As wealthy families pour into Palm Beach, securing a desk at one of the island’s prestigious private schools has become a Herculean task, with million-dollar donations, backdoor deals, and mega-investors circling in the water.
In mid-August, just as Palm Beach parents were preparing their children for the start of a new school year at Palm Beach Day Academy, pressing Peter Pan–collared uniforms, prepping backpacks, and polishing their high-end SUVs to look their best for first-day drop-offs at its waterside campus, a local real estate broker got a call from New York. A financier had decided, spur of the moment, to move there in the fall with his five-year-old daughter. Could he and his wife buy a house and enroll her in a top private kindergarten on short notice? In his work, the executive regularly moved mountains or, at least, mountains of money. Surely, he could do the same for his family.
“I can help you find a house,” the broker said haltingly, even though listings are as scarce as prices are high since the IRS deductions for state and local taxes were capped in 2017 and, three years later, COVID inspired mass relocations. “But you have to find the right school prior to coming,” she warned. “That’s going to be tough.” Private school placements in Palm Beach aren’t quite as rare as a gold Rolex Daytona 6265, but they’re close. Local schools are at or near capacity. Palm Beach Day, the island’s most convenient and prestigious, brags that it is full to bursting, with an all-time record 580 students. Even parents who’d planned ahead had trouble finding desks for their children this year. Waiting lists are the new normal. The financier pressed. What if he offered a big fat donation to a school? “I don’t think that will get your kid in anymore,” the broker sighed. “There are so many people here with so much money.”
It’s the best and worst of times for affluent parents newly arrived in Palm Beach. Entitled almost by definition, they face a frustration from which wealth typically insulates them. Though there are dozens of private grade schools in Palm Beach County, there are only a few of the sort of prestigious ones that relocating parents from big cities and big companies like Goldman Sachs, Point72, Elliott Management, and BlackRock expect and consider their children’s birthright.
Even before COVID, a pregnant mother was told to enroll her unborn child in the Discovery preschool in West Palm Beach. “That’s an eye-opener,” she said. By 2021, “People were frantic,” she continued, “frenzied, flocking to put in applications, not thinking rationally.”
It turns out there are some things—or at least one thing—that money can’t buy.
Privileged Palm Beachers don’t lack for school choices, if perhaps not as many as the Manhattanites, Angelenos, or Chicagoans they were just a few years ago. They even have two well-regarded West Palm Beach public magnet schools, Bak and Dreyfoos, though that word— public—repels certain parents.
Palm Beach Day, the oldest independent school in Florida, was founded in 1921, when the barrier island was first gaining prominence. Today it offers pre-K to 3rd grade classes on a “lower campus” on the Intracoastal Waterway in West Palm, and grades 4 to 8 in the only top-tier private school on the island. It remains the school for island kids, though it’s hardly the only game around town.
Opened in 1925, Rosarian Academy, a Catholic pre-K-to-8th grade day school in West Palm, was the first to boast of religious affiliations, though most local religious schools now say they take a nondenominational approach to admissions. Since 1934, when the pre-K-to-12th grade day school Pine Crest (which now has facilities in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton) opened, some Palm Beach parents have proved willing to send their children farther afield. A few decades later, competitors began to emerge: the all-grade Broward Prep in Coconut Creek (just inland from Deerfield Beach); the Arthur I. Meyer Jewish Preparatory School in Palm Beach Gardens, which teaches pre-K-to-8th grade classes in English and Hebrew; the Benjamin School, a nondenominational K-to-8th grade day school, which neighbors Meyer; and the St. Andrew’s School, which boasts of its Episcopal tradition and has day and boarding students of all grades on its Boca Raton campus.
“We took a pied-a-terre in Fort Lauderdale,” says a Palm Beach–based businesswoman married to a private equity executive, whose daughters attended Pine Crest. Driving back and forth daily wasn’t for her. “I-95 in rush hour?” she laughs. “You’re taking your life in your hands.”
By 1965, American Heritage, in Plantation and Delray Beach, muscled its way into the ranks of top schools with a reputation for academic rigor and success in channeling students to elite colleges and universities. The Weiss School in Palm Beach Gardens (pre-K-to-8th grade) is even more selective; founded in 1989 by a money manager, owner of a ratings agency and investment newsletters, it only accepts students with IQs of 130 or above.
Finally, there are three more recent arrivals. The newest is Alef Preschool of Palm Beach, an arm of the local Orthodox Jewish Chabad House. The other two are not just private but privately owned and operated by Palm Beach billionaires. Both tout forward-thinking curriculums with offerings in subjects like AI.
William Koch, the most unconventional of four heirs to their family’s Wichita, Kansas–based conglomerate with roots in the energy business and American conservatism, founded Oxbridge Academy in West Palm in 2011, and in a dozen years, grew it into an educational powerhouse for students in grades 6 through 12. (Palm Beach’s highest-profile high schooler, Barron Trump, attends.) And in 2016, it was joined by the Greene School, currently offering pre-K-10th grade, founded by Jeff Greene, a self-made real estate entrepreneur and one-time Democratic candidate for one of Florida’s seats in the US Senate.
