Philadelphia Inquirer

Alumna donates $128.5 million to George School
By Martha Woodall
Inquirer Staff Writer


Standing inside a simple, 19th-century Quaker meetinghouse, George School
officials announced yesterday that the Quaker boarding and day school near
Newtown is the recipient of what is believed to be the largest gift ever
to an existing private school - $128.5 million.

The donation, which will be paid over 20 years, comes from a grateful
alumna of the Bucks County prep school whose father was billionaire
philanthropist Warren Buffett's professor and friend and an early investor
in Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a holding company based in Omaha,
Neb.

Barbara Dodd Anderson, a 1950 graduate, said the donation would honor her
late father, David L. Dodd, an economist and professor at the Columbia
University Business School, and George School teachers.

"This is an extraordinary day in the life of this school," said David
Bruton, a 1953 graduate who chairs the school's governing board.

"This gift is meant to honor not only my father, David Dodd, and his
legacy, but also all of the teachers at George School who had such an
impact on me and are so important to their students today," Dodd Anderson,
75, said in a statement released by the school.

"I want to help George School because of the excellence of its faculty and
because it is a school without pretensions, where caring for and learning
from each other are as important as academic success."

Nancy Starmer, head of school, said Dodd Anderson's gift was an
affirmation of the importance that George School places on the
relationship between students and teachers and on academics and service
that prepare students to take their places in a complex world.

"She makes all of us very proud to be in a community that has inspired a
gift like this," Starmer said.

Dodd Anderson, described by school officials as a deeply private woman,
did not travel from her home in Fresno, Calif., for yesterday's
announcement. Ed Huff, her longtime accountant, said she hoped to visit
the campus this fall or spring.

Officials at the National Association of Independent Schools in Washington
said they did not know of any larger gifts to a single, existing private
school in the country. Dodd Anderson's donation tops the record $100
million that Walter Annenberg gave in 1993 to his alma mater, the Peddie
School in Hightstown, N.J.

"The Annenberg gift was unprecedented," association spokeswoman Myra A.
McGovern said yesterday. "This is unbelievable."

School officials said the initial funding would go toward financial aid,
increased compensation for faculty and staff, and environmental projects.

Dodd Anderson's father bought early shares in Berkshire Hathaway, then a
textile firm, and put them in his daughter's name before it became a
multibillion-dollar enterprise.

She has created an irrevocable, charitable annuity lead trust designed to
provide George School with $5 million a year for the first 15 years and
$10.7 million in each of the last five years, Huff said.

One-third of the trust was composed of 200 original Berkshire Hathaway
shares. The rest was cash.

"One hundred percent is coming from Berkshire Hathaway investments," Huff
said.

Buffett, who has made a commitment to give his own vast fortune to
charity, praised Dodd Anderson's gift.

"Any longtime shareholder of Berkshire is appreciably wealthier because of
the indirect influence that David Dodd had upon our company," Buffett said
in a statement. "I am delighted that his decision to invest in Berkshire
has enabled Barbara to honor both her father and George School through
this wonderful gift."

In a brief telephone interview yesterday, Buffett said he was gratified
that so many early Berkshire Hathaway investors were using their wealth
for philanthropy.

"Barbara is a perfect example of that," he said. "She is planting a tree
those in the future will be sitting under."

George School officials said that for the first two years they expected to
designate $2 million to the school's endowment for compensation of staff
and faculty and $2 million to the endowment for student financial aid.
Income from that money will be applied to the operating budget for those
purposes.

A portion of the remaining $1 million - $100,000 - will be applied to the
school's annual fund and the rest used for environmental projects or added
to the endowment.

George School's endowment of $77.2 million already is greater than the
most recent national average of $57.9 million for boarding schools. But
Anne Storch, George School's director of development, called the gift from
Dodd Anderson "quite a shot to our endowment."

This is not Dodd Anderson's first gift to George School. Among other
things, she established the David LeFevre Dodd Teaching Chair in her
father's honor to attract and keep great teachers. She provided a $5
million leadership gift for a new library that will be named for her
11-year-old granddaughter, Mollie Dodd Anderson.

And in 1993, she created a program in her own name that provides $10,000
scholarships each year for 16 students who are committed to academic
excellence and social involvement. The amount is rising to $15,000
beginning with three scholarships to new boarding students this academic
year.

Chloe Collins, 16, a junior from Mullica Hill, said receiving a Barbara
Dodd Anderson scholarship had been critical to her ability to attend
George School.

"I wasn't initially thinking of attending a boarding school, but [the
school] got me hooked," said Collins, who learned about George School
during a high school night at Mullica Hill Friends School, which she
attended through eighth grade.

All the scholarship recipients correspond with Dodd Anderson, so Collins
feels as if she knows the alumna a little bit. But she was surprised, she
said, when she learned about the huge new gift Monday night.

"I thought it was incredible," Collins said. "I knew it was a big deal,
but I didn't realize until they were talking about it in class today that
it was the biggest ever. It's exciting."