Unlike in days long gone, The Hill School and Pottstown borough need each other to face the future, Gov. Tom Wolf said Thursday night.
Wolf, a 1967 graduate of the prestigious private school located on the borough’s eastern edge, said in his day, The Hill School “existed in splendid isolation” and had little to do with Pottstown, which at the time, was a booming industrial center.
“Pottstown didn’t need Hill and Hill didn’t need Pottstown,” he said.
But times have changed.And now, the future of the two are “inextricably intertwined,” as community development expert and fellow Hill alum Bart Harvey phrased it in remarks that followed Wolf’s.
Toward that end, The Hill School has provided a $5 million endowment to its community engagement arm – called Hobart’s Run – in an effort to improve the neighborhood surrounding the school and lift up the borough as a whole.
One of those efforts is an investor’s forum, the bulk of which will occur Friday when potential investors will hear success stories about investment in Pottstown and participate in peer-led discussions and networking concerning strategies for business expansion and creation in the borough.
“Our mission for the Investors’ Conference is to provide a local forum through which potential investors can learn about the process involved with becoming a stakeholder in the revitalization of Pottstown,” said Twila Fisher, manager of community and economic development for The Hill School and the head of Hobart’s Run.
The effort was kicked off Thursday night with a dinner at the historic Sunnybrook Ballroom in Lower Pottsgrove and at which Wolf agreed to serve as the keynote speaker.
He said The Hill School and Pottstown now “need each other” as each is best served when the other flourishes.
When The Hill School loses prospective students because the neighborhood around the school is something less than “a pristine New England village,” that’s a situation that hurts both the borough and the school, he said.
But the very fact that the neighborhood surrounding The Hill School is not a picture postcard, “but a real town,” is an advantage that should be marketed, not a handicap which needs to be hidden, said Wolf.
“America’s top schools are no longer looking for students who have been cosseted on an island for their education. You have all the ingredients to be a unique experience in getting your secondary education,” said Wolf.
“Both Pottstown and The Hill School should make more of their unique position among elite prep schools,” Wolf advised. “No other prep school has what Hill has – Pottstown – and Hill students will have a richer educational experience by engaging with the community here.”
He said other schools have successfully engaged with their surrounding communities and lifted both up as a result – citing efforts by the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in Philadelphia and Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.
But the partnership needs more than to work on Pottstown-specific issues.
“You also need a good outside game,” Wolf advised.
By this he meant having a voice in Harrisburg and Washington to address “all the legacy issues that towns like Pottstown face.” He offered up municipal pensions and high property taxes as two examples.
“School property taxes hit places like Pottstown the hardest, with a high rate that doesn’t produce much revenue. Trying to revive a place like that without reforming the property tax structure is like pushing water up hill,” said Wolf.
A partnership like Hobart’s Run can achieve “great things” with trust among its partners and a good inside and outside game, Wolf said.
Quoting 17th century English poet John Donne, whose work he studied all those years ago in his Hill English classes, Wolf cited the poem “No Man is an Island.”
And similarly, The Hill School and the borough need to break down the barriers that keep them from working together.
If not, “we know for whom the bell will toll,” Wolf warned.
