Head Of The Class

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Peter Benedict at work in his office at Saint Edward’s in 1972, two years after he became headmaster. “A school has to be run as a business,” he says. “Like a CEO, a headmaster has to earn the support of the people who must carry out his policies.”

Sipping a glass of iced tea in his South Beach home, Peter Benedict is discussing a topic he has been living and breathing for more than 30 years: Saint Edward’s School. “When I became headmaster in 1970, the school had 186 students and a faculty of 16,” he is saying.  “When I left in 1995, it had 760 students and a faculty of 80. Now it’s up to 900 students and a faculty of 97.”

Benedict believes that the school he did so much to create will soon have to place a cap on its enrollment. “It’s clear that Indian River County will continue to grow,” he says. “But this doesn’t mean that Saint Ed’s should grow with it. If the school becomes much larger, the individual attention paid to each student will be lost. Schools with an enrollment of over a thousand students are part of a different culture – a culture that exemplifies the public-school system.”

Benedict’s views are significant because, as headmaster of Saint Ed’s for 25 of its 38 years, he presided over the biggest expansion in its history, including the opening of the Upper School in 1972.

Read the entire article in the April 2003 issue

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