Press Release

Letter to Community

May 8, 2012

Dear Linden Hill Community,

I write today on behalf of the Linden Hill Board of Trustees to convey some very important and difficult news regarding the future of our Linden Hill School.

It is well documented over the course of the past several years that Linden Hill School has experienced lower enrollment causing reduced tuition revenues against our total operating costs. Our school was already burdened with extraordinary debt and could ill afford the dramatic decline in revenues. Nonetheless, our community has responded courageously and above the call of duty, ensuring that our two most recent audits showed revenues that matched our expenses as a nonprofit entity in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This was a significant achievement.

We came to the understanding that our need for fundraising each year was growing at a rate that would exceed our small community’s ability to respond. We were, in short, rapidly approaching an inevitable closing of the school for lack of funds. We responded to this stark reality directly during the summer of 2011 to critically examine (1) our place in the LD/ADHD middle school market, (2) our programs to meet our population’s needs, (3) our staff’s skill sets to provide services to this population at the highest level and, finally, (4) our overall business model for sustainability. We came to the ultimate conclusion that we must take bold steps if we were going to have any chance of saving the school. At the same time, we recognized that those steps might not save the school. Nonetheless, making some dramatic changes was our only hope, however slim, of survival.

Thus in the fall of this 2011-2012 school year, we embarked on what we felt was a necessary effort to stem the tide of decreasing enrollment and enhanced pressure on our school’s donor base. Despite this effort and given the extreme pressure on the fundraising efforts and donors themselves over the past several years, it became increasingly evident that that we have exhausted the ability of our constituents to rescue the school from the ravages of a depressed economy and our significant enrollment declines. Recognizing this, the Board of Trustees determined that the current and projected expense of keeping Linden Hill School open is more than our community could bear or risk. Thus, the Board has voted to close Linden Hill after the end of this school year, June 8, 2012.

The changes that have caused this seemingly abrupt decision actually have very deep and long term roots. Since my arrival at Linden Hill in January of 2004, we have regularly borrowed from the bank of next year’s tuition deposits, banked for the ensuing school year, to finish paying the expenses of the current school year (sometimes beginning as early as March, before Q4 of our fiscal year). Each year, we forged ahead and made ends meet, rising and falling with each student lost or big gift received struggling to close huge gaps annually between tuition revenues and expenses. The cumulative effect of this existence was deleterious to our ability to provide the best of staffing and to maintain the highest consistency of expectation for each member of the community. Yet, despite it all, we opened and closed each school year having helped our boys along in their lives, thanks to the courage of our faculty, board, and parents.
Recent economic trends exacerbated the widening gap between tuition revenues and the total expense of running a strong school for our boys. These adverse conditions crested early in this spring as we looked at our 2011-2012 deficit of $1,500,000.00. Several large donors dug deeper into their pockets, and then doubled their gifts last year as well as this, allowing us to meet this disproportionate need for funding to balance last year’s and this year’s budgets. Thus, with the enrollment numbers being low again as we project into next year, and with the reality that our donors are literally and figuratively exhausted, the Board felt a responsibility to close the doors of Linden Hill School effective June 8, to ensure our ability to (1) provide a full school year to our current families, and (2) fully refund all deposits to families enrolled for next year’s program and for this summer program.

We are deeply saddened that we must make this decision regarding a school that has helped so many fine young men and their families. Our tradition has been a proud one as the oldest junior boarding school in America for boys with learning differences. We hope that through each of us who has been affiliated with our school, its legacy will live on.

We have budgeted and implemented a closing plan that will allow our boys to end this school year on schedule, and will allow us to pay our faculty for their work through the close of school. Again, we will fully refund all tuition deposits for the coming summer and 2012-2013 school year programs.

I want to thank each of you who contributed to our community over the course of its proud history. Our sadness cannot be quantified.

Peace be with all of you as you carry forth the legacy of Linden Hill School.

Sincerely,

James A. McDaniel