Unrestricted Endowment
Challenge and Commitment:
Endowment Opportunities at Breck School
Breck’s Mission is to: Prepare each student for a college whose culture is compatible with the individual’s needs, interests and abilities; Help develop each student’s unique talents and potential to excel by nurturing independence and self-worth; Instill in each student a deep sense of social responsibility.
The Breck Mission Statement
The Challenge: Financial Security to Keep Breck Strong
With this strong statement to guide every aspect of daily life, Breck has built a school that is rich in human resources and is firmly committed to the essential ideals of high standards in teaching with a strong emphasis on values and on students’ intellectual, physical and emotional growth.
Today Breck is a national model for its commitment to a number of mission-based programs, including schoolwide service learning, modern language instruction beginning in kindergarten, and development of a multicultural curriculum.
Achieving excellence, however, comes with a correspondingly high price. And laying the groundwork for maintaining a high level of innovation into the future is more expensive still.
According to the National Association of Independent Schools, most independent schools consider an appropriate endowment goal to be two and one-half times the size of the operating budget. In the 2006-07 school year, with an endowment of $44 million and an operating budget of $27 million, Breck is about two-thirds there.
With a significant rise in its unrestricted endowment, the school would be better equipped to meet the challenges that lie ahead and avoid placing disproportionate pressure on tuition in order to maintain a balanced operating budget.
The Solution: An Increased Endowment
Adding to Breck’s endowment is an opportunity to assure that the school is strong enough to continue its most important work without financial constraint.
More specifically, an adequate endowment would help the school to:
- Enhance its ability to recruit and retain top faculty by offering competitive salaries, benefits and significant opportunities for professional development,
- Improve the socioeconomic diversity of the student body by increasing funding for financial aid, and
- Assure ability to provide state-of-the-art materials and equipment that support state-of-the-art curricular and extracurricular programs.
The Commitment: Investing in Breck’s Future
With the success of Breck’s New Century Campaign, which concluded in 2000, the school was able to increase its unrestricted endowment by $8.3 million. Still, a great deal more must be done.
Just as vigorously as Breck School has held onto its traditions, it also has embraced change in order to remain on the forefront, to offer a comprehensive curriculum, and to stay up to date in pedagogical design. Today, innovative changes and initiatives can be best pursued without restriction. An unrestricted endowment gift assures that the school can respond to future opportunities or emergencies as they arise. Gift restrictions in the new millennium may restrain the school at the moment it needs flexibility in both spending and investment. An unrestricted gift is a contribution of both money and choice.
The Breck Board of Trustees is committed to its fiduciary and moral responsibility to prepare the school well for the future. It invites the Breck family to consider the special value of an unrestricted endowment gift.