This baker’s dozen of schools is likely to get more competition soon, especially if forecasts of continued population growth in southeast Florida prove correct. Bloomberg News has reported that even though land is far tighter than money in Palm Beach County, two established for-profit private school chains, Basis Independent Schools and England’s North London Collegiate School, are seeking sites and approvals for new schools off the I-95 corridor between Jupiter and Miami. And Stephen Ross—the founder of Related Companies, the developer that owns a substantial number of office and residential towers in West Palm Beach and is building several more—has said that Related is “doing everything we can” to encourage more schools to open, “looking for land and trying to be very creative.” Those efforts are rumored to include eyeing land in horsey Wellington, west of West Palm, and outreach to top New York prep schools whose names are status brands for Related’s hoped-for transplanted tenants.
The impression persists that Palm Beach is a desert for elite education—a notion likely reinforced by recent noisy attempts by Florida’s governor to eliminate what he and his backers term “woke orthodoxy,” i.e. liberal and progressive ideas about gender and race, from public school curriculums and libraries. Private schools aren’t affected by those populist policies, but they have cast a pall, and raised concerns about strings attached to public voucher and scholarship programs. So, reflecting a national trend visible everywhere from East Hampton to Montecito and Aspen in-between, wealthy emigrés seeking good weather and, in Florida at least, a favorable economic climate (i.e. no state individual income taxes), not to mention safe, quiet neighborhoods and the consoling proximity of others like them, have even more incentive to focus their energies on finding quality private education for their children.
The Benjamin School, for one, saw applications rise 47 percent between 2016 and 2021, and another 50 percent in the last two years, while its student enrollment grew by 11 and 9 percent respectively in the same periods. Meanwhile, attrition (i.e. students leaving before graduation) dropped from 10 percent to a mere 4 percent, according to Amy Jablonski, its director of enrollment management. “Before COVID, if a [tuition] check bounced, Benjamin asked for a new one,” says a local real estate broker. “Today, it’s, ‘Who’s next?’”
Myra McGovern, a number-crunching Vice President of the National Association of Independent Schools, gasped after researching my request for statistics on the recent growth of enrollment in private schools within a 10-mile radius of West Palm Beach. “It’s really, really off the charts,” she said. “An unheard-of leap.” Between 2017 and 2018 and 2022 and 2023, the total number of applications submitted to 10 independent schools in Palm Beach County increased by 49.1 percent. About half those schools became significantly more selective, saying yes to a smaller percentage of applications. But between 2017 and 2018 and 2022 and 2023, the total number of enrolled students increased by 14.8 percent. And thanks, in part, to generous parents, a substantial number of spots now go to scholarships and maintaining a more diverse student body.
So it’s hardly surprising that new-arrival parents are panicking. “People pull out all the stops,” says a local real estate broker. “They throw money, they ask for Board introductions, they call people” who work at desirable schools. A friend whose name is similar to that of the head of the lower school at Benjamin got a frantic call. “What do we need to do?” the parent begged. Came the reply: “You’ve got the wrong Sheehan, sorry.”
On February 2, 2022, Palm Beach Day Academy announced a splashy gift that caught the attention of many area private school parents: an $18 million donation from Scott Shleifer, a managing director and co-founder of the private equity investing arm of Tiger Global Management, and his wife Elena. Shleifer’s net worth is estimated at $2.5 billion. The official story (confirmed by a source close to Shleifer who requested anonymity) is that the couple’s four children—the oldest, a daughter, was born in 2014—had been attending the school for “more than a year” at that time. But some cocked an eye at that claim.
The Shleifers long resided on Park Avenue, but a year earlier, in February 2021, had closed on the purchase of a newly built, fully furnished Palm Beach mansion on land previously owned by Donald Trump, and then the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, for $122.7 million, touted as a Florida record. Did he move in immediately and somehow get his children enrolled between semesters at the convenient, prestigious, and full-to-the-brim school? Unclear. But public records indicate that the Shleifers didn’t move to Florida until that July, leaving time to settle in before the first day of school in September. Other parents, understandably, wondered if Shleifer had bought his children into the school. “Quite a coincidence,” one says drily. Others were put off. “I can’t compete with that,” says a West Palm Beach mother whose son is soon to enter pre-K. “I’m like, let’s do the bake sale.”
Only a few of the established private schools around Palm Beach are willing to talk about the rush on admissions. But Dr. Linda Trethewey, the head of school at 98-year-old Rosarian Academy, where some of Bill Koch’s children studied before matriculating at Oxbridge, sought to be reassuring. “We do have capacity,” she said, “we have seats available, and we are doing what we can to expand,” promoting a fundraising capital campaign and building new classrooms so the school can expand by a third.
