Stephen Ross, king of West Palm Beach.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Wealthy New Yorkers love Palm Beach for its low taxes, lush weather, and the possibility of hobnobbing with Stephen Schwarzman at the Everglades Club. But upper-crust New Yorkers considering a move South must ask a question: What to do with the kids?
That’s why billionaire developer Stephen Ross is getting into the school business. This month, Ross’s Related Companies got approval to build its first private school, as Bloomberg reports. Renderings show the school as a network of low glassy buildings with pitched roofs, surrounded by palms and, concerningly, what looks like a wetland. It will sit on one side of a 70-acre lot, and on the other will be a kind of outdoor mall with a modern-farmhouse vibe. The site is in Wellington, a village about ten miles from downtown West Palm Beach. (The parents he’s after may already know Wellington quite well: It’s the go-to spot for polo. Tatler spotted Georgina Bloomberg on the grounds there last fall.)
The village owned the land and reviewed plans before approving a sale for $47 million. The public meeting was covered by the local Town-Crier, which quoted the mayor sharing concerns from constituents who “don’t like the idea of … being the school for the northeast migration, as opposed to the school for the population that’s already here.”
Those concerns seem … valid! Tuition will be around $40,000 a year, and the school plans to offer scholarship for only the first five years, and only for 20 kids — or 1.2 percent of the 1,650 students. The school is run by a for-profit network of 14 schools called Education in Motion, which was founded in 2003 by a couple who were unimpressed with the options for their kids in Shanghai and built a system on the British model, with campuses in Switzerland and Asia. Also, Ross has made it pretty explicit that a northeast migration is exactly the point: “You won’t get people to move if you don’t have great schools,” Ross said at a recent conference in Miami Beach, per Bloomberg. “We’re very proactive in really understanding what is needed for growth and bringing it here.”
Ross isn’t the first billionaire to start a school from scratch in the area. The lack of suitable schools has long plagued the region’s ultrarich transplants. (“If you’re even thinking about moving here, put your name on the list,” one broker told the Real Deal back in 2022. “Just fill out the application, get it in immediately.”) As we’ve previously reported, schools are buying land and breaking ground in a scramble to please parents like Scott Shleifer of Tiger Global Management (who reportedly gave $18 million to a day school after his kids got a spot). And billionaires who don’t like waiting are simply building their own, with Jeff Greene founding one in 2016 and William Koch starting another in 2011, where Barron Trump was enrolled.
But Stephen Ross is the biggest changemaker in town — with 18 buildings across West Palm Beach and a proposal to turn 30 acres around Boca Raton’s City Hall into offices and apartments. Last year, he helped “woo” Vanderbilt University to open a campus in West Palm Beach, hosting an event at his mansion. He’s also developing a 150-bed hospital run by the Cleveland Clinic. As Ross once told Bloomberg, “This is more like city-building.”