Walton Foundation Gives $11.7M Grant to Fund Financial Aid for International, Middle-Income Students, Faculty Development
By Corey Sherman ‘07
Editor-in-Chief
In what head of Development, Daniel Courcey, calls a “monumentally important gift on almost every single level,” The Walton Family Foundation and alumnus Benjamin S. Walton ’92, a Director of The Walton Family Foundation will endow Choate with an $11.7 million grant to be used for scholarships and faculty development.
Need-based scholarships for students from Africa, the Middle East and underrepresented regions in the United States will comprise $8 million of the grant, $2.8 million will be allocated toward partial-need scholarships for U.S. middle-income students, and the remaining $900,000 will be directed towards faculty and curricular development.
“Part of my job, as head of development,” said Courcey, “is to work with other schools, such as Andover, Deerfield, and Exeter, and it is incredibly important for Choate at this point, and at this juncture in our history, to have a gift of this magnitude benefit our financial aid program.”
According to the Director of the Gakio-Walton Scholars Program, Mary Pashley, the Middle Income Scholarship aspect was the brainchild of Choate’s Headmaster, Edward Shanahan, and Head of Admissions, Ray Diffley. That aspect of the gift is important in that it targets an underrepresented group at Choate – students coming from middle-class working families, whose parents can afford to pay only a portion of the school’s steep tuition of $37,300.
“While we don’t have the financial luxury of being able to move forward with the need-blind admission platform that Exeter is moving towards,” said Courcey, “a gift like this allows Choate to remain as one of the top institutions in the world.”
Mr. Shanahan shares Courcey’s sentiments, is pointing toward this gift’s potential impact for Choate.
“The generosity and vision of this remarkable, historic gift will enable Choate to enroll more students from areas of the world that have been traditionally underrepresented on our campus,” said Headmaster Shanahan. “By giving Choate these new resources, Ben and his family’s foundation have insured our ability to enhance our macro perspective on worldwide cultural, social, political, and environmental issues.”
The origins of the program date back to 1992 when S. Robson Walton, Chairman of the Board of Wal-Mart, founded the S. Robson Walton Family Scholarship fund. In 2002 the Foundation awarded Choate a grant to bring a post-graduate from Kenya in honor of Ben Walton’s close friend Wilson Makuna Gakio ’92, who died in 1993 from an undetected heart ailment. The first recipient of this Gakio scholarship was a post graduate student from Kenya who graduated as a member of the Class of 2002.
“I’ve known Ben for a while and its my sense that he has had strong feelings for the school,” said one of the directors of the Program, Jim Yanelli, who was instrumental in bringing the gift to Choate, “and he looked for ways to accomplish things for the school that are important for him and out of conversations I and others have had with him, we began to form a plan that embodied his visions.”
According to Yanelli, the visions he alluded to are multi-faceted.
“He really wants to push the admissions staff to bringing the best and the brightest to Choate,” said Yanelli. “His visions are as much about bringing people to Choate to have an impact on the community as it is changing the lives of individual scholars.”
According to officials at the school, the Gakio-Walton Scholars will receive a four-year commitment from Choate. Included in this is, but is not limited to, tuition and board at Choate, travel expenses, a 10-month stipend, summer enrichment programs (only for international students) and a laptop computer.
Student eligibility will be determined by the Choate Financial Aid office, led by Andy Noel. Deserving students should be well-rounded, have a strong record of academic accomplishment, test well, take an interest and have aptitude in extracurricular activities and express a sincere desire to come to Choate.” Qualifying students must also be in accordance to the school’s standard methods for determining who receives aid and should come from families who would not normally have the opportunity to consider sending a child to Choate.
“I’m thrilled, I’m excited, I’m a little bit nervous,” said Pashley, “but this incredibly generous gift on Ben’s part provides the opportunity to kids who would otherwise not have the opportunity to come to Choate. But we don’t want to set any kid up for failure so part of what weighs into the admissions process with this scholarship program is their ability to adapt to Choate.”
To aid with adapting to Choate, a unique aspect of the Gakio-Walton Scholars Program is that an incoming student will be mentored by a student from their home country - something that the school believes is “a key factor in achieving academic and social success.”
“We want to have something that the scholars can call their own,” said Momo Akade, academic adviser to the Gaiko-Walton scholars, “we’re going to pair incoming scholars with returning scholars so that they can develop a relationship and learn via their mentor.”
In addition, another key feature of this grant is the faculty development wrinkle, which is unprecedented in other major scholarship initiatives at Choate such as the Icahn Scholars Program.
According to Shanahan, “This gift will help our faculty to develop their craft so that Choate’s curriculum continues to reflect our increasingly complex global society.”
The grant, which will be paid over a ten-year span, ending in the 2014-2015 school year is a generous gift not just in its own right, but as a draw for other gifts in Choate’s fundraising efforts that may lead to a capital campaign in the near future. According to Courcey, this will really allow the school to adopt some powerful tactics and strategies in talking with other potential donors.
Said Courcey, “To have something like this to talk about, particularly with the challenges posed by a potential capital campaign - it’s a huge opportunity for us in the fundraising house to take this idea and make it hum.”
“The best thing about this gift is that it truly represents the Choate ideal,” said Pashley, “the fact that Ben can honor his friendship with Wil is the true embodiment of the Choate experience. We’ve brought people on board so that this can be developed in the way Ben wanted it to be and make sure its here long after I am.”
