St. Paul's School (also known as St. Paul's or SPS) is a college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The school's 2,000-acre (8.1 km2), or 3.125 square mile, campus serves 548 students, who come from 37 states and 28 countries.
 Established in 1856 to educate boys from upper-class families, St. Paul's later became one of the first boys' boarding schools to admit girls and is now home to a diverse student body from all backgrounds. The school accepted 15.7% of applicants for the 2022-23 academic year. Annual tuition is $62,000; St. Paul's provides financial aid to 39% of its students and fully meets any admitted student's demonstrated financial need with an average award of $56,182. The school's endowment is valued at $631 million as of June 2019, ranking third among American boarding schools.
 The school's list of notable alumni includes US ambassadors, congressmen, senators, Pulitzer Prize winners, a Secretary of State, and a Nobel laureate, among others.
 In 1856, Harvard University-educated physician and Boston Brahmin George Cheyne Shattuck, inspired by the educational theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, turned his country home in the hamlet of Millville, New Hampshire, into a school for boys.: 8, 9  Shattuck wanted his boys educated in the austere, bucolic countryside. A newly appointed board of trustees chose Henry Coit, a 24-year-old clergyman, to preside over the school for its first 39 years. In addition to Shattuck's two boys and Coit and his wife, there was one other student. The original location was 50 acres, but over the years surrounding lands were acquired.: 14 
 Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the school expanded. In the 1870s, the first ice hockey games in the U.S. were played on the Lower Pond. During the infancy of ice hockey in the United States, the school established itself as a powerhouse that often played and beat collegiate teams at Harvard and Yale. Its Lower School Pond once held nine hockey rinks. In 1884, it built the first squash courts in America. Both ice hockey and squash were introduced to the school by James Potter Conover, one of the most celebrated American athletes of his time, who had also competed for Columbia University. By 1895, when Coit died, the school had 35 teachers and 345 students.
 In 1910, Samuel Smith Drury took over as rector. Drury, who had served as a missionary in the Philippines, found St. Paul's in almost all aspects — student body, faculty, and curriculum — severely lacking a serious commitment to academic pursuits and moral standards. He sought to hire better teachers, tighten academic standards, dissolve secret societies, and encourage a student council. Drury also presided over the school throughout the 1920s and 1930s during what August Hecksher called its "Augustan era".
 The first faculty and students of color arrived at the school in 1957 and 1959, respectively. The following decade ushered in a turbulent period for St. Paul's. In 1968, students wrote an acerbic manifesto describing the school administration as an oppressive regime. As a result, seated meals were reduced from three times a day to four times a week, courses were shortened to be terms (rather than years) long, mandatory chapel attendance was reduced to four times a week, and the school's grading system was changed to eliminate + and - grades (re-introduced in 2016) and given its current High Honors, Honors, High Pass, Pass, and Unsatisfactory labels instead of A–F. By the end of the sixties, St. Paul's had begun to admit sizable numbers of minorities in every class, had secularized its previously strict religious schedule considerably, and expanded its course offerings. It admitted girls for the first time in 1971, becoming one of the first boys' boarding schools to do so. The arts program was also expanded in the early seventies, while the interdisciplinary Humanities curriculum was introduced in the early nineties.
 A new library, designed by Robert A. M. Stern and Carroll Cline, opened in 1991; a 95,000 sq. ft. Athletic & Fitness Center opened in 2004. The school celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2006. The new science and math building — the Lindsay Center — opened in fall 2011. The former visual arts center, the Hargate Building, underwent construction until 2017 to become the new Friedman Community Center.
 
The modern school, in addition to students drawn from the highest levels of American society and international elites, serves a diverse body of students from all backgrounds. The school's rural 2,000-acre (809 ha) campus is familiarly known as "Millville," after a now-abandoned mill whose relic still stands in the woods near the Lower School Pond. The overwhelming majority of the land comprises wild and wooded areas. The campus itself includes four ponds and the upper third of the Turkey River.
 There are 19 dorms, nine boys', nine girls', and one all-gender. Each houses between 20 and 40 students, and every dorm has members of all four forms. The architecture of the dormitories varies from the Collegiate Gothic style of the "Quad" dorms (built in 1927) to the spare, modern style of the Kittredge building (built in the early 1970s).
 Lindsay Center contains a greenhouse and an observatory.
 
Overlooking the Lower School Pond, the Ohrstrom Library was remodeled in 2016 and is now home to 75,000 print books and almost half a million e-books in its digital archive, "putting the school archives on par with some of the country’s major universities." Perhaps the focal point of the campus is the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, constructed between 1886 and 1888, also known as the New Chapel. There is an Old Chapel, used only for ceremonial events as it is too small now to accommodate the entire faculty and student body. St. Paul's conducts its Humanities classes using the Harkness method, which encourages discussion between students and the teacher, and between students. 
