Dorchester Community News

Vision Comes Full Circle for Epiphany School with Permanent Home
Full-Service School to Make Triumphant Dorchester Return

December 21, 2001
by Peter Van Delft

Little more than four years ago, a group of dreamers banded together spurred by the fervent calling of a common vision. Within this vision were many children – children from every economic background, culture, race, and religion imaginable – sharing, playing, socializing, and most importantly learning.

Unencumbered by any of the myriad socioeconomic and class-based obstacles that so many of today’s low-income children face, they were given the attention, encouragement, and most critically the opportunity to succeed without excuses. To some, this might have appeared to be a walk of whimsy or perhaps the fantastic imaginings of a few wild-eyed idealists with less a connection to reality than hearts filled to bursting with naïve optimism. But this was no ordinary vision and these were far from ordinary dreamers.

The Epiphany

The spark that would eventually ignite and become the Epiphany School was first cast back in 1997. That’s when Episcopalians Bishop M. Thomas Shaw and local Church Rector Jane Butterfield Pressler set out to create a school designed to service the needs of some of the low-income inner-city children from the City of Boston.

Using Roxbury’s Nativity Preparatory School as a base model, the pair determined that for such a school to be successful, they would need the skills and passion of a talented, determined, and dedicated staff of believers in their idea. One of the first people seen to embody these traits was a learned man named John H. Finley, IV who was working to achieve his graduate degree from Harvard. Rev. Shaw and Ms. Pressler approached Mr. Finley about their idea and thus the first brick was mortared in the school’s short but storied legacy.

“Bishop Shaw and Jane Butterfield Pressler were talking about a school for a couple of years and they were sort of inspired by the Nativity [Prep] model but also thought of Anglican schools in Africa and the models that they had,” said Mr. Finley, the Epiphany Head of School. “I was asked to take the job on and I really knew that the program would work because we had Reverend Jennifer Grumhaus Daly [Co-Founder and Chaplain] who would provide the curriculum building and the heart and the charisma that it takes to run this school, she is just amazing.

And then we had Tony Jarvis, the head of Roxbury Latin, who would provide this great sense of legitimacy and the support that we’d need to move forward and he was also the rector of a parish at All Saints which was very empty and which would help us find a place to be. I was convinced at that time that we had programs that would work – programs that were needed that I knew about from Nativity.

I knew where I wanted to take it and what kind of changes we wanted to make in that model. So I knew that it was going to happen, I knew that it was going to work. I knew that there were enough pieces in place to make it happen. I said that there were two ways that I wanted it to be and that was to be boys and girls – there were some people who wanted to make it single-sex – and I also wanted to make it tuition free. I really didn’t believe in a sliding scale tuition because I had seen so many private schools where they take a little bit of money and then they say ‘oh it’s a bad year, well let’s take a few more rich kids’ and then ‘oh, the rich kid’s parents don’t like the other kids’ so they pressure the school to force that kid out and you change who it is that you are serving.

And then there were those who felt that having it be tuition free was disempowering, that it was sort of a handout and that it was not a good thing. I respect their opinions, I don’t agree with them, but I respect them. So, my job was to be the kind of person who showed up every day and answered the phones, opened the door. Jennifer worked on the curriculum. We put a board together, had board meetings, and then we started hiring teachers and we opened in September. I started to work on the project in June of 1997 and we opened in September of 1998.” Alas, within just a year’s time, the school would begin the first of several transitions to come in which they searched for a new place to set up shop.