Campaign Priorities

Campaign Overview

The Potomac School is a remarkable place of learning, a school beloved by its students and faculty, both present and past. The Campaign for Potomac's Future is an opportunity to fuse our educational vision, programmatic excellence, and our essential values to ensure the kind of education that will prepare our students to be 21st century leaders.

The goal of The Campaign for Potomac's Future is to provide the best facilities and resources available to enhance and enrich the academic and extra-curricular activities of our students and faculty.

The Campaign will

• Guarantee Potomac’s preeminence as a K-12 academic institution while preserving the traditions that make The Potomac School unique
• Ensure that we recruitand retain the finest faculty
• Help us attract the most talented and diverse pool of students
• Build the best facilities for all Potomac students
• Add green features to our facilities which will help us teach conservation to the next generation of environmental stewards
• Reduce our operational costs
• Ensure long-term financial security

Campaign Newsletter Winter 2008

 

Our Students' Journey Begins in a New Lower School

In Spring 2008 we plan to break ground on the construction of a new Lower School that will embody long-standing Potomac traditions and inspire the creative spirit of current and future generations of children. The new building will preserve special gathering places like the centrally located library; it will offer enhanced hallway niches and a large assembly space; and every classroom will open directly to the outdoors.

The new facility will also provide more direct access to the Gumtree playing fields and the trails and streams of our natural areas.

Our current building is over fifty years old and simply does not accommodate the changing needs of our youngest scholars. Built in 1959, it has excessively high operating and maintenance costs. A new Lower School will reduce operational costs and provide the best learning environment at this important time in our children's development.

 

Robust Endowment

With funding in place for construction of a new Lower School, we are focusing on building our Endowment and a new Administration Building. A robust endowment is critical to the future financial stability of the school, enabling us to:

• Provide attractive salaries, benefits, and professional development opportunities in order to recruit and retain the highest quality teachers and staff.
• Ensure the long-term viability of our financial aid program to attract students with different viewpoints and backgrounds, recognizing the intellectual and moral strength this brings to our school.
• Protect our tuition from increasing operational costs. A percentage of every construction dollar is being set aside in Endowment to offset operating costs.

 

A New Administration Building

Together with our new Lower School, we plan to construct a new Administration building to house the Lower and Middle School Dining Room, new Admission office, and a welcoming entrance to the school.