SJS News

The following letter appeared in the 2023-2024 Annual Report of Giving.

Dear friends and supporters of Saint James School,

Congratulations on your remarkable year of giving to our School. As you will see in this report, Saint James received just over $5.5 million in gifts last year, including just shy of $1.4 million for the Annual Fund. We can only be impressed and humbled by your incredibly generous response to our successful Make a Difference Capital Campaign and your continuing giving for our three identified areas of need, which are:  

1. The Annual Fund, which is our second largest source for funding for the annual budget.
2. Our exciting new capital projects dramatically improving our campus,specifically the Young and Rocca Townhouses for faculty, the Pohanka Fine Arts Center, the Turner Athletic Center and Stockton Smith Fieldhouse, the renovation and repurposing of the Cotton Building, and the new boys’ dormitory with two additional faculty apartments and one townhouse.
3. Growing our endowment to increase non-tuition income for the future, funding financial aid, faculty salaries, and campus maintenance.

Obviously, all three of these areas are essential to our health and quality as a school, and your generous support is allowing us to deliver the best academic, residential, athletic, and arts programs for a school of our size in the nation, securing our unique competitive niche as “the best of the small boarding schools” or “the smallest of the best boarding schools” as consultants now describe us.

Because of your generous support, we are now fully enrolled with 250 eager and talented students who really want to be here from all over the world, all over the country, and all over our “local” region of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC, because no one visits our campus now without being very impressed by our facilities and our students.

We have also been able to increase the salaries and benefits for our staff and faculty, which was long overdue, and we hope to do more of this as our endowment grows in the future.

So, predictably, I only have two things to say to you:  thank you very much, and please keep giving! You are transforming Saint James for generations to come, and we are very, very grateful.

To quote the cheer when we are winning the game in the third quarter, “Let’s go, Saint James!!”

Yours faithfully,

The Revd. Dr. D. Stuart Dunnan
Headmaster