(Bloomberg) -- Castilleja School Foundation is borrowing in the municipal bond market for the first time, receiving $106 million to upgrade the campus of the 127-year-old private school for girls and young women.
The bonds, issued through the California Enterprise Development Authority, are secured as a general obligation of the school and will be its only outstanding debt.
S&P Global Ratings assigned the bonds an A grade, citing Castilleja’s “healthy market position with historically very solid demand metrics for the rating, highly capable and tenured leadership team, and a relatively modest but stable enrollment base,” wrote credit analyst Chase Ashworth.
The school, founded by Stanford University graduate Mary Ishbel Lockey with the encouragement of the university’s first president, is known in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Its board of trustees includes executives from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Intel Corporation, plus investment firms KKR & Co. and Silver Point Capital.
A handful of professors from Stanford, about a mile away from Castilleja in the affluent neighborhood of Old Palo Alto, also serve as trustees. Tuition costs $62,400 for a 12th-grade day student, and only about 31% of applicants were accepted for this year at Castilleja, the only non-sectarian all-girls middle and high school in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Castilleja is one of several independent schools increasingly looking to public markets, says Ashworth.
The increase is “due to current economic conditions and tightening in the banking sector as of early last year,” he said. “The sector historically benefitted from greater flexibility in funding options, with private placement bonds having been a particularly popular form of financing in the past.”
Campus Makeover
Castilleja officials plan to renovate about 75% of the institution’s six-acre campus, plus construct new buildings over the next four years. An aquatics center, a three-story building for classrooms, parking facilities and other improvements will be added, increasing the school’s capacity to 540 students in 2028 from 416 currently, according to the bond prospectus.
The project, under consideration for more than a decade, will replace 1960s-era structures originally built as dormitories. Equally important in the tech-forward region, the new buildings will include space for robotics, science and technology programs and a center for leadership and global education outfitted with a state-of-the-art video conference space.
The expansion has prompted a backlash from the school’s wealthy neighbors upset about increased traffic. To address the concerns, the school received a permit from the City of Palo Alto capping enrollment at 540 students and requiring a plan to limit traffic around the campus.
The school expects the entire project cost to be $198 million, according to bond documents. It began fundraising in 2015 and has raised $97.1 million so far, according to bond documents. Castilleja has a $75 million endowment.
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