St. Paul's School (also known as St. Paul's or SPS) is a college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The school's , or 3.125 square mile, campus serves 540 students, who come from 37 states and 28 countries.
Established in 1856 to educate boys from upper-class families, St. Paul's later became one of the first boys' boarding schools to admit girls. U.S.-based families with annual household incomes of $150,000 or below generally attend for free.
The school's list of notable alumni includes U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Nobel laureate John Franklin Enders, and media baron William Randolph Hearst.
History
Early history In 1856, Boston physician George Cheyne Shattuck Jr., the future dean of Harvard Medical School, converted his summer home in Millville, New Hampshire (a satellite town of Concord) into a boarding school for boys. Inspired by the educational theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who believed that classroom learning should be balanced with the "direct experience of the senses," Shattuck wanted his two sons educated in the austere, bucolic countryside. He hoped that eventually, the school would "educate the sons of [other] wealthy inhabitants of large cities."
For the first fifty years of St. Paul's history, it was run by two brothers, Henry Augustus Coit (r. 1856–95) and Joseph Howland Coit (r. 1895–1906). An Anglophile, Henry Coit endeavored to make St. Paul's an American equivalent of an English public school, importing Anglicisms such as "forms," "removes," "evensong," and "matins." The school's religious services were Anglo-Catholic, and enrollment was initially limited to Episcopalians. In the 1890s, Coit also attempted to ban baseball in favor of cricket; the SPS cricket team toured New England and Canada.
SPS almost immediately attracted an upper-class clientele. Shattuck had attended Round Hill School, a short-lived experimental school that was "the most famous American school of its time." Founded in 1823, Round Hill was one of Harvard College's top feeder schools, and "offered an excellent but very expensive education" with "an elegant lifestyle," including "servants, stables, and tours of the estates of prominent Bostonians." Although it shut down in 1834, it left a strong impression on Shattuck, who believed that in the isolation of a boarding school, attentive teachers could better foster "physical and moral culture" in their students. Roughly 70 percent of Round Hill families eventually sent children to St. Paul's.
The school started with just three students,Khan, Shamus Rahman (2010-12-28). Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology) (p. 11). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. "Coit died in 1895, firmly at the helm until his final days. By the end of his forty-year tenure, St. Paul's had a faculty of 35 and a student body of 345." but grew quickly. By the mid-1860s, it was already filled to capacity, leading an SPS parent to establish St. Mark's School. Enrollment reached 204 students by 1878 and 345 students by 1895. Although the school (founded by Bostonians) was initially not associated with the New York upper class, SPS gradually extended its reach to New York and the Philadelphia Main Line. By 1894, there were only six students from Boston. In 1923, the school educated 199 students from New York and 26 from Massachusetts.
College feeder The Coits' immediate successor, Henry Ferguson (r. 1906–11), left after just five years. In 1910, Samuel Drury (r. 1911–38) assumed control of the school. He presided over what the school historian called its "Augustan age." Drury stayed at St. Paul's for twenty-seven years. Along the way, he declined the rectorship of Manhattan's Trinity Church—at the time the nation's wealthiest congregation—and the bishopric of Pennsylvania.
Like other leading New England prep schools of the period, SPS was not founded as a college-preparatory school: of the first 70 graduates, only five went directly to college. That is not to say they did not eventually go to college. Some early SPS alumni, including its first-ever student, simply took a gap year to attend cram schools like Dixwell's in Boston. However, by the Drury era, times were changing. Ferguson had recognized that parents were increasingly interested in sending their sons to college, but was not able to implement his ideas.
Drury turned SPS into one of America's most reliable feeder schools to Ivy League universities. Although Drury shared some of Henry Coit's skepticism about higher education—he once wrote in his annual report that a quarter of every St. Paul's class should be encouraged to forego college —he significantly improved St. Paul's academic reputation. He hired better teachers, tightened academic standards, and reestablished student discipline. Universities were attracted to the kind of well-schooled, upper-class young men that schools like St. Paul's produced in large quantities. In 1934, 95% of St. Paul's graduates matriculated at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In addition, in 1940 (shortly after Drury's death), 77 students applied to Harvard from the "St. Grottlesex" schools (of which St. Paul's was the largest member), and only one was rejected.
Drury also sought to democratize the student body and curtail snobbery among the richer students. Although St. Paul's was heavily oversubscribed—in 1920 it received over 1,600 applications for just over 100 openings—Drury set aside 10 slots a year for the winners of a competitive examination, dryly explaining that "we try to admit every son of an alumnus," but also "wish to admit every boy with high marks." A capable fundraiser, Drury raised the school's financial endowment from $1.1 million in 1920 to $3.6 million in 1930, and conducted a $1.6 million fundraising campaign that primarily went towards student financial aid. From 1920 to 1938, the share of SPS students on scholarship nearly tripled, from roughly 6% to 17%. Starting in 1922, Drury and his successors froze tuition at $1,400 for 22 consecutive years.