 Malcolm Gordon coached ice hockey at the school for 29 years, and during his time there,World War I fighter pilot Hobey Baker played under him. The first squash courts in the United States were built at St. Paul's in 1884.
 St. Paul's, and Concord, New Hampshire, were early cradles for ice hockey in America. By some accounts, the first hockey game in the United States was played on Lower School Pond November 17, 1883. The school was an established leader in the sport in the early 20th century, playing and beating collegiate teams, including Harvard and Princeton.
 St. Paul's boys' crew won the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta in 1980, 1994 and again in 2004. The St. Paul's women's crew team won the Peabody Cup at the Henley Women's Regatta in 1996, 1998, 2001, and most recently 2019.
 The athletic directors of St. Paul's and the other members of the Eight Schools Association compose the Eight Schools Athletic Council, which organizes sports events and tournaments among ESA schools.
 St. Paul's was also a member of the Independent School League (ISL) until 2017. The school announced the decision to withdraw from the ISL in 2016 due to league bylaws surrounding scholarships. Since the 2017–18 academic year, the school competes in the Six Schools League (SSL) with Choate, Deerfield, Northfield Mount Hermon, Andover, and Exeter. Additionally, the school competes in the Lakes Region League with Proctor Academy, New Hampton School, Kimball Union Academy, Tilton School, Holderness School, Vermont Academy, The White Mountain School, and Brewster Academy.
 According to Shamus Khan, author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (2010) and a sociologist who is a St. Paul's alumnus, students are socialized to function as privileged holders of power and status in an open society. Privilege in meritocracy is acquired through talent, hard work, and a wide variety of cultural and social experiences.: 15, 16  Economic inequality and social inequality are explained by the lack of talent, hard work, and limited cultural and social experience of the less privileged.[needs update] Thus high status is earned, not based on entitlement. According to Khan, "Today what is distinct among the elite is not their exclusivity but their ease within and broad acceptance of a more open world."
 Hierarchy is embedded in the rituals and traditions of the school from the first day.[citation needed] According to Khan, the student advances up the ladder of the hierarchy embedded in the culture of the school.[needs update]
 The annual Inter-House Inter-Club Race, known among students as the "Dorm Run," but now officially named the "Charles B. Morgan Run", takes place late in Fall Term, usually in early to mid-November. Students are invited to earn points for their dorm and club by running in a 2-mile (3.2 km) cross country race. The current student record is 9:48, set in 2006 by Peter Harrison '07.
 In the Spring Term, St. Paul's holds a school-wide public speaking contest called the Hugh Camp Cup. The finalists' speeches are delivered before the entire school, and the student body votes on a winner, whose name is engraved on the prize. Alumnus John Kerry achieved this distinction during his sixth form year.
 St. Paul's students once had a close relationship with jam bands like the Grateful Dead. Some of the slang peculiar to St. Paul's originated as the "Pyramid Dialect" among St. Paul's students and alumni who followed the Grateful Dead's 1978 shows in Egypt. Phish played in the Upper Dining Hall on May 19, 1990. American electro house artist Steve Aoki performed in the school's Athletic & Fitness Center on April 9, 2015.
 St. Paul's School founded the summer Advanced Studies Program in 1957 to provide juniors from public and parochial New Hampshire high schools with challenging educational opportunities. The students live and study at the St. Paul's campus for five and a half weeks and are immersed in their subject of choice. Recent offerings have included astronomy and Shakespeare. In addition to the course load, students choose a daily extracurricular activity or sport to participate in four afternoons per week. The program had a 37% admission rate in 2010. In 2014, 267 students from 78 high schools participated in the Advanced Studies Program.
 In May 2017, the school issued a report, led by former  Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, detailing sexual misconduct by 13 former faculty and staff members (including Gerry Studds) that occurred between 1948 and 1988. The report did not focus on any allegations that occurred after 1988. Sexual misconduct documented in the report covered assaults, harassments, and rape. One student who contacted The Boston Globe, but not the people conducting the report said, "It's not a complete accounting. It's nowhere close." Any further historical allegations are reported by an independent overseer.
 In July 2020, author Lacy Crawford published her memoir of being raped as a 15-year-old student on campus, and the school's subsequent cover-up.
 Craig B. Anderson, the Episcopal bishop who was St. Paul's rector for eight years, retired under pressure in May 2005 after a campaign by parents and alumni that criticized his management of school finances and investments. Anderson had severely cut back on school expenses while simultaneously being quite liberal with his own compensation and perks. There was an investigation by the Attorney General of New Hampshire that resulted in a settlement agreement and an audit by the IRS.
 The "Senior Salute", a supposed ceremony in