Part Two – Where town and gown meet, or do they?
This is the second in a three-part series about Berwick Academy that explores the town’s 234-year relationship with Maine’s oldest school. This article looks at the the relationship between the town and the academy. Part 3 will explore strains that persist in the relationship.
Many residents know little about the private school in the center of their village several generations after Berwick Academy stopped educating South Berwick teens through the town tuition program. And today, 67 years after the private/public model dissolved, many people in town are unaware of the connections that exist between the academy and the town.
Some two dozen random residents who were asked what they knew about B.A., as the school is known locally, responded with a something akin to a shrug.
“I know absolutely nothing about it,” said Justin Gauthier as he waited for his child at Central School one afternoon. “Well, I went there once for a graduation years ago and I heard they had a good hockey team, and that’s it.”
“I don’t know much about it,” said Sheryl (Bray) Bondi, who grew up on Agamenticus Road and owned Rideout’s Hardware store. “B.A. had an account, but I didn’t pay much attention to the school. “
And many people who have lived in town for decades have never seen the inside of the magnificent Fogg Memorial, the gold domed stone building visible from New Hampshire.
Where town and gown interact
Officials at Berwick Academy can detail a surprising number of interactions between town and gown.
Among the connections, the private school’s students join Marshwood students for a handful of sports; some of the academy’s facilities are used by townspeople; and dozens of people who live in town are employed by Berwick Academy or attend the school, paying tuition. In addition, many former students still live in South Berwick.
Marshwood’s co-op softball and junior varsity hockey teams include B.A. students, and Marshwood teams practice on the B.A. turf field and use the indoor tennis courts, according to Rich Buzzell, Marshwood High School athletic director. And the public can use the outdoor tennis courts, according to Amy Smucker, the academy’s assistant head of school for external affairs, although posted signage outside the courts has caused confusion in the last five years.
Besides sports connections, the South Berwick Eliot Rotary Club meets at the school weekly, with an academy staff member joining meetings. In addition, Red Cross Blood drives on campus are open to the public.
Representatives from B.A. meet twice a year with the town manager, police, fire and public works departments to update each other on issues of concern to both. Marshwood’s school resource officer also holds workshops with B.A. staff on the drug scene and relevant trends. The town police and fire departments respond to pubic safety calls at the academy.
The academy’s physical presence cannot be overlooked. Sitting on 80 acres in the middle of town, the academy’s real estate is valued at more than $22 million, of which 87% is tax exempt as an educational institution.
Town residents can be seen walking dogs and running on Powderhouse Hill and through the school campus, while a handful of local children and their parents often make use of the newly renovated playground on weekends and evenings.
The student body
Among the school’s 520 students, drawn from three states and four countries, 33 students this year are South Berwick residents. Twelve of of the employees who live in South Berwick have children enrolled in the K-12 school, according to Smucker.
Berwick Academy employees who live and work in town are also part of the South Berwick community and serve on town boards, visit the public library, line up B.A. student musicians to perform at Hot Summer Nights, march in the Halloween parade and participate in the Pumpkinman Triathlon events and the Strawberry Festival, enriching both communities.
More than 150 current residents of town have attended the school over the years, including those who were there when it educated all local students before becoming a boarding school in 1958.
In fact, the incoming chair of B.A.’s Board of Trustees, Catherine Powell Stevens, is the daughter of longtime residents Owen and Margaret Stevens and one of three alumni on the 21-person board that oversees an $18 million endowment, according to the school website.
Alumni outreach is far flung and frequent, with gatherings recently in Florida, Washington D.C. and New York City as well as a winter festival on campus in 2024 that included at least one famous alumnus – Mike Eruzione, captain of the 1980 Winter Olympics hockey team for the win over the Soviet Union.
Charlie McLean, 68, lifelong Highland Avenue resident, saw the alumni festivities from his living room window and found out Eruzione had been there. As a teen, he had played ice hockey in the evenings with Eruzione on the old tennis courts that were flooded in winter for an ice rink.
“I was so pissed he was there and I missed him!” McLean said.
The question of tuition
Despite the many connections spelled out by B.A. officials, the idea persists in town that B.A. caters to an elite community.