Turbulence and reform Norman Nash (r. 1939–47) guided the school through World War II before leaving to become the Bishop of Massachusetts. He was succeeded by Henry Kittredge (r. 1947–54), the first SPS rector who was not an Episcopal minister. Although Kittredge questioned colleges' increasing reliance on standardized tests in college admissions, he was generally able to sustain SPS' enviable college placement record. In 1953, SPS sent 78% of its students to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, second among New England boarding schools.
Under Matthew Warren (r. 1954–70), the school underwent significant changes. Tuition was increased to $1,800; applications increased significantly despite rising tuition, aided by an improving economy; and the campus was substantially renovated. As competition for spots at SPS increased, Warren conciliated the alumni, many of whom wanted to send their own sons to SPS. He announced that under his watch, SPS would not "use scholarship funds to entice the unusually able boy to our school." It was an ill-timed concession, as colleges were receiving the same flood of applications as boarding schools and took the opportunity to tighten their own standards for admission. By 1967 the proportion of SPS graduates going on to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton had nearly halved from 1953. Warren personally visited Yale president Kingman Brewster to ask him to reverse course. Brewster replied that Yale would accept students from the top 40% of the SPS class, but was no longer interested in bottom-half SPS students.Karabel, p. 357.
The school gradually opened its doors to a broader cross-section of America. The school scrapped its Episcopalians-only rule, although not without some hiccups. In 1939, Rose Kennedy withdrew Robert F. Kennedy from the school after just one month because she believed its culture was still anti-Catholic; in the late 1950s the school allowed John Kerry '62 to attend Mass off campus as long as he also attended the school's Episcopal Sunday chapel services later that day; and by the end of the 1960s, Catholics were no longer required to attend Protestant services on campus. Asian students have attended since 1949 at the latest, when future Mitsubishi Corporation CEO Minoru Makihara spent a postgraduate year at SPS. SPS' first black faculty member (John T. Walker) and student arrived in 1957 and 1959, respectively. Warren's last major achievement was coeducation: in May 1970, shortly before he stepped down, the board of trustees agreed to begin admitting girls in 1971. Nonetheless, the tail end of Warren's tenure marked the start of a turbulent period for St. Paul's. In 1968, students wrote an acerbic manifesto describing the school administration as an oppressive regime, and issued demands for change.
St. Paul's rode out the storm under Warren's successor William Oates (r. 1970–82). According to Alex Shoumatoff '64, Oates applied "the prevailing educational and developmental thinking of the day, that schools should not be repressive and that adolescents should be free to experiment and try out different identities." He conciliated the students by offering them the opportunity to participate in disciplinary decisions. He also accepted several of the demands that the students had made in 1968. In the following years, seated meals were reduced from three times a day to four times a week, courses were shortened to be terms (rather than years) long, mandatory (non-Sunday) chapel attendance was reduced to four times a week, and the school's grading system was changed to ease student competition. Oates doubled the size of the school's endowment with a $30 million fundraising campaign. He also expanded the arts program.
Emergence into modern era Shortly after Oates retired, SPS became part of the first class of private schools inducted into the National Blue Ribbon Schools Program, in the 1983–84 school year. However, by the 1980s and 1990s, the board of trustees wanted the administration to exercise a firmer hand over the school. They confronted St. Paul's emerging image (warranted or not) as a "party school"—a poll found that 80% of the students were using drugs—and sought to restore faculty discipline over the students. In July 2020, alumna Lacy Crawford wrote that in 1991, when she was a fifteen-year-old student, she had been raped by multiple SPS students. She accused SPS of a cover-up. The school issued a statement that it would "honor her desire that the school acknowledge its failings, accept responsibility, and work, not just promise, to do better." Crawford later disclosed that the school had issued her a written apology and that she was pleased with its response.
In 1992, the board appointed David Hicks (r. 1992–96) as rector and ordered him to improve the school's academic reputation, as "[n]obody had gone to Harvard in five years, except for legacies." Hicks introduced an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum which the school still employs today. Although the faculty eventually forced him to resign, the school rebounded academically. In 1996, SPS sent 39% of students to Ivy League colleges, the highest figure among a sample of 20 (mainly) Northeastern boarding schools, and 6% clear of its closest competitor. In 2001, it ranked fifth among boarding schools and fifteenth in the nation in a study of which schools sent the most students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.