If you've read the "Longacres Alumni Page" and our current news pages on the website, you know that things are going very well at Longacres. Our budget for annual expenses is balanced and new students have to sign up almost a year in advance to get into our regular camp sessions.

But money is still a big issue in our master plans. To have nearly 70 years of Longacres tradition is a good thing. But to have buildings and facilities 70 years old leads to occasional very expensive maintenance issues. Many of you are in business yourselves, and it doesn't take more than five minutes with a pencil to see that a camp program with only nine students and a few CIT's is hard pressed to cover routine expenses, let alone major maintenance!

It may seem odd for a privately owned small business to be asking for donations. But Longacres is an "odd" small business. As most of you regulars know, it is a labor of love for us to keep Longacres going after 70 years in our family. And to maintain the very unusual small family farm style riding program that makes us unique. It is no accident that camps offering five hours of riding and showing for everyone are few and far between. They do not make economic sense without special support. Tom and Meghan take well under $20,000 a year out of the Longacres business and live a modest, but comfortable life with the help of some outside income.

In a way, we think of "Friends of Longacres" giving to be a form of multi-tiered tuition. Neither Tom nor Meghan grew up in wealthy families, and we very much want Longacres to remain affordable to some middle class families who are willing to sacrifice a bit. We do not want to become a place that is only for the very rich. If you can afford to contribute something - to pay a little more than the base tuition, it means we can keep our basic tuition a little lower a little longer, and have a more diverse group of students join our family every year.

If your family is in a position to make a contribution as a "Friend of Longacres", along with your tuition payment, Longacres will be grateful. Such contributions will allow us to keep our tuition rate from becoming unaffordable. (continued other side)

We are grateful to those of you who contributed as a "Friend of Longacres" in some way last season. We had several who made helpful cash donations towards the cost of our new barn roof and the major dining hall renovations. We have had valued contributions of time and effort from some with special skills helping to open and improve the farm. We have had help caring for horses that otherwise might not have found a winter home. Many of you sponsored high score awards in the Summer Horse Show Series. More than a dozen parents of current students plus a few other Friends of Longacres helped in some way last year. Anything at all is a help and is appreciated!

In addition to larger cash contributions to our general and maintenance funds, you can sponsor horse show High Score Awards for a $150 donation for a division; you can be an Awards Party Patron for a $100 donation. And if you have special skills that could be of help to the farm, give us a call.

Finally, a comment on a directly related topic: Our base tuition will rise next year. At the same time, we would like to explore the possibility of offering some kind of financial aid. We do not have a good plan for how to administer aid requests. If some of you are familiar with financial aid programs for private schools or colleges that we might piggy back off when determining scholarship eligibility, we'd love to hear from you.

If you've read the "Longacres Alumni Page" and our current news page, you know that things are going very well at Longacres. Our annual budget is balanced and new students have to sign up almost a year in advance to get into our regular camp sessions.

But money is still a big issue in our master plans. To have nearly 70 years of Longacres tradition is a good thing. But to have buildings and facilities 70 years old is a potentially very expensive maintenance issue.

We are beginning to explore the idea of accepting donations from Alumni and friends who have had good experiences at Longacres to help with these large occasional maintenance expenses. And perhaps scholarship funding. - (Longacres already routinely gives modest financial aid to deserving girls and we wish we could do more.)

In 2007 we face the special expense of a new $17,000 barn roof and more than $20,000 for reconstruction of the 70 year old dining hall foundations. Some of you have expressed interest in supporting these projects. We would be pleased to talk with others.

The hard truth is that a very small camp like Longacres must maintain all the same facilities as a much larger traditional camp on a fraction of the tuition income.

Although we are experimenting with adding an additional week or two in late May and June, our budget assumes ten weeks with nine paying students. That's ninety weeks of tuition or a little more, or just under $100,000 gross income.

Although supporting Longacres would not be possible at all if Meghan and I did not have some outside income, we do need to take a little out of the business to support a modest middle class lifestyle for ourselves. That leaves less than $100,000 to cover the annual operating budget of the Longacres farm. It is enough, but just barely - NOT counting the occasional big ticket items like barn roofs and dining hall foundations.

There are only a few options for maintaining the long term success of the program. One would be selling off significant parts of the land here to raise capital. We may do this in a limited way, but if we sell very much it will diminish the Longacres experience. A second option is to raise tuition quite a lot. With our unique program, this might work - but it is not what we want to do. We know that an equestrian horse show program like ours at Longacres is something for reasonably affluent families already and we accept that. But we would be very sorry to have Longacres become a place that only the children of the very rich could afford.

The other option is Alumni support. The steady stream of Alumni letters telling us how much Longacres meant to many students in their youth tells us that there may be enough Alumni loyalty to help defray some of the special expenses we face from time to time. This year would be a good time for some of that to materialize!

Brown Ledge Camp in Vermont, one of the old and successful New England camps, was not long ago sold to a non profit Corporation funded by former campers. A Board of Directors provides for the continued operation of the camp. Something like that might be in Longacres future as we reach our 75^th Diamond Jubilee in six years. In the meantime, any "giving" to support necessary unusual Longacres expenses will have to be informal.

Our guideline will be that normal annual operating expenses should continue to be funded out of the regular tuition income from each year's students. Any Alumni gifts would be kept segregated from our normal business accounts and would be used exclusively to fund identified special maintenance projects. (or scholarship aid with the approval of the donors.) Anyone making a gift to this fund would become a part of our informal "Board of Directors" and would be given appropriate accounting.

Thank you!