Making Change

April 5, 2024

Barnstormers,

If you visit the modest gravesite of Sam and Helen Walton in the Bentonville Cemetery, you will often find nickels and dimes resting on their shared headstone – quiet expressions of gratitude placed there in homage to the legendary retailer’s first 5 & 10. Today, on the 32nd anniversary of Mr. Walton’s passing, it is fitting that we also pay our respects to the philanthropists whose family foundation made Thaden School possible.  

The coins on the Walton headstone carry me back to Monica Mahoney’s Making Change, the Fleetwood Cadillac stationed near the entrance of 21c Hotel. Perhaps you have stopped to admire its coat of pennies, nickels, and dimes. Built in 1962, the year Walmart’s corporate offices opened in Bentonville, the Fleetwood had a sticker price of $9,937, one of the priciest vehicles on the American road. But the coins stretched across it add up to roughly $952, the amount Walmart saved its customers annually with the fiscal discipline that creates “everyday low prices.” 

I first saw Mahoney’s numismatic mediation on wealth, frugality, and mobility in April of 2015, shortly after its installation at 21c. I was here from New Jersey to meet the search committee that would eventually invite me to lead the founding of Thaden. At that time, our school had no name, no students, no faculty, no curriculum, no campus – just the generous support of the Walton Family Foundation. As I strolled down the pathway to meet the committee for dinner at Crystal Bridges, I dreamed of helping the Foundation create a school for making change: a world-class independent school affordable for all families in Northwest Arkansas. The quality and accessibility of the collections at Crystal Bridges certainly added fuel to this ambitious sense of possibility.

Over the past eight years, our founding funders have provided the philanthropic resources to create such a school: on the strength of our indexed tuition program, Thaden has become a diverse learning community where students from all walks of life can learn and grow stronger together by virtue of their differences. In fact, Walton family contributions to this remarkable program exceed $50 million. That’s five billion pennies, or one billion nickels, or 500 million dimes, enough to coat a fleet of 52,521 Fleetwood Cadillacs. Bumper to bumper, they would stretch from Bentonville to Kingfisher, Oklahoma, where Mr. Walton was born, or to Newport, Arkansas, where he opened his first store. 

But the value of our indexed tuition program is uncountable. As we discussed on Wednesday evening at our State of the School meeting, the level of tuition assistance Thaden offers is the principal engine behind our success in recruiting a remarkable faculty and professional staff from all corners of the United States. It is equally compelling in the eyes of colleges and universities that seek, now more than ever, students who know how to embrace the educational value of the diversity they will find on their campuses. Most of all, we see the value of our indexed tuition program on campus as it enriches – in countless ways – the quality of a Thaden education.  

Just as the gravesite of Sam and Helen Walton faces east toward a rising sun, so a Thaden education will never lose its luster as a currency that carries our newly minted graduates to the places and possibilities of their dreams. 

Together, we are making a school for change.

Clayton K. Marsh

Founding Head of School