to enroll them at the Park School (where the average class size has
been 14 students in recent years).
Instead, the “non-profit” Park School is
requiring most of the parents whose children are enrolled there to pay $32,490
for a first and second-grade classroom seat, $33,890 for a third, fourth and
fifth-grade classroom seat and $38,750 for a sixth, seventh and eighth-grade
classroom seat during the 2016-2017 academic year.
Like
Brookline’s Dexter Southfield private school, the Park School also claims to be
a “non-profit” educational operation. Yet according to the Park School
Corporation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2014, between July 1, 2014 and June
30, 2015, the Park School’s total revenues of $33,704,139 exceeded its total
expenses of $25,014,673 by $8,689,466; and its net assets increased from $63.5
million to $65.7 million during the same period. In addition, the value of the
tax-exempt Park School’s endowment increased from $43.8 million to $48.4
million between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015.
The same
Form 990 financial filing also indicated that between July 1, 2014 and June 30,
2015, the Park School paid both an annual base salary/total annual compensation
of $145,335 to former Head of School Jerry Katz and an annual base salary of
$248,895/total annual compensation of $411,840 to its then-Head of School
Michael Robinson. In addition, tax-exempt bonds of $9,435,000 on February 21,
2007 and $14,025,500 on April 1, 2012 were issued by the Massachusetts
Development Finance Agency to apparently finance and refinance private school
building construction costs, according to the same 2014 Form 990 financial
filing.
The Park
School’s board of trustees may still not be too interested in paying more
property taxes or payment in lieu of taxes to help the Town of Brookline fund
its public school system (which requires around $108 million each year to
operate); or in providing more community benefits (such as, for example, open
admissions and free tuition for all children of Brookline residents). One
reason might be because some of the wealthy folks on its board of trustees have
perhaps been more interested in apparently using hedge fund money to speculate
and attempt to profit from for-profit U.S. health industry firm stock
ownership, searching for lucrative real estate development deals, sitting on
U.S. federal court judicial benches or filling high Massachusetts state
government agency posts?
Park School
Trustee Conan Laughlin, for example, manages North Tide Capital (a $2.9 billion
hedge fund firm whose offices are located at 500 Boylston Street in Boston),
which apparently makes 88 percent of its speculative investments in for-profit
health care industry corporations like the following: Select Medical Holding
Corporation (in which it owned $163 million worth of stock in September 2016);
the Tivity Health Inc./Healthways fitness centers industry firm (on whose corporate
board Laughlin also sits); and the Community Health Systems chain of 158 for-profit
hospitals in 22 states (in which North Tide Capital owned $34.1 million worth
of stock in September 2016).
Coincidentally,
a 2015 study revealed that 7 of the 10 hospitals in the United States which
charged their uninsured patients the highest medical costs above what Medicare
allowed in 2012 were for-profit hospitals owned, operate or leased by Community
Health Systems [CHS]’s hospital chain affiliates. And according to a May 18,
2016 National Nurses United [NNU] labor union press release, “CHS has engaged
in rampant and serious unfair labor practices at their hospitals, including
terminating Registered Nurses [RN] leaders in a wide scale attempt to weaken
support for the union and forestall reaching initial collective bargaining
agreements.”
Another Park
School trustee, Seth Brennan, is a co-founder and Managing Partner of Lincoln
Peak Capital: a speculation/investment firm (with offices at 177 Huntington
Avenue in Boston) that is “focused exclusively on investing in asset management
firms” and which “currently has minority equity investments in five asset
management firms which collectively manage over $55 billion in assets,”
according to Lincoln Peak Capital’s website. In addition, Brennan also sits on
Artisan Partners Asset Management’s corporate board and the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum’s board of overseers.
The founder
of the Corbelis residential land development/dealmaking firm and the Henley USA
Head, Garrett Solomon, is also a Park School trustee. According to the
London-based Henley private equity real estate investment/dealmaking firm’s
website, in 2015 Henley “launched its first USA business” which “was
underpinned with the announcement of Henley USA headed by Garrett Solomon and
his team from Corbelis in Boston;” and it “has an active pipeline of deals” and
“is aiming to have a business the same size as its European operation within
short order,” where “total equity invested per deal currently range from $5
million to $150 million.”
Other
members of the Park School’s board of trustees in recent years have included: the
for-profit New Century Health CEO Atul Dhir; U.S. Federal Court Judge Denise
Jefferson-Casper; and the current Undersecretary and Chief Operating Officer of
the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development,
Stephanie Neal-Johnson. In addition, Boston Public Library Trustee Laura De Bonis,
a former Director of Library Partnerships for Google Book Service, has also sat
on the Park School’s board of trustees in recent years.
Perhaps
the time has come, however, for more local community-elected Brookline School
Committee members and local Town officials to now be included on the board of
trustees of “non-profit” Brookline private schools like the Park School (instead
of top executives and officials of external for-profit corporations or state
and federal external organizations)--in order to increase likelihood that
Brookline’s private schools begin serving the local community’s public interest
more in Brookline on their privately-controlled campus sites?
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