On a recent Sunday morning village residents Jenifer Austin and Jane Orr were walking their dogs on campus. Orr mentioned that her granddaughter attended the school for nine years and loved her experience. Austin recalled that her third grade son once found $40 someone had dropped at the campus. They asked a nearby parent of a B.A. student if it was hers and when she heard the amount found was $40, she said, “Oh just keep it,” as if it were a trivial amount.
The idea of B.A. being elite is no doubt fueled by its tuition of $33,200 a year for K-4, $42,800 for 5-8 and $53,000 for high school, high even when compared with national standards for similar independent private schools.
“For some people, the notion of a tuition-charging school is a foreign concept and…people think it is only for a particular kind of person or family,” acknowledged Jim Hamilton, head of school at Berwick Academy.
But Hamilton and Smucker, both of whom are taking jobs elsewhere next year, point out that B.A. invested $4.6 million annually the last two years for a program used by nearly half the families at B.A., families whose incomes range from $20,000 to $250,000 this school year. A typical B.A. family has an income of $198,000, according to the B.A. website.
“What I am always happy to share is that 45% of our families are receiving what typically would be called financial aid…(and it) makes for a really interesting community and it’s not like a private school that you see on TV, full of entitled, rich folks,” Hamilton said. “I think if people take time to get a sense of what we are (today) my hope is they will say that’s kind of neat.”
Hamilton believes negative views of Berwick Academy by residents come from a knowledge gap and suggested some residents have not recovered from the school’s decision in 1956 to become an independent boarding school.
For their money, B.A. students get classes sizes that average 13 to 15 students compared to Marshwood’s average of of 15 to 24 students.
The real estate
Berwick Academy’s 80 acres of prime real estate make it the second largest land owner in the village residential district. Its campus includes an arts center, seven athletic fields, a library, dining hall, dormitory, outdoor classroom and several administrative buildings. It also holds a wellness center, an athletic center and tennis courts, in addition to the Fogg Memorial.
The 166 real estate properties that are tax exempt in South Berwick, including Berwick Academy, are valued at $163,216,900. Maine state law exempts schools, churches, hospitals and research centers as well as municipal and state property, like Vaughn Woods, from paying property taxes. At least half the revenue lost from local tax exemptions must be reimbursed by the state, under state law said Verna Sharpe, town assessor.
The value of Berwick Academy’s real estate represents about 12% of all tax exempt real estate in town. The town’s three public schools represent 33% of the tax exempt property and town buildings another 9.5%. Nonprofits, churches, the water and sewer districts, and qualified veterans’ homes are among the other tax exempt properties.
Except for the bus and vehicle traffic that briefly clog Union and Academy streets as well as Highland Avenue twice a day, downtown visitors might not realize B.A. students were in town.
B.A. kids do on occasion come into town. Bea VanCampen of Berwick, who graduated last year, said she and her friends used their off-campus privileges as seniors to visit Dunkins’, Aroma Joe’s and La Festa in Dover for pizza lunches.
VanCampen recalled teachers connecting the academy and town through history curriculum and the Outreach Club through which students could choose to volunteer at Central School, work at the food pantry, or work at the Table of Plenty soup kitchen in Berwick.
Hamilton and Smucker described a curriculum that includes participation in history reenactments with Historic New England, studying the environment in Vaughn Woods, and learning about sustainability through connections between the school vegetable garden and donations to the local food pantry.
B.A. English teacher Jen Onken of Berwick teaches a senior honors class that investigates the impact of interactions between people. In 2019, her class fanned out through town, exploring it through the eyes of shopkeepers, town employees, local police, firefighters and historians, publishing a compilation of essays called “Maine St. Magazine: South Berwick.”
This class led to Wanya Wu, a student from China, becoming friends with the Chinese-American owners of the Asia Café downtown and writing about how the owners secretively slipped traditional festival dishes like Zongi into his take-out orders during Chinese holidays.
Berwick Academy will start the summer with new leadership, as Scott Erickson will be the 55th Head of School, returning to New England where he started in education at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H.
Erickson said in an interview posted online in February that he was immediately drawn to the “Berwick” community, as the school has branded itself.
“The moment I visited Berwick,” he said, “I could feel the energy, warmth, and authenticity of the community.”
