---
title: "A prep school just got $200 million, payable over the next several decades"
description: "Victor Atkins remembered Middlesex in his will with the biggest gift in its 125 years, and a few instructions"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-05T11:43:25.658Z
modified: 2026-10-05T17:16:47Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-prep-school-just-got-200-million-payable-over-the-next-sev-fa7946
language: en
tags: ["education", "philanthropy", "wealth", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A prep school just got $200 million, payable over the next several decades

*Victor Atkins remembered Middlesex in his will with the biggest gift in its 125 years, and a few instructions*

By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-prep-school-just-got-200-million-payable-over-the-next-sev-fa7946

Around New England there are many private high schools that can boast of having celebrated their 125th birthdays. The Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, has now found a way to enliven the festivities that the others will struggle to match: announcing, at an evening reception on September 26 kicking off its anniversary celebrations, a donation valued at $200 million. The Boston Globe reports this may be a first for the genre.

The donor is the late Victor Atkins, an alumnus who worked at the brokerage E.F. Hutton and went on to chair the board of Polaris, the snowmobile and ATV manufacturer. He died in April 2025 at the age of 80, at his home in Nevada. His affection for Middlesex was never a secret — the campus already has an Atkins Athletic Center and an Atkins House dormitory — but his earlier gifts were never on this scale. “It’s an incredible gift,” Bessie Speers, the head of school, told the Globe. “His deep love for the school has translated into this incredible legacy.”

The mechanics of the gift are worth a look, because $200 million is not a check so much as a plan. Atkins’s estate laid down a few stipulations: 25 percent goes to a faculty endowment, 15 percent to financial aid and 10 percent to student residential life, with the remaining half unrestricted. And the money arrives on a schedule rather than in a lump. Middlesex has received 40 percent of the total so far — enough to push its endowment to a recently pegged $323 million — while the rest sits in a charitable trust that will pay out to the school over the next several decades.

This structure is doing quiet work in both directions. For the donor’s estate, a charitable trust is the standard machinery for turning one very large act of generosity into a long stream of deductible, managed distributions — the gift is irrevocable, but its arrival is metered. For the school, it means something halfway between having $200 million and being promised $200 million. The whole sum is legally spoken for, which is why Middlesex can announce the full figure at a 125th birthday party and not be accused of wishful thinking. But the school will spend it as it comes, decade by decade, which is a discipline most institutions would not choose for themselves and most donors, understandably, do not trust them with. Dead men set budgets. That’s the point.

The earmarks, too, tell a story about what Atkins thought the money was for. Half of it is unrestricted, which in philanthropic practice is the real compliment: it says the school can be trusted with discretion. The directed half favors the inputs — faculty pay, financial aid, dormitory life — rather than anything with a naming opportunity attached, and Atkins had already collected his naming opportunities while alive, on the gym and the dorm. “He believed in investing in things that would help people be better human beings,” said Jason Robart, the board chair, who called the gift’s likely effect on other donors “really humbling.”

That last phrase is the honest tell about how advancement offices think. The $200 million is the gift; the announcement, carefully timed to the anniversary kickoff and kept secret by top officials for weeks beforehand, is the fundraiser. A nine-figure bequest to a Concord boarding school of a few hundred students is not only revenue. It is an advertisement, to every other alumnus with a Nevada house and a will, of what a legacy looks like when it is done properly. The bar in New England prep school philanthropy just moved, and Middlesex moved it — which, for a school founded the year the bottle cap was invented, is a decent use of a birthday.