Oxbridge and Greene are also expanding, thanks to the generosity of their founders. Since its 2011 birth on a 45-acre campus he acquired from a Jewish community group, Koch’s school has grown from two grades to seven, but has also suffered early difficulties, including claims of sexual harassment, a toxic work environment, and athletic recruitment violations that led to high turnover. But its reputation has improved consistently since 2018, when Koch closed its football program and hired a new school head who successfully reoriented its mission “to academics first,” says its president and CEO, David Rosow, who boasts that 75 percent of its faculty hold advanced degrees in their subject area, including an Artificial Intelligence program run by a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics. “You can’t just say ‘Here’s my money, let me in,’” Rosow says. The money was, in fact, almost all Koch’s—$150 million to date—though Oxbridge has added a fundraising team and Koch’s donations have finally begun to decline.
When he joined Oxbridge in 2018, says Ralph Maurer, the head of school, it had “probably too many seats,” as most of the families migrating to the area had younger children than the then-high-schoolonly institution admitted, but “that changed quite rapidly. We knew what was coming.” Its middle school opened in 2021 and “filled instantly,” he continues. “We have our largest 9th grade class ever now, and a large percentage of the families are new or were new to Florida in the last few years.” The student population grew from under 500 to over 600. “Our facilities are completely full.”
Even if it had room for more students, parents couldn’t buy their kids in. “There are enough eyes on the files and people questioning if a child will be successful,” an Oxbridge staffer says. “Even if the parent was a potential donor, people would storm the office, saying, ‘Look, this kid won’t succeed here.’”
Jeff Greene’s family wasn’t rich. His father sold machinery and then moved to West Palm, where he manufactured rubber stamps, and Greene worked his way through high school and college, including a stint waiting tables at the Breakers before becoming a real estate investor. After turning his small fortune into a huge one 16 years ago, following the hedge fund runner John Paulson’s advice to bet against subprime mortgages, Greene moved to Palm Beach in 2009 with his wife Mei Sze Chan, an Australian Chinese immigrant who ran a real estate business herself.
They had three children in the next four years, and, assuming that Palm Beach Day would be an amazing school for them, enrolled two there; she joined the Board and he the capital committee. But Greene is a hands-on guy, and that rubbed some in town the wrong way (“he’s a one-hit wonder who thinks he can do anything,” snipes a local mother). And he “wanted to make changes” to bring Palm Beach Day “up to the level of a New York school,” Greene says before stopping himself. “I don’t want to say anything bad. It’s a heavy lift to make changes.”
The bottom line was that he and his wife felt they could do better, and, inspired by Koch, undertook “a gutsy move to get people to put their most precious assets in your hands.” He’d made a failed run for the Florida senate in 2010, and had focused on education as an issue. The bottom line, he says, is simple: “You want your kids to love coming to school.” So, The Greene School was launched in 2016 as a pre-K-to-4th grade school with 42 students. Having been “the billionaire being courted,” Greene says, “I wanted every family to be treated the same.”
Greene has added a grade a year since then, and will soon open 11th and 12th grades. Like Weiss, it requests IQ tests as part of what head of school Denise Spirou calls its “rigorous acceptance program” that also includes two-day visits and academic assessments to ensure new students will benefit from “personalized education” that ranges from technology to yoga.
As it grows younger and more crowded, Palm Beach County has taken the issue of educational supply and demand personally. “I’m on the front line,” says Kelly Smallridge, the president and CEO of the public/private Business Development Board of Palm Beach County, who has discussed the issue with more than 10 dozen finance services executives since 2020. “Florida no longer has the reputation of Mickey Mouse, the beach, and old people,” she says. “It’s a competitive business environment. Our governor is on the national stage.” The county knew it had “an issue,” she continues. “Growing pains.” So, in 2018, it created a concierge service: “We’ll help you find everything from private school to summer camp; meet the Mayor; a realtor. They want their hands held through the process.” Smallridge has personally intervened with private schools because “I didn’t want them to be the reason to not make a move. Wealthy people define their success not by the size of their wallet but by where their children go to school. Getting them in is highly desirable.”
Last April, Smallridge even organized a school field trip to New York, not for students, but for 25 heads of both public and private schools, and Related offered a space in one of its Hudson Yards buildings for them to discuss “education—it was only about that” with real estate brokers and finance executives and their families, “one [conversation] an hour, every hour, from 8 to 5, for two days,” she says. “I needed to get to the meat of what executives are most concerned about. My goal is to land your company and executives here. It was so successful, we’re making it an annual trip.”
Skepticism remains, however. “Take some of what you hear with a grain of salt,” says Oxbridge’s David Rosow, who doubts that Related’s Ross can put together the land, the money, the educational partners, and the staff required to get a school up and running. Oxbridge is still, he admits, “a work in progress.” So, too, is the private school landscape in Palm Beach. But for now, at least, it’s a seller’s market.
