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INVESTING IN FUTURES
ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND RIGHT HERE IN PALM BEACH COUNTY, WEALTHY INDIVIDUALS ARE INFUSING FUNDS INTO EDUCATION WITH THE HOPE OF BENEFITING AND EMPOWERING THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEARNERS
BY ERIC BARTON AND MARY MURRAY
If money is no object, what becomes your objective for that money? Perhaps you take the Elon Musk route and conquer space travel. Or you follow Mark Cuban’s lead and offer prescription drugs at significantly reduced prices. Maybe you tackle world hunger, make efforts to reduce crime, or attempt to remove “incurable” from a disease.
For some ultra-wealthy Americans, that objective is education. In recent years, two schools backed by local billionaires have opened in West Palm Beach: Jeff Greene’s The Greene School and Bill Koch’s Oxbridge Academy. Their work, trying to solve the problems facing education today, is not far off from what other billionaires are doing elsewhere in the country.
Among them is Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a stated educational objective to “significantly increase the number of Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty who graduate from high school, enroll in a postsecondary institution, and are on track in their first year to obtain a credential with labor-market value,” per the foundation’s website. It pursues this by investing in K-12 education grantees across the country—with a focus on schools and addressing seven specific priorities, including networks for school improvement, educator preparation, and social and emotional learning. Similarly, the foundation started by Eli and Edythe Broad provides grants to support public education systems and improve parent engagement, among other goals.
Education—and his access to it—transformed Fred C. Koch’s life. Born in smalltown Texas in 1900, Fred lacked the financial resources to attend the types of schools that would foster his intellectual curiosity. He had his sights set on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a local businessman helped send him there. Fred would go on to become a high-tech builder of sophisticated oil refineries, an endeavor that would evolve into Koch Industries, which Forbes currently lists as the No. 2 largest private company in America.
“He was so grateful,” William “Bill” I. Koch says of his father. “He then told all of his kids that the best thing you could do is get a good education and then you could create your own pathway yourself. He insisted that all of his boys do that. Three of us went to MIT, and one went to Harvard—the poor guy.”
But long before Bill Koch would attend his father’s alma mater, he was looking to his example of how hard work, perseverance, and real-world experiences could shape one’s future.
“He was a kid—very poor—and then he
—BILL KOCH
COURTESY OF OXBRIDGE ACADEMY
Bill Koch has invested $150 million into Oxbridge Academy, which currently serves students in seventh through twelfth grades.
COURTESY OF OXBRIDGE ACADEMY
became extremely successful,” he says. “He instilled in us that if we wanted to be accomplished in life, that’s what we had to do. At one time, he was the biggest rancher in the United States. He had a ranch in Texas, one in Kansas, one in Wyoming, one in Montana, and one in Nevada. He sent us there during the summer— he didn’t want us playing around—and we had to work 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and we got paid $5 a day. We were exposed to all these other people [and] what life was about.”
When Koch wasn’t spending summers on the ranch, he was attending boarding school. When the time came for Koch—a Palm Beacher and the founder and CEO of Oxbow Carbon—to consider where to educate his own children, he knew he wanted to keep them nearby. He sought to create a school that could offer superior academics and enrichment opportunities here in Palm Beach County, enabling students to have life-defining educational experiences close to home.
To date, Koch has invested $150 million into Oxbridge Academy. Occupying a 54-acre campus, Oxbridge opened in 2011 and began with ninth through twelfth grades. Ten years later, in January 2021, it announced that it would add seventh and eighth grades. Currently, the school’s enrollment is 560, with a student-teacher ratio of nine to one and an average class size of 13. Five out of Koch’s six children have attended Oxbridge, and another notable student is Barron Trump, the teenaged son of former President Donald Trump.
Across both the middle and upper schools, Oxbridge spends more than $5 million annually to provide need-based financial aid to approximately 40 percent of its students. Diversity, equity, and inclusion have also become key
aspects of the school’s mission to prepare students to enter the world with kindness and fortitude.
“While we have several faculty members responsible for DEI initiatives and serving as a confidential advisor to students with DEI-related concerns, the core concepts have been part of our ‘culture of kindness’ since the school’s founding,” says Head of School Ralph Maurer. “We value acceptance, understanding, mutual respect, and personal accountability and responsibility.”
