“A California high school has made millions of dollars from the initial public offering of shares in Snap Inc., the company behind the Snapchat photo messaging application,” Ashley Coleman reports for The Daily Mail.
“The board of the Saint Francis high school in Mountain View agreed to invest $15,000 in seed money in Snap Inc. in 2012, when the company was just getting started,” Coleman reports. “They had been invited to do so by one of the student’s parents, a venture capital investor, the high school president says in a letter issued to the school community Thursday. Barry Eggers, the parent who organized the deal, said the payoff was unprecedented for a school like Saint Francis. ‘I don’t think there have been any other high schools that have invested so early in a company such as Snap,’ he told Quartz.”
“The private Roman Catholic school held onto the investment until this week, when Snap shares sold for $17 each in an IPO. The share price rocketed another 44 per cent higher when trading began Thursday,” Coleman reports. “The school says they sold two-thirds of their 2.1 million Class A shares at $17 each, to raise $24 million. The remaining 700,000 shares that they held onto are now worth more than $17 million, after the stock closed at $24.48 a share on Thursday.”
Read more in the full article here.
“Saint Francis High School [is] a private Roman Catholic school in Mountain View, California,” Alison Griswold reports for Quartz. “The money will be used ‘accelerate’ the school’s pursuit of goals outlined by its ‘strategic plan,’ which include launching a comprehensive STEM program, expanding funding for financial aid, and providing additional training to faculty and staff.”
“Saint Francis established its growth fund in 1990 as a way of generating additional revenue for the school,” Griswold reports. “In 1996, the fund returned $2.1 million on a $25,000 investment in Advanced Fibre Communications, a telecom services company, according to the school’s website.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Congrats to Saint Francis High School and their students!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
The title should have said private high school instead just high school. They’re the only schools that have that can afford too considering all the budget cuts. Certainly not typical America. Rather the fortunate America.
You know it could be as simple as a fund raiser by the parents to make that type of investment. Any schools PTA could do this. No this is something special, some very smart decision making.
Our local public schools scrape up a lot more money than that for footballl, music, carnival, etc. $15K is a drop in the bucket. I am sorry to put it like that, but it’s true.
Yes, local schools in my state are still trying to collect money for the band trips to Florida, even after they receive anywhere from $7K to $12K per student per year in local, state, and federal taxes.
Many private colleges universities will be forced into pursuing these kind of investments because costs have gotten so out of hand. (unless they have endowments like Harvard or the Texas school systems.
GOP controlled cities and states are cutting budgets in order to give it to corporations and the wealthy. Education is the biggest target. Money raised for football and other actives are just for that, not investing. You’ll never see a kid with a sign collecting money – not for football but for an IPO. private schools don’t have to worry about such things. They have sugar daddies.
Democrat-controlled areas are raising taxes to pay for more administration that never delivers any education improvements.
I’ll be a monkey’s butt. That’s some good investment. Congratulations St Francis. For a short moment, I thought it was my home town Catholic HS, by the same name, but Mountain View is in the same general area, just the other side of the bay.
Now I know where that nice new softball/soccer/lacrosse field came from that we’ve been watching go in all winter…
And all of it tax free.
Maybe they can forward some of that cash to Rome where the Catholic Church is claiming penury when sued for sexual predation of young boys by Priests. Various Catholic entities have been shuffling assets to hide them from being used to pay out damages for the widespread rape of young boys by their employees.
Churches should all be stripped of tax waivers. Bill Mayer rightly calls them the Spook House on the corner that pays no taxes.
Global warming is your religion, and unlike many other religions, the global warming scam never helped anybody except the scam artists.
I have no religion. Climate Change is based upon peer reviewed scientific consensus- not belief.
It was still gambling and no responsible school administration should be playing the markets. You cheer for this school’s stroke of luck now, but you’d be calling for the hanging of school administrators if they had put all their money into MySpace. School officials don’t and should not have the spare time on their hands for venture capital investments.
Teaching is not improved by making it a for-profit factory setting kids up to score well on an artificial test. Real child development takes much more.
Those of you who think like deVos that privatization is the simple answer, ask yourself what problem you are trying to solve. If you want an individual school to achieve amazing test scores, then of course make it private, expensive, and exclusive and demand parent involvement. If on the other hand you want a nation with a well educated populace, you actually have to teach the poor, the parentless, the misfits, and the disadvantaged. For this, the extremely righties on this forum have no answer. They seem to think America would be stronger with a large and growing poor class while their limo drivers take them from gated estate to guarded downtown office every day.
Thats great! Now they can afford to add restrooms for their she-male students.