Vision and visionary

When Clint Wilkins first knew Sage Hill School, it wasn’t much to see ? just a series of Post-it Notes covering three walls of an office.

That was the room, located near John Wayne Airport, where Wilkins first moved in 1998 when he was appointed founding headmaster of the Newport Beach private school. To set his priorities, Wilkins assembled a strategic plan of goals for the next two years ? a mere 180 of them ? and stuck them along his walls.

“We had to raise money, contact students and their parents,” Wilkins said. “It was very much like a political campaign. We’d go from barbecue to coffee to lunch, speaking to everyone who would listen.”

Ultimately, that word of mouth got around. Over the next eight years, Sage Hill, on a campus perched on a hillside overlooking the San Joaquin Hills tollway, gained a reputation as a bastion of diversity in one of Newport-Mesa’s most upper-crust areas, a school that not only fostered academic excellence but also mandated community service.

This year at graduation, the senior class left the school a gift that may bring it to a whole new level ? an endowment fund to help low-income students attend the campus. For Wilkins, who will serve his last day as Sage Hill headmaster today, it amounted to a grand finale.

“We look at this as a long-term deal,” he said. “I feel that high school is the time to channel that spirit of idealism.”

It’s idealism, more than anything else, that has guided Wilkins. Since he began at Princeton Day School in 1969, he’s been a rare hybrid: an educator who has devoted nearly all his time to expensive private schools and a crusader for impoverished youths. By the time Wilkins announced his retirement from Sage Hill this year, 15% of the student body was on financial aid.

A native of Boston, Wilkins was serving as the high school principal of a Baltimore private school when Sage Hill’s founding trustees chose him in a nationwide search. Over the last three decades, he had overseen schools in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and the Bay Area and served as a visiting scholar at Stanford.

“You couldn’t find a man with more integrity and more educational excellence in his background,” said Ellen Gordon, a founding trustee of Sage Hill.

Dori Caillouette, another founding trustee, said the board went through a half a dozen candidates before settling on Wilkins.

“We weren’t looking for someone who was deeply entrenched in the traditional mode,” she said. “We were looking for someone who was more visionary. When he accepted the job, we had very little money, no campus and a big dream.”

As a nonprofit school with no religious affiliation, Sage Hill had a democratic mission ? and the administrators made that apparent on the first week of class in fall 2000. During an exercise, the staff lined all students and teachers on the football field, then asked all white students to move forward and black students to take a step back. The aim was to show the role that past racial disparities still play in modern-day America.

Over the next two hours, students and faculty engaged in discussions about religion, gender and other sources of discrimination in their lives. The exercise proved so effective that Sage Hill adopted it as an annual tradition.

The school didn’t stop there. Every year, students do mandatory service learning projects, which can include mentoring fourth-graders on the Westside or identifying water contaminants at local beaches.

When the first senior class graduated in 2003, it started the tradition of leaving a gift for future students.

In some cases, Wilkins said, it takes teenagers to set society on the right path.

“They’re old enough to see the world’s injustices but still young enough not to accept them,” he said. “There’s this sense of optimism, of wanting to change the world, which is really infectious.”

Wilkins will be followed at Sage Hill by Jacqueline Smethurst, an educational consultant and former head of Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. Smethurst will serve as interim head of Sage Hill for the 2006-07 school year.

After a brief sabbatical, Wilkins plans to follow his Sage Hill career by starting another philanthropic venture: a training academy for professionals who want to become nonprofit leaders. Over the last decade, he’s learned how to create an institution out of nothing.

“It’s been an incredible journey to create something that didn’t exist,” he said, looking out his office window over the Sage Hill grounds. “This used to be an empty hillside.”dpt.30-wilkins-CPhotoInfoNG1SG3LI20060630j1n6kkncDON LEACH / DAILY PILOT(LA)Clint Wilkins, the founding headmaster of Sage Hill School, will retire today after eight years at the campus’ helm.