Groton School is a private college-preparatory day and boarding school located in Groton, Massachusetts. It is affiliated with the Episcopalian tradition.
Groton School | |
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Address | |
282 Farmers Row , 01450 | |
Coordinates | 42°35′36.04″N 71°35′03.23″W / 42.5933444°N 71.5842306°W |
Information | |
Type | Private day and boarding school |
Motto | Cui servire est regnare ("In whose [God's] service is perfect freedom" (Book of Common Prayer) / "To serve [God] is to reign" (Lumen gentium)) |
Religious affiliation(s) | Episcopal Church |
Established | 1884 |
Headmaster | Temba Maqubela |
Grades | 8–12 |
Gender | Coeducational |
Enrollment | 378 (2023–24) |
Campus type | Suburban/rural |
Athletics conference | Independent School League |
Nickname | Zebras |
Accreditation | NEASC |
Endowment | $475 million |
Website | www |
Groton enrolls about 380 boys and girls from the eighth through twelfth grades, dubbed Forms II-VI in the British fashion. Its $475 million endowment enables the school to admit students on a need-blind basis. 40–44% of students are on financial aid. Students with family incomes under $80,000 attend for free, and families making $120,000 typically pay no more than $5,000.
The school admitted 8% of applicants in 2022. Its list of notable alumni includes U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Groton School was founded in 1884 by Endicott Peabody, an Episcopal clergyman.[1][2] Peabody was backed by Harvard president Charles Eliot and affluent figures of the time, such as Peabody's father Samuel Peabody, Phillips Brooks, William Lawrence, William Crowninshield Endicott, and J. P. Morgan.[3] The school also enjoyed the patronage of the Roosevelt family, as Theodore Roosevelt was one of Peabody's close friends.[4][5] Local landowners James and Prescott Lawrence donated the land for the campus, as there was no Episcopal church in town.[6] The school chapel served as the town's parish church until 1950.[7]
Peabody served as headmaster for fifty-six years. A proponent of "muscular Christianity," he instituted a Spartan educational system that included cold showers and dormitory cubicles instead of individual bedrooms.[10][11] He successfully attracted the children of wealthy families,[12][13] whom he hoped to toughen up through this program of "corrective salutary deprivation."[10]
Under Peabody, Groton sought to inspire its students to serve the public good, rather than enter professional life.[14] In peacetime, many graduates were involved in public affairs,[15][16] but the alumni typically gravitated to business, finance, law, or similar professional positions.[17][18] In wartime, the school's ethos of public service played a more prominent role. 475 of Groton's 580 military-age alumni served in World War I; 24 died and another 36 were wounded, at a time when the graduating class contained roughly 27 students.[19][20] Roughly 700 alumni served in World War II, with 31 deaths.[21]
Peabody also expected his students to "be ready for advanced courses at the universities."[14] He sought to improve the academic qualities of the student body, introducing competitive entrance examinations and a scholarship program in 1907.[22][23][24] (One such scholarship student, Henry Chauncey '23, went on to popularize the Scholastic Aptitude Test with American universities.[25]) Since even Ivy League universities could not always be counted on for financial aid at the time, Peabody also helped certain students pay for college. Chauncey was able to transfer from Ohio State to Harvard after Peabody arranged for a Groton donor to subsidize the cost,[26] and Peabody gave the 1940 valedictorian John B. Goodenough a tutoring job to help make ends meet after the latter was admitted to Yale.[27][28]
Peabody was succeeded by John Crocker '18, the Episcopal chaplain at Princeton University.[29] Crocker's 25-year tenure overlapped with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. In September 1951, Groton accepted its first African-American student.[30][31] In April 1965, Crocker and his wife—accompanied by 85 Groton students—marched with Martin Luther King Jr. during a civil rights demonstration in Boston.[32] (Four years earlier, Southern authorities had arrested Crocker's son John Jr. '42 during the Freedom Rides, leading to the Supreme Court case Pierson v. Ray.[33]) Crocker also significantly expanded the school's financial aid program; by his retirement in 1965 approximately 30% of Groton students were on scholarship.[34]
After Crocker, Groton cycled through three brief Headmasterships: Bertrand Honea Jr. (1965–69), Paul Wright (1969–74), and Rowland Cox (1974–77).[35][36][37] These years were marked by disputes over how (if at all) to implement co-education at Groton. Honea proposed either merging with a girls' school or formalizing a sister-school relationship with Concord Academy, a well-regarded girls' school twenty miles away.[38][39] (Concord declined Groton's offer to help relocate the academy to the town of Groton, and mooted the issue by opening its doors to boys in 1971.[40][41]) Following Honea's departure, Wright proposed an organic transition to co-education by expanding the student body from 225 to 300 students; this plan eventually won over the Board of Trustees.[42] After Wright reached Groton's mandatory retirement age, the Board tapped Cox to implement the plan.[43] Groton welcomed its first female students in 1975.[42] Applications tripled,[44] and today, Groton's student body is evenly split between boys and girls.[42]
