Doane Academy 'out to change the world' after $17M gift

Doane Academy, a small prep school in Burlington City, was "in pretty tired shape" when John McGee interviewed for the headmaster's job 15 years ago.

"Everyone felt tired and discouraged," he told a news conference Friday.

Enrollment across all 13 grades was only about 100, the aged brick buildings had grown unsafe, and "financially, we were really up against a wall."

But the threat of bankruptcy that once hovered over this quaint, 178-year-old campus has been banished, perhaps forever. McGee was on the dais to announce that philanthropist Henry Rowan and his wife, Eleanor, had made a "transformational" gift of $17 million to the school.

"Doane Academy is out to change the world," declared McGee, who said the Rowans' permanent endowment would help Doane boost its enrollment of about 220 pupils to 300.

The 91-year-old Rowan - an industrialist whose 1992 bequest of $100 million to Glassboro State College helped transform it into the research institution called Rowan University - appeared touched by the standing ovation he got from students and faculty crowded into timber-ceilinged Scarborough Hall, but did not speak.

The Rowans' donations to this leafy, 10-acre site overlooking the Delaware River would be the envy of any Ivy League university. In addition to the $17 million announced Friday, their family charitable foundation had already given $8.5 million, for a total of more than $25 million.

The terms of the new endowment stipulate that the school may spend only the interest it draws from its investment, and may use no more than a 5 percent annual return. Chancellor Van Sciver, the school's chief financial officer, said the fund would initially generate about $850,000 a year.

Among the previous donations was a $5 million gift in 2013 for a main building, to be called Rowan Hall. Designed in classical style by architect John Martin of Riverton, the brick, three-story structure will include classrooms, reception areas, and administrative offices.

"Dad's focus has always been on education," Rowan's daughter, Virginia Rowan Smith, told the audience, adding that he believes "nothing is more important."

Smith said that the school, with roots in the Episcopal Church, had "found a way to differentiate itself from many other schools of the same age group by focusing on education that develops the person," with particular focus on "strong ethical leadership."

"I know Dad was impressed with what John [McGee] did here," said Smith, who praised the ethnically and economically diverse student body as "impressive, smart, articulate, and polite - and they have good ideas."

She said that it was in a chance conversation in 1999 with a young waitress who was a senior at Doane that she first learned about the school, and that she later introduced her father to it.

At the close of the news conference, the gathering filed outside to the riverbank. There, in the shadow of the Burlington-Bristol Bridge, officials dedicated a flagpole named in Rowan's honor, and raised its giant American flag for the first time.

The chill, brisk wind sent it snapping north toward Burlington Island. "Isn't it beautiful?" Eleanor Rowan murmured to her husband, who nodded.

"It's wonderful to be in a position to do this much good," Elizabeth White Fineburg, a 1960 graduate, remarked as Rowan walked, with the help of two canes, back inside Scarborough Hall.

The retired superintendent of the Morrisville, Bucks County, school district, Fineburg said the school had "really cultivated the qualities you need for good, sustainable ethics and leadership."

"I wouldn't have stood a chance without this school," she said. "It made all the difference in my life."

Throughout the morning, construction crews were erecting steel for Rowan Hall, whose ground floor will be named St. Mary's Hall. It is a nod to the original name of the school, which began as a boarding school for girls in 1837.

It later became a day school and admitted boys, and changed its name to St. Mary's Hall-Doane Academy, the latter a reference to its founder, Bishop George Washington Doane. At Henry Rowan's urging, the school dropped its confusing dual name in 2008 and settled on Doane Academy.

All youngsters are urged to join a team sport and other extracurricular activities, and each child is assigned to a "family" composed of one pupil from each grade.

"You meet with the whole family once every other week," said Kelsey Doell, 17, of Langhorne.

"You play games and you become closer," said Doell, a senior who started there in seventh grade and is now student council president. "They really do become your second family."

She said she hoped to return to Doane after graduating from college to teach and help other children "find who they are, and find the leadership within them."