St. Andrew’s opened in 1961 as a boarding school for boys — even
the cheerleaders were male. Photo courtesy of St. Andrew’s School
By Mary Jane Fine
A bit of perspective: It was the year Gov. George Wallace allowed two black students to be enrolled at the University of Alabama. President John F. Kennedy guided a nervous nation through the Cuban missile crisis. Diet Rite and Tab debuted that year, and ABC began broadcasting in color. The Beach Boys turned Surfin’ Safari into their first hit. A gallon of gas cost 31 cents.
Back then, the western reaches of Boca Raton were a vast tract of scrubland and alligators. It was 1962, the year St. Andrew’s School welcomed its first class.
“This was the only thing around here,” says Carlos Barroso, with a sweeping gesture that takes in the school’s perfectly manicured 81 acres. “Lynn University didn’t exist. FAU didn’t exist.”
Barroso, the school’s director of marketing and communications, steers a golf cart across a wide expanse of emerald-green lawn, along herringbone brick paths, past building-after-white-and-pale-yellow building, Bahamian colonial style. The administration building. The visual arts building. The library and book store. The science building. The Upper School cafeteria. The athletic center (there’s a baseball field and an Olympic-size swimming pool, too.) The dorms. The faculty homes. It is like touring a small boutique town.
Michael Goodman, a 1989 St. Andrew’s graduate,
has sent his son Matthew and daughter
Katherine to St. Andrew’s. Photos by Jerry Lower
In this, its 50th anniversary year — the school was founded in 1961, opened to students a year later — he emphasizes the changes the campus has seen. It began, with 122 students and an Ivy League faculty, as a boys’ boarding school; this year’s enrollment, coed, is a record 1,313. The school initially mimicked the British system, with fifth and sixth forms, only later adopting the grade terminology.
Tuition in the early days was a looser, less regulated matter, so a headmaster might lower the financial bar for a given student and raise it for one whose family had a heftier income. Tuition nowadays is on a set scale — pre-K $18,540; Upper School (grades 9-12) day students $24,300; Upper School boarding students $43,000 — but 15 percent of the students receive financial aid.
Early in this campus tour, Barroso stops at the Performing Arts building and the office of Teresa Vignau, St. Andrew’s theater director and speech teacher — and her very own chapter in the school’s history. She was, in 1969, its first female graduate, though she attended only her senior year there. With two other girls, all daughters of St. Andrew’s teachers, she was taken in, she explains, when integration-related violence (“there were knife fights,” she says) disrupted their high school.
“It was like having a bunch of brothers,” she recalls of the days when the boy-girl ratio was 35-to-1, “and I kinda had my pick of who I wanted to be my boyfriend.”
Teresa Vignau, right, St. Andrew’s theater director and
speech teacher, also was the school’s first female graduate. She
works with students to get a realistic look to a costume by driving over it. Vignau is a resident of the unincorporated county pocket.
Vignau was a Miami Dolphins cheerleader that year. The team trained on campus during the summers of 1966-70, which led to the on-campus filming of Paper Lion, the story of author George Plimpton’s quarterbacking effort with the Detroit Lions; Alan Alda played Plimpton.
“They brought in backhoes and removed all the palm trees” from the filming area, Vignau remembers, “then, after the filming, they put them all back.”
These days, her point-of-pride is the 655-seat theater and its state-of-the-art lighting booth. “Too many times, we teach our past instead of the kids’ futures,” Vignau says, a reference to the continual updating of equipment here and throughout the school.
The arts live large here: The music department teaches everything from bagpipe to jazz band, chorus to songwriting; there are separate studios for sculpture and painting and photography, and a gallery for displaying student work; a mirrored dance studio boasts three ballet teachers.
Much as St. Andrew’s celebrates its progress, then lives comfortably with now: A Seminole-built chickee chapel, once the site for graduations, still graces the grounds, while a white, steepled chapel, open to the public on Sundays, now hosts graduations for students from 20 countries and across the U.S. (Gulf Stream School is a major feeder school; 43 Gulf Stream students currently attend St. Andrew’s.)
Michael Goodman, a 1989 St. Andrew’s graduate who currently lives in Boca’s Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, had a longer and far more arduous path. After spending three years in and out of hospitals — 26 surgeries for a bone infection — his mother decided that, since he had improved following an operation in California, that a move to Florida would be beneficial. And, while he has no proof that sun and sea were the tonic, he has no reason to believe they weren’t.
He remembers his first year at St. Andrew’s as one of adjustment, but adjust he did — and went on to become school president and captain of both the baseball and football teams.
He likes to say that he can speak as student, teacher (before becoming a lawyer, he taught there for a year), alumnus and, now, parent: His son Matthew is in fourth grade, daughter Katherine in kindergarten.
“My kids, when they come home and you ask them, ‘How was school?’, they say, ‘It was perfect.’ It’s tough to beat that.”
Comments