Lynn University celebrates 20 years

The world learned of Boca Raton’s Lynn University in January 2010 when four students and two faculty members were among the hundreds of thousands killed in Haiti’s earthquake.

This week, the university celebrates a more cheerful milestone: Its 20th anniversary as Lynn.

The school had opened in 1962 as a two-year women’s school named Marymount College, operated by nuns from the Religious Order of the Sacred Heart of Mary.

The school later went bankrupt and prepared to close. Students planned car washes and other events and even went door to door with soup cans and signs reading, “Save Our College.”

In 1971, Marymount got a visit from educator Donald Ross — no relation to Donald Alexander Ross, the first Lake Park resident killed in World War II and the man for whom the road in northern Palm Beach County is named.

Ross intended to buy the soon-to-be-defunct school’s library for his own program at Wilmington College in Delaware, a school he’d founded in 1967.

“I walked all over campus and could not believe how beautiful it was,” Ross told Lynn’s magazine in 2006.

Instead of buying up Marymount’s books, Ross persuaded Wilmington trustees to merge with Marymount and make it a coed college. By 1972, enrollment was up to 350.

In 1974 the school’s name was changed to the College of Boca Raton, but it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that it would begin offering four-year degrees.

In 1991 it would get its third name: Lynn.

In September 1991, the 1,000-student College of Boca Raton was renamed for philanthropist Eugene Lynn.

Palm Beach Post file photo provided by the Lynn family

Lynn (above, with his wife Christine) had become president of the Boca Raton-based Lynn Insurance Group in 1956. Over three decades, he and his wife, Christine, donated $3.5 million for a student dorm and put up the money for the Lynn Student Center, built in 1963. Eugene Lynn died in 1999.

Ross would run the school until 2006, when son Kevin took over.

Lynn now has about 1,660 undergraduates and about 450 graduate students. Its five colleges and two schools offer 34 majors. It’s become a leader in serving students with learning challenges.

Marymount College in Boca Raton became coed in the early 1970s. It is today’s Lynn University. (Photo courtesy of Lynn University)

Nuns at Marymount College (Photo courtesy of Lynn University)

Marymount campus in 1972. (Photo courtesy of Lynn University)

Tags: Boca Raton, Lynn University, place names, schools

This week in history: Dreyfoos School of the Arts opens

The former Palm Beach High reopened on Aug. 20, 1997, after a $29.5 million renovation, as the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Jr. School of the Arts. The first school on the site had opened in 1908, replacing a four-room schoolhouse at Clematis and Dixie. Parents at the time worried about sending their children so far out of town into the wilderness. A new high school building opened in 1915, a third building opened in 1922, and a fourth in 1927.

In 1970 the school changed its name to Twin Lakes, which closed in June 1988. It briefly operated as Palm Beach Lakes High until that school’s new campus opened in 1989, then remained vacant until 1997.

Palm Beach High School in 1908. The 1928 hurricane destroyed the tower. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County).

Tags: schools, This Week in History

Roll call for Palm Beach schools chiefs (part 2)

Last week we started a list of Palm Beach County School superintendents. Here’s the rest of the superintendents and their start dates:

10. John W. Martin (Jan. 1, 1964): The district’s former business manager was interim superintendent for a year.

11. Robert W. Fulton (above, Jan. 5, 1965): He struggled with the county’s early desegregation efforts.

12. Lloyd Early (above center, with with Lake Worth Police Chief Donald Majewski, left, and Area School Administration John McDonald; Sept. 1, 1968): Two years into his term, then-Gov. Claude Kirk suspended him amid charges of malfeasance and incompetence.

13.Athelstan Spilhaus (Aug. 23, 1970): The scientist and educator served only three months before the state Senate reinstated Early.

14. Lloyd Early (Nov. 16, 1970): The county’s last elected superintendent said on his departure that he feared the county’s school board had too much power.

15. Joseph Carroll (above, Jan. 2, 1973): On his resignation, the county’s first appointed superintendent in seven decades said his candor in releasing dismal test scores had harmed the school system’s reputation.

16.Thomas J. Mills (above, July 1, 1978): In his 13 years – the second-longest among superintendents – the county’s population nearly doubled. In 1986, he pushed through a $317 million school construction bond.

17. James G. Daniels (above, July 1, 1991): A former deputy superintendent, he was called out of retirement to briefly serve.

