The Lincoln Academy Development Office, which raises money for the private Newcastle high school, has collected almost $10 million in donations since its 1996 founding.
Lincoln Academy Development Director Kathe Cheska expects the office to reach the landmark as it wraps up the 2013 annual campaign and the capital campaign for a new applied technology and engineering center nears the homestretch.
“When we started this office, nobody dreamed we would raise this kind of money,” Cheska said.
Donations have built the Alumni Dining Commons and Courtyard and the Ryder Science Wing, purchased laptops for every student, renovated the Parker B. Poe Theater and replaced the tennis courts.
Lincoln Academy hopes to break ground on the next big project, the technology center, this summer. The school has $1.45 million of its $1.7 million goal on hand.
Another $2.12 million in donations earns interest in various endowment funds.
The interest from the general endowment goes into the operating budget to supplement tuition, while the interest from other funds provides scholarships for Lincoln Academy students.
The annual campaign donations and the income from the general endowment supplement tuition by about $500 per student, Cheska said.
If Lincoln Academy was a public school, the entire operating budget and the millions of dollars of capital projects would all likely come from state and local taxes.
The idea of supplementing tuition was exactly what late Lincoln Academy Head of School Howard Ryder had in mind when he founded the Development Office in 1996, Cheska said.
Ryder became head of school in 1994, coming to Lincoln Academy from Dover-Foxcroft Academy, where he had started a development office.
The state determines the tuition Lincoln Academy can charge area towns to send their students to the private high school.
“The number is really too low to provide a quality education,” Cheska said, so Lincoln Academy and similar schools have to find other sources of income to fill the gap.
Ryder hired Cheska in 1996 to work on this problem. The office opened in a classroom with Cheska alone to staff it.
She spent countless hours of the early years researching a book about the 200-year history of the school, “Lincoln Academy: A History, 1801-2001.”
Cheska and her assistant and daughter, Kerry Cushing, along with a volunteer committee of alumni, conducted interviews, read old yearbooks and rummaged through boxes of archives in the school attic.
“In that process, it was like living through this time,” Cheska said.
The research has proved valuable to Cheska in her role as development office director.
She talks to alumni regularly as part of the job and she always knows a little bit about what their Lincoln Academy experience was like from the experience of researching and writing the book.
“It was a fun project and I still use that knowledge all the time,” she said.
The school began a major, six-year fundraising effort, the Third Century Capital Campaign, after the bicentennial.
“The first need was clear,” Cheska said. The cafeteria was in the basement of the old gym – now the theater – and had a capacity of 80 students and a kitchen equipped with World War II-era military surplus appliances.
Students, especially during winter, would bring food to school and eat in classrooms or hallways or skip meals altogether to avoid the place.
Thus, the first priority of the campaign was to build a dining hall in the center of campus “that could keep the kids on campus and actually make it a pleasant experience to eat lunch,” Cheska said.
The Third Century campaign would eventually raise $2.24 million for the Alumni Dining Commons and Courtyard, a bus loop to remove drop-off traffic from the student parking lot, a new entrance and elevator for the main building and other upgrades.
The second project of the campaign was the Ryder Science Wing, with its “state-of-the-art” science laboratories.
“In order to offer AP classes, you had to offer AP labs, and we just couldn’t do that in the existing science building, which was built in 1978,” Cheska said.
The $1.28 million science wing opened in 2006.
The years of the Third Century campaign also saw changes for the development office, which moved to downtown Damariscotta in 2003 and back to campus in 2006.
From 2006 until early this year, the development office was in Borland Hall, the traditional residence of the head of school. Jay Pinkerton, the head of school from 2006-2013, did not live at Borland Hall.
Now, with Pinkerton on his way to Morse High School and a new head of school, David Sturdevant, on his way to Borland Hall, the office has moved again, to a rented house at 48 Academy Hill Rd., across the street from the softball field.
The office, in addition to fundraising, handles many aspects of communications and public relations for the school. “The biggest thing we do is to get people excited about the school and what the school is doing,” Cheska said.
Today, Cheska hopes the school is close to the end of a $1.7 million capital campaign for the applied technology and engineering center.
The school wants to break ground this summer. “We’re trying really hard to get there,” Cheska said.
The new facility will be in the area of a faculty parking lot next to the baseball diamond.
“There’s a constraint of when we can work on that property without creating a major parking issue, so we’d like to get going as soon as possible,” Cheska said. As with everything, however, “it depends on having the money.”
The technology center campaign began in 2011 with an anonymous gift of $450,000. The lead gift and four other large gifts add up to $750,000, half of the money raised to date.
The school hopes for another lead gift to launch its next campaign, and the wishes of the donor could well determine what project Lincoln tackles next, as was the case with the lead donor to the technology center.
“We have horribly, woefully serious needs in athletics,” Cheska said.
The school has preliminary plans in place for a sports complex including new baseball and softball fields and a six-lane track around a new soccer field. The complex would be in the area of the new tennis courts, a $250,000 project completed in 2007.
The school also plans to build a modern library and a new performing arts space to provide a quality, up-to-date locale for the music program. After the new fields are ready, the school would turn the softball field into a parking lot for the performing arts space and the theater.
For more information about capital campaigns or the Lincoln Academy Development Office, call 563-3599 or email cheska@lincolnacademy.org.