As Koch notes, diversity and a robust financial aid program were part of his original vision for the school. “You need to understand that there are different ways to do things in the world,” he says. “And other people with other backgrounds know how to do that, can do that, they show you how to do that. In spite of what some people think, if you have a guy [with] a different attitude or a different perception on a problem, he may be right.”
Per Koch, “life-defining educational experiences” are also at the heart of Oxbridge Academy. These opportunities range from a well-rounded athletics program (with niche offerings such as equestrian and sailing available alongside soccer, basketball, and baseball) to arts education and an array of clubs, teams, and activities. Oxbridge also boasts signature programs in artificial intelligence, independent research, and aviation; the latter employs the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association curriculum and allows students to practice in a Redbird MCX Flight Simulator. In addition, there is the Cambridge Scholars program, where juniors can travel to England for two weeks to study under faculty at Cambridge University, and the Free Enterprise Institute, which is new for the 2022-23
Jeff Greene’s The Greene School opened in 2016. For the current school year, 175 students are enrolled and enjoy a studentteacher ratio of eight to one.
COURTESY OF THE GREENE SCHOOL ERIC STRIFFLER
school year and is geared toward students passionate about economics, financial markets, and entrepreneurship.
“These programs represent our vision as an educational institution, creating a curriculum that gives students a solid foundation of knowledge and adapts to a constantly changing world,” says Maurer. “They provide real-world opportunities and open new pathways for students. For example, the aviation program does more than train pilots. It combines math, science, engineering, geography, government, and economics into a multidisciplinary program. Students have gone on to university pursuing aeronautical and aerospace engineering, among other fields related to aviation.”
Like Koch, billionaire businessman Jeff Greene links his interest in funding education to his father. Growing up in a Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts, Greene says his father would often emphasize the importance of education—a lesson rooted in the trials of his ancestors who survived the Holocaust. “He would say, ‘No matter what happens, they can never take that away from you,’” Greene recalls. “They can never take away your education.”
Greene’s father worked as a machinery dealer to textile mills, and when that industry largely shifted from New England to the South, his business collapsed. Greene found himself going off to college with no financial support. He worked two jobs while at Johns Hopkins University, before going on to Harvard for an MBA.
After creating a real estate empire built in part on credit default swaps during the last housing crash, Greene moved to Palm Beach in 2009. He says he was surprised by the education options in the area and, eventually, he and his wife, Mei Sze Greene, decided to create a private school that could rival the best schools in the country, particularly in the areas of academic prestige, opportunities, culture, and personalization. The Greene School opened in 2016, and currently, all three of the Greenes’ children are enrolled there.
The Greene School started as pre-K through fourth grade; grades 5 through 8 were added thereafter. The school began working toward additional expansion in May 2021, when Greene purchased the adjacent EmKo art and restaurant building. This fall, the school is welcoming ninth graders; it will add a new grade level with each subsequent year.
To lead the school, the Greenes hired Denise Spirou, who has a doctorate of education from Walden University and had previously run The Weiss School in Palm Beach Gardens. (This school, which Elizabeth and Martin Weiss established in 1989 to educate gifted children, is another example of philanthropic individuals using their resources to better the local education landscape.) At The Greene School, Spirou says that she had the chance to start anew, to define a school from day one.
“As an educator, I felt like I hit the jackpot,” she adds. “What an amazing opportunity to start a school from the ground up using my 30 years in education, knowing what went well and what didn’t go well, and then hire a team of dream educators. It’s something I couldn’t say no to.”
The Greene School maintains a studentteacher ratio of eight to one. Prior to acceptance, potential students are required to take the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children aptitude test and visit the school for at least a day to ensure that the academic environment is a good fit. “We serve bright, careful learners— kids who really love to learn and are creative and think in different ways,” Spirou says. She also notes that faculty members spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve students’ neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to form and reorganize synaptic connections.
For the 2022-23 school year, 175 students are enrolled at The Greene School. They are privy to a multitude of “enrichment classes” including engineering, computer science, art, drama, yoga, Mandarin, and Spanish. The school day doesn’t end at 3:15; most kids stay on campus for activities like robotics, tennis, chess, and aviation. When it comes to financial assistance, The Greene School offers need-based scholarships (with merit scholarships available to high schoolers), giving out millions each year.
While the school’s big budget no doubt has helped it succeed, Greene believes it has to be more than that. “Look, money helps no matter what you’re doing,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it’s not just the money. The money can grease the wheels. Success comes from passion and caring and not just the money.” «
COURTESY OF THE GREENE SCHOOL
