All boys. All boarding. Grades 9-12.
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Woodberry Forest Parent Shares 9-11 Story
The Woodberry Forest community gathered January 23, 2012, to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001. The evening's special guest was Jimmy Dunne, parent of Seamus Dunne '12 and CJ Dunne '15 and senior managing principal of the investment firm Sandler O'Neill and Partners. The attack on the World Trade Center took the lives of 66 of Sandler O'Neill's 171 employees, including two of its three executives, and destroyed all of its physical and virtual data. As the only surviving executive, Jimmy Dunne led the successful effort to rebuild the company he had started fourteen years earlier with several of his closest friends.
Jimmy explained that the motivation behind his efforts to make Sandler O'Neill profitable again stemmed from his desire to provide financially for the families of the lost employees. "I didn't learn a thing from those murderers," Jimmy told the boys. "I already knew I loved my family and my country." He credits the strong character he learned during his school days for seeing him through the crisis and achieving success, and he praised Woodberry Forest School for building in its students the understanding of right and wrong that would serve them in inevitable times of hardship. "I gave seventeen eulogies and heard twenty-five," Jimmy explained. "Not one of them talked about a person's money, cars, or homes. In the end, people remembered a person for what kind of friend and father he was."
The evening's events also included a screening of a CBS 60 Minutes piece on Jimmy Dunne's actions after September 11, prayers from chaplain Dr. David Smith, and a rendition of O Vos Omnes by Pablo Casals sung by the Dozen.
Woodberry Forest School is an exceptional private school community for high school boys in grades nine through twelve. It is one of the top boarding schools in the United States and one of the only all-boys, all-boarding schools in the country.
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Woodberry Forest admits students of any race, color, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, and national or ethnic origin to all of the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, or national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic or other school-administered programs. The school is authorized under federal law to enroll nonimmigrant students.