Episcopal Academy closes on goal for epic project
The Main Line school is approaching what it needs to fund its move to Newtown Square.
Episcopal Academy is nearly two-thirds of the way toward reaching the $90 million goal of a capital campaign that will help underwrite the costs of building the school's new campus in Newtown Square.
Officials said yesterday that the private school has raised $57 million.
Money from the capital campaign, as well as proceeds from the sale of Episcopal's existing campuses in Merion and Devon, will pay the $212 million cost of creating the 123-acre campus in Delaware County.
Episcopal, which was founded in 1785, enrolls 1,100 students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
Constructing the new campus with seven major buildings is "one of the largest financing projects" begun by a private pre-K-through-12 school in the country, according to experts.
Major gifts to Episcopal's campaign include a $5 million grant the Annenberg Foundation awarded in 2003 to build the Roger Annenberg Memorial Library and Learning Center.
Son of the late Walter H. Annenberg, Roger Annenberg graduated from Episcopal magna cum laude in 1958, attended Harvard University and died of an overdose of sleeping pills when he was 22. The Annenberg Foundation has supported many projects at Episcopal over the years.
The two-story library will occupy a wing of the Campus Center. Plans call for it to house 8,000 reference books, 25,000 works of nonfiction, 8,500 volumes of fiction and 15,000 videos and DVDs. Designed by the Gund Partnership of Cambridge, Mass., the facility will offer 56 study carrels, 36 computer stations, two classrooms, project rooms and work rooms.
Episcopal's new campus is slated to open in the fall of 2008.
Brian Tierney, publisher of The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, is a member of Episcopal Academy's board of trustees and has pledged a gift of more than $1 million to the capital campaign.