The new headmasters also relaxed some of the more Spartan aspects of Peabody's Groton in response to changing preferences within the American upper class, which increasingly favored private day schools over boarding schools.[45][46] They replaced the sleeping cubicles with proper bedrooms, added more holidays to the academic calendar, relaxed the dress code, authorized a school newspaper, and gave students more free time over the weekends to explore the town of Groton or their own personal interests.[47][48] However, some traditions remain, such as the school's commitment to public service, its small community, and its attachment to the Episcopal Church.
In the spring of 1999, the Middlesex County District Attorney began investigating the claims of three Groton seniors, who alleged that they, and other students, had been sexually abused by other students in dormitories in 1996 and 1997.[49][50] During the school's investigation of the matter, another student brought a similar complaint to the school's attention. In 2005, the school pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor charge of failing to report the latter student's sexual abuse complaint to the government and paid a $1,250 fine. The school issued an apology to the victims, and the civil suit stemming from the first student's complaint was settled out of court.[51][52] In the fall of 2006, as part of the settlement, the school published a full apology to the boy who first alleged the abuse in 1999.
Groton reached its modern form under William Polk '58 (1978–2003) and Richard Commons (2003–13), who significantly upgraded the campus' buildings and grounds and internationalized the admissions process; and the current Headmaster, the South African Temba Maqubela (2013–present).[53][54][55][56] In recent years the school has focused on broadening affordability. In 2008, Groton, Andover, and Exeter began offering free tuition to families with household incomes below $75,000 (now $80,000).[57][58][59] From 2014 to 2018, the school conducted a $74 million fundraising campaign that allowed it to begin admitting students on a need-blind basis.[60][61]
Members of the Groton community continue to play a notable role in the secondary school community. At present, former Groton masters are the heads of school at Cranbrook (Aimeclaire Roche, also president of the national Heads and Principals Association),[62][63] St. Paul's (Kathleen Giles),[64] St. Albans Upper School (Sam Schaffer),[65] Dana Hall (Katherine Bradley),[66] Salisbury (William Webb),[67] and Brewster International (Craig Gemmell),[68] among others.[69]
The Form of 2023's average combined SAT score was 1490 and its average combined ACT score was 33.5.[71] The school's 4:1 student-teacher ratio[71] allows the school to offer a variety of courses and an individualized study program for seniors whose academic interests have gone beyond the regular curriculum.[72] Although not every department at Groton offers formal Advanced Placement classes (for example, English[73] and History[74] generally do not), Groton students took 2,582 AP exams (approximately 6.5 per student) from 2018 to 2022 and passed 93% of them.[71]
Groton has historically served as a feeder school for Harvard College. From 1906 to 1932, 405 Groton students applied to Harvard and 402 were accepted.[75][76]
There were at least three major reasons for this level of success. First, even Ivy League schools accepted most of their applicants until after World War II and the Korean War, when veterans armed with G.I. Bill funding vastly expanded the pool of talent.[77][78] (Stanford, which accepted seven of every eight applicants in 1951, was rejecting four of every five by 1965.[79]) Second, Groton students often performed well on college entrance examinations. From 1906 to 1934, only six students received perfect scores on the English component of the College Boards (the predecessor to the SAT), and four were Groton alumni.[80] Third, even when Groton produced middling students, elite colleges were often willing to admit them anyway. Many Groton students had parents who had attended Ivy League schools;[81] as such, they enjoyed preferential treatment from college admissions offices.[78] Others were so wealthy or famous that elite schools were willing to admit them in spite of their academic limitations.[82] One especially rich Groton boy did so poorly in school that Endicott Peabody threatened to ban him from applying to Harvard.[83] Despite "appalling" scores on his entrance exams, Harvard admitted him anyway.[84] (In those days, a student did not actually have to pass his entrance exams to be admitted.[85])
By the 1960s, a new system was emerging. Even Groton alumnus and trustee McGeorge Bundy '36[86] (the faculty dean at Harvard[87]) commissioned a report urging Harvard to diversify its student body and to give greater weight to academic excellence in undergraduate admissions.[88] In 1960, Groton's 75th anniversary book accurately warned that "a problem now exists which Dr. Peabody never had to face. ... Groton's old superiority is challenged ... by boys who come from public schools all over the country. As one [Yale] dean said to me, 'There has been a dramatic rise in the academic competence of Yale's students during the last few years. The best of the present are no better than the best of previous years; there are simply more of them.'"[89]
Groton has contributed to several other educational institutions.
