"The Campaign for the Boys honors those boys who have come before us, sustains those here now, and prepares the way for those yet to come."
— Headmaster Byron Hulsey '86
To secure Woodberry’s mission of educating boys in a community built on intellectual thoroughness and moral integrity, we have launched The Campaign for the Boys. This campaign will advance the student experience for decades to come by endowing support for tuition assistance and for the school’s faculty and staff. The Campaign for the Boys has already helped fund the complete restoration of the Walker Building, ensuring this iconic space will remain at the heart of the Woodberry student experience.
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Tuition Assistance
Secure the long-term resources needed to make a Woodberry education available to any boy with the talent and desire to succeed as a Tiger and make the school more affordable to all families by allowing for lower, more sustainable increases in tuition in the years ahead.
Faculty Support
Provides resource to ensure the school can hire and retain the very best faculty and staff who will know, challenge, and love Woodberry boys each and every day.
Walker Building
Restore the Walker Building, which has been the heart of our campus since 1899, so that it can serve boys' needs for decades to come.
“We try to teach that education is training for service to others rather than success for one’s self; to give rather than to get; for sacrifice rather than gratification.”
— J. Carter Walker, 1955
Tuition Assistance Goal
GOAL
$80
million
COMMITTED
$65
million
$125 Million
Tuition Assistance
Goal: $80 Million
Walker Building
Goal Met
Faculty and Staff Support
Goal Met
The Challenge
GOAL
$40
million
COMMITTED
$23
million
The current and former Board is challenging the Tiger Nation to help us conclude the Campaign for the Boys and meet our goals. Woodberry has a proud tradition of collective philanthropy. The school has the highest alumni giving rate of any school or university in the country. Past campaigns for the school have drawn on a deep and broad pool of support, receiving gifts of every size from alumni, parents, and friends. The Campaign for the Boys is no different.
To achieve the campaign’s objectives in the next year and a half, three extraordinary Tigers — Laura Bucholz, Bill Caler ’63, and Fred Lummis ’71 generously pledged $5 million toward tuition assistance and challenged the current board of trustees to match it, which they promptly did, bringing the total to $10M. The board then turned around and challenged all former trustees to match their $10M, and we have secured $20M. Now the current and former trustees are challenging the Woodberry community to raise an additional $20M. It will take the participation of every member of the Woodberry community to achieve this ambitious goal and secure the future of the school in perpetuity. If we meet this challenge, we will meet the goals of the campaign and secure Woodberry’s unique culture and style of education for future decades of students. Whether it's a contribution to the Amici Fund or the creation of a new scholarship in the endowment, the gift will go towards the challenge.
The Impact of Investing
in Woodberry
Travis “Ty” Tysinger ’62 has seen Woodberry from a variety of perspectives. While plenty of alumni have become teachers or watched their sons and grandsons attend the school, few can say that they’ve been a student, three-sport varsity letterman, teacher, parent, development officer, volunteer, and grandparent. Ty, however, has done all those things in his sixty years of knowing the school.
A Culpeper native, he first came to Woodberry for two postgraduate years, during which he lettered in football, soccer, and baseball. He quarterbacked the varsity squad during the legendary Red Caughron’s first two seasons as head coach of the Tigers. While Ty’s tenure as a student was brief, it would play a significant role in shaping his future. “The school embraced me in a way that I had never felt before,” Ty said. “They saw more in me than I had ever seen in myself. It just turned out to be a magical time.”
Throughout his time at Hampden-Sydney College, that fond feeling about Woodberry stayed with him. After his graduation, Ty began an eight-year stint at Woodberry as a teacher and a coach. The Woodberry he returned to felt different.
“I first came to Woodberry at a time when Mr. Walker’s old masters werestill a presence and a strength of the institution. But that cadre of wonderful teachers was heading out the door,” he said. “Woodberry needed a little shaking up, and Headmaster Baker Duncan ’45 really got the school going again. He brought in some wonderful new teachers who would become favorites of mine.”
Among those faculty members was English teacher John Stillwell ’45, who also influenced the young Tysinger.
“He and Coach Caughron were the two men who most influenced me when I was there,” Ty said. “But lots of people helped me round out and round up my thinking and my direction.”
When Fred Lummis ’71 arrived at Woodberry as a new boy, he was thirteen years old and had never been east of Texas, his home state.
“It was a major moment of growing up and figuring things out on your own,” Fred said of his time as a student. “It was an experience that prepared me for the rest of my life.”
After attending Vanderbilt University, where he met his wife, Claudia, Fred returned to Texas, earning a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Austin and settling in Houston. The distance, his business career in private equity, and a busy family life meant he didn’t have many chances to stay connected with Woodberry or his fellow alumni. That began to change when his own sons approached high school age. Though they didn’t attend Woodberry, the experience of taking them to visit campus got Fred thinking.
“I realized that Woodberry meant a lot to me, and that reconnecting with the school and my classmates was important,” he said.
Fred and Claudia joined the Advisory Council, and in 2012 he joined the board of trustees. Not long after becoming a trustee, Fred became chair of the finance committee, a role he held until his board term ended in November 2021. He helped the school chart its recovery from the Great Recession, transition from the headmastership of Dennis Campbell to that of Byron Hulsey ’86, and respond to the economic challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The day-to-day financial management of Woodberry is fantastic, and the school’s financial discipline and oversight stack up favorably with any company I’ve worked with,” Fred said. “There’s a focus on keeping costs down so that we can control the growth of tuition.
Ty Tysinger '62: Sixty Years of Tiger Service
Fred Lummis '71: Giving Back to a Place that Shaped Him