18. C. Monica Uhlhorn (above, with Daniella Henry, executive director of the Haitian-American Chamber of Commerce, during a special meeting with Haitian community leaders at Carver Middle School in 1991; Aug. 21, 1991): Florida’s first ever female appointed superintendent was ousted a week after an ABC News report posed her as a national model of what’s wrong with public education.

19. Bernard Shulman (July 16, 1995): Then a deputy superintendent, he served as interim superintendent for a year.

20. Joan P. Kowal (above, March 17, 1996): The former Daytona Beach-area schools chief served four years before she was fired following low evaluations.

21. H. Benjamin Marlin (above, with colleagues, Nat Harrington and Ann Killetts; Dec. 13, 1999): Hired as an interim, he stayed for 15 months.

22.Art Johnson (above in 2004; March 28, 2001): He left amid controversy over then-chief academic officer Jeffrey Hernandez’s curriculum policies and reported out-of-town moonlighting.

23.William F. Malone (above, Feb. 22, 2011): Hired as an interim, he later agreed to stay on through August 2012.

Tags: schools

A look at past school superintendents

Art Johnson, ousted in February as Palm Beach County School Superintendent, is one of 23 (actually 22, one served twice), dating back to when the area still was in Dade County before it split in 1909.

The shortest tenure: 1 month (James Daniels, 1991). The longest: 15 years (Howell Watkins, 1948-1964).

Here’s a list, with starting date:

1. James C. Harris (July 13, 1900): The first superintendent, he also founded the downtown West Palm Beach store that still operates.

2. Henry W. Lewis (Dec. 9, 1910): The county’s first elected superintendent, a news article called him a “painstaking officer.”

3. Guy Metcalf (above, Jan. 2, 1917): Publisher of the region’s first newspaper, a mayor of West Palm Beach, and a key mover in the county’s split from Dade, he was arrested for forging a bill for $333.49 for science equipment; he was found dead the next day of an apparent suicide.

4. Jackson B. McDonald (Feb. 15, 1918): He went on to become Martin County’s first superintendent when the county split off in 1925.

5. W. E. Keen (Dec. 4, 1918): Reported to the governor in 1920 that in two years, enrollment had jumped from 2,000 to nearly 2,500 — at least in the white schools. Black enrollment isn’t mentioned. He also said seven rural schools had been built. And he complained that the School Board pay of only $4 a day mostly attracted “inexperienced business men.”

6. Agnes Ballard (Jan. 4, 1921): The county’s first — and for seven decades, the only — female superintendent also was Florida’s first female licensed architect.

7. Joe A.Youngblood (Jan. 6, 1925): He steered the booming region for a dozen years before leaving to run the National Youth Administration.

8. John I. Leonard (above, Sept. 21, 1936): In his dozen years, the county struggled through the Depression, World War II came right to Florida’s shores, and black teachers began struggling for equal rights. He also was the first president of Palm Beach Junior — now State — College.

9. Howell L.Watkins (above, July 2, 1948): The county’s longest-serving superintendent, Watkins founded Palm Beach Junior College in 1933 and was its dean.

Next week: From the boom years to today.

Tags: schools

Palm Beach County Schools: The First 100 Years

Want to learn more about the history of Palm Beach County’s public schools and help students further their education at the same time? You can do both for just $20.

That’s the price for a copy of Palm Beach County Schools: The First 100 Years. The book, written by retired Palm Beach Post editorial writer Bill McGoun and published by the school district, details the development of public education from the arrival of the first settlers until the present day.

It tells of the people who built the system and of the challenges they faced, ranging from explosive growth to the dismantling of racial segregation to the influx of students from all over the world speaking more than 140 languages.

Read about:

Guy Metcalf, the star-crossed publisher and promoter turned politician.

Agnes Ballard and Clara Stypmann, who held public office as soon as women could vote in Florida.

Howell L. Watkins, who helped write state education law and presided over Florida’s first public junior college.

Robert Fulton and William Holland, who worked inside and outside the system to break down racial barriers.

The book is being distributed by the Lake Worth High School Alumni Foundation. You can order a copy online here or send a check payable to LWHS Alumni, to P.O. Box 1166, Lake Worth, FL 33460.

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The foundation also is distributing Lake Worth High School: A History, an in-depth look at the oldest high school in Palm Beach County still housed on the original campus. It tells decade by decade how the school grew and how the events around it affected its development.

Tags: schools