In 1909, Bishop Charles Henry Brent founded Baguio School (now Brent International School Baguio) in Baguio, Philippines to educate the children of American colonial administrators, military personnel, missionaries, and businesspeople.[90][91] The school's first headmaster was Remsen B. Ogilby, a former Groton teacher,[92] and Peabody lent the school Guy Ayrault, who became its first assistant headmaster.[93] Peabody's son Malcolm '07 ran the school from 1911 to 1913.[94] The school sought to be a "determinedly American institution" in Southeast Asia until the Philippines gained their independence in 1946.[95]
In 1926, Peabody founded Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts. Groton was heavily oversubscribed, and the introduction of competitive examinations in 1907 had not meaningfully trimmed the waitlist.[96][97] Peabody did not want to increase the size of the school,[98] but also did not want to turn away too many parents.[99] Accordingly, he raised over $200,000 from Groton donors to build a new school,[100] which, like Groton, would be Episcopalian and small enough to be familial.[101] He also picked his former student Frank D. Ashburn '21 to lead it, and chaired its board of trustees.[102] At Brooks, Ashburn sought to replicate Groton's emphasis on "stern Christian principles ... to train boys for life," but veered away from the "character-building cold showers that had been a dreaded prebreakfast ritual at Groton."[103]
Groton currently supports Epiphany School, an academically intensive, tuition-free, lottery-admission Episcopal middle school for at-risk youth in the Boston area.[104] The school was founded by John Finley '88,[105] and Groton headmaster William Polk previously served on Epiphany's board.[106] Epiphany's academic year is 11 months long,[107] and the entire school relocates to Groton's campus in the summer.[108]
Groton's acceptance rate normally hovers around 12%.[109][110][111][112] Applications increased by 20% during the COVID-19 pandemic, driving the acceptance rate down to 9% in 2021 and 8% in 2022.[113][114] Since then, the school has not published its acceptance rate.
In 2016, Business Insider ranked Groton as the most selective boarding school in the United States.[110] In 2024, the website Private School Review repeated this ranking, although it did not say whether it confirmed this information with Groton.[115]
Groton admits students on a need-blind basis.[116] At the start of the 2018–19 school year, 18 of Groton's 96 incoming students were siblings of current students, and another 5 were children of school employees.[117]
In the 2022–23 school year, Groton enrolled 26 eighth graders (in school jargon, "Second Formers"), 81 freshmen ("Third Formers"), 87 sophomores ("Fourth Formers"), 92 juniors ("Fifth Formers"), and 91 seniors ("Sixth Formers"), for a total enrollment of 377 students.[118][119]
Race and ethnicity | Groton | Massachusetts | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
White | 47.5% | 69.6% | ||
Asian | 23.5% | 7.7% | ||
Black | 8.7% | 9.5% | ||
Hispanic | 12.9% | 13.1% | ||
Multiracial | 7.4% | 2.7% |
When Groton was founded in 1884, American boarding schools primarily catered to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. St. Paul's accepted only students with "sound Episcopal credentials,"[122] and in 1885 Andover admitted a Jew "[f]or the first time in twelve years."[123] Although Groton was open to Jews and non-Episcopalian Christians (for example, the Presbyterian Theodore Roosevelt[4][124] and the Jewish Otto Kahn[125] both sent their sons to Groton), the results were not substantially different.
