Dilworth plan to teach girls needs $350m
Trust believes education model including wraparound support ready for extension
New Zealand’s wealthiest school, Dilworth, is looking for a new benefactor to open a school for girls. The Dilworth Trust Board believes its 100 per cent boarding-school model with wraparound support could benefit girls as well as boys, and wants to help open a sister school somewhere near its 112-year-old boys’ school in Auckland.
But the catch is that founder James Dilworth’s 1894 will restricts it to using its assets, now worth $858 million, to educate only “the sons of persons of good character, of any race, and in straitened circumstances”.
So the trustees are looking for a new benefactor for a girls’ school who has about $350m to spare.
“We believe there are a few people in New Zealand who could fund this,” said board chairman Aaron Snodgrass, who attended Dilworth after his father died of cancer and who is now chief financial officer of Eastland Energy in Gisborne.
“If you think of the families that our boys come from — just because you are a boy doesn’t mean that you are in any more straitened circumstances than your sister . . .”
The board went to the High Court in 2003 to vary Dilworth’s will to allow it to investigate a school for girls, but was advised it couldn’t use the legacy to fund such a school.
“We have done work to ensure that there is a need, and we have worked with advisers and economists and educators for girls,” Snodgrass said. “We are talking to philanthropists, but it is very, very early stages.”
He has gone public with the plan today to mark Dilworth’s inauguration into the NZ Business Hall of Fame in Auckland tonight, along with three other posthumous laureates and living entrepreneurs Bill Buckley, Dame Trelise Cooper, Alan Gibbs and Graeme and Craig Turner.
Dilworth, a founder of the Auckland Savings Bank and a major landowner, had no children with his wife Isabella. His legacy gives every boy at the school a scholarship of $35,000 a year. They are selected based on “family need and suitability”. Boys leave with new clothes, a Bible and, if they choose to do tertiary study, a scholarship of $5000-$6000 a year.