In Groton's early years, most of its students came from wealthy families in New York; some others came from New England.[126] A 1902 graduate recognized that "[n]inety-five percent of these boys came from what they considered the aristocracy of America. Their fathers belonged to the Somerset, the Knickerbocker, the Philadelphia or the Baltimore Clubs. Among them was a goodly slice of the wealth of the nation."[13] Accordingly, schools like Groton considered it their mission "to make virtuous and brave those who, through the accident of birth, would someday exercise great power and influence."[10]
In the 2023–24 school year, 46% of Groton students identified as students of color, and 15% commuted to school from towns and cities in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.[71] In addition, 7% of the student body were international students; they came from 25 countries.[71]
In the 2023–24 school year, Groton charged boarding students $59,995 and day students $46,720, plus other optional and mandatory fees.[116] Typically, 40–44% of students are on financial aid,[116][127][128][129] which covers, on average, $46,519 for boarding students and $32,371 for day students.[116] The school's policy is that students with family incomes under $80,000 pay nothing to attend. In addition, students with family incomes under $120,000 typically pay no more than $5,000.[116]
In 2014, Groton adopted a policy of restricting frontline tuition below that of its competitors. In 2022, it was the least expensive school among a sample of 40 peer schools.[130] However, after financial aid is taken into consideration, other boarding schools may still offer competitive tuition packages once a student is admitted. For example, at Lawrenceville, boarding tuition for 2023–24 was $76,080 (roughly $16,000 more than Groton), but the average aid grant for boarding students was around $60,000 (roughly $13,000 more than Groton).[131][132] (At most New England boarding schools, including Groton, scholarship students constitute a minority of the student body.[133])
Groton's financial endowment stands at $475 million.[71] In its Internal Revenue Service filings for the 2021–22 school year, Groton reported total assets of $623.4 million, net assets of $537.3 million, investment holdings of $471.1 million, and cash holdings of $3.1 million. Groton also reported $37.8 million in program service expenses and $7.8 million in grants (primarily student financial aid).[134]
Groton is an independent (private) school accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.[135] The school was initially organized as a charitable trust.[136] In 1893, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act reorganizing the school into a non-profit corporation governed by a board of trustees.[136] The Groton board is composed of alumni, parents of current and former students, and the Headmaster.[137] The Articles of Incorporation have been amended only twice since 1893: to enable girls to attend Groton,[138] and to change the name of the legal entity from Trustees of Groton School to (simply) Groton School.[139]
Groton does not participate in either the Eight Schools Association or the Ten Schools Admissions Organization.[140][141] Outside of athletics, Groton has collaborated with other independent schools on a primarily ad hoc basis. For example, after the Kent State shootings, Groton, St. Paul's, Andover, and Exeter held an emergency meeting to discuss how boarding schools should respond to growing student unrest.[142] Groton also worked with St. Paul's, Andover, Deerfield, and Hotchkiss to create the Gateway to Prep Schools application portal.[143] The current headmaster, Temba Maqubela, sits on the board of the Heads and Principals Association.[63]
As an independent school, Groton is not dependent on public funding.[144] However, private schools are still eligible for government grants and indirect assistance. The Massachusetts Development Finance Agency has issued tax-exempt bonds to finance renovations and/or new buildings at Groton,[145] Andover,[146] Deerfield,[147][148] St. Mark's,[149] and Nobles.[150] The schools are still required to pay back the bonds on their own, but obtain tax benefits and more attractive repayment terms by working with the government.[145]
Groton has a 480-acre campus,[71] including academic buildings, dormitories, athletic fields, and undeveloped land for conservation.[151] The campus layout and landscape was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park in New York City and the campuses of many high schools and universities.[152] The school's core buildings are arranged around a (mostly) circular lawn, and "The Circle" is the primary metonym for Groton's campus.[153] In 2018, Architectural Digest named Groton the most beautiful private high school campus in Massachusetts.[154]
The earliest surviving buildings on campus surround the Circle. Most of them were designed by Peabody & Stearns between 1884 and 1902.[155] These buildings include the Brooks House dormitory (1884), the Fives Court (1890), the Hundred House dormitory (1891), the Schoolhouse (1899),[156][157] and the old gymnasium (1902), the latter of which is now the dining hall.[158] In 1900, Henry Vaughan built St. John's Chapel to replace his earlier chapel (now the Sacred Heart Church of Groton), which the school donated to the local Catholic community in 1904.[159][160]
Other architects who worked at Groton include Graham Gund (Campbell Performing Arts Center), R. Clipston Sturgis (Sturgis House and Gardner House), McKim, Mead & White (Norton House), and Henry Forbes Bigelow (Cutting House).[155][161] More recently, the school built a solar battery farm and a net-zero emissions faculty residence to improve energy efficiency on campus.[162][163]
The school's athletic facilities include the Athletic Center (which contains two hockey rinks, three basketball courts, twelve squash courts, and a swimming pool), a crew boathouse on the Nashua River,[164][165] and 18 tennis courts.[166] The school is also building a track and field complex, which is scheduled to open in spring 2024.[167]
Groton's sports teams compete in the Independent School League (ISL), a group of boarding and day schools in Greater Boston.[173] The ISL prohibits non-need-based financial aid, although as previously noted, Groton already accepts students on a need-blind basis.[174][116] Moreover, unlike the Six Schools League[175][176] and the Founders League[177] (two academically similar athletic conferences), the ISL prohibits member schools from recruiting post-graduate students for their sports teams.[178]
Like other ISL schools, Groton athletes play different sports based on the three terms of the academic year. In the fall, students can choose between cross-country, field hockey (girls), football (boys), soccer, and volleyball (girls). In the winter, the choices are basketball, ice hockey, squash, and swimming. In the spring, the choices are baseball (boys), crew, lacrosse, tennis, and track & field.[179]
The Groton football team has produced three national championship-winning college football coaches, including four-time champion Percy Haughton,[180] and four members of the College Football Hall of Fame.[180][181][182][183] In 1905, when Stanford, California, Columbia, Northwestern, and Duke were dropping football in the name of player safety,[184] Endicott Peabody persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to push the remaining universities to make the game safer by reforming the rules of football; this resulted in the legalization of the forward pass, the rule requiring 10 yards for a first down, and the creation of the neutral zone.[185][186]
The Groton boys' crew has won nine New England championships[187] and has produced five Olympic gold medalists (and twelve Olympic rowers overall).[188] The younger girls' crew has won four New England championships[187] and has produced world champion Liane Malcos '96.[189] Both teams send crews to the Henley Royal Regatta and Henley Women's Regatta with some regularity.[190][191]
Groton's sports rival is St. Mark's School. The two schools began playing in 1886 and contest the fifth-oldest high school football rivalry in the United States.[192] The rivalry began when the St. Mark's trustees rejected Endicott Peabody for their vacant headmaster position on the basis that the bylaws required the headmaster to be an Episcopal priest and Peabody had not yet been ordained,[193] only to turn around and hire a different layperson (William Peck) for the job.[194] In 1887, Peck refused to allow St. Mark's to play Groton because Groton (whose student body was considerably smaller than St. Mark's' at the time) insisted on allowing Peabody and his deputy William Greenough Thayer to play on the varsity.[195] The rivalry took on a friendlier tone when Peck left St. Mark's and the Southborough school hired Thayer for the now-open headmaster position.[196]
Groton did not play St. Paul's School in football until 1919; in fact, the two teams would play only twice in the first fifty years of Groton's existence.[197] However, Groton and SPS would eventually play each other in the ISL for over forty years.[198] When SPS withdrew from the ISL in 2016, Groton and SPS agreed to play each other in all sports on an out-of-conference basis.[174] Since then, both schools have occasionally referred to this matchup (which does have a trophy attached to it) as a rivalry.[199][200]
Groton also plays its neighbor Lawrence Academy in various sports, but because the ISL is split into different divisions for football and hockey, matchups are less frequent.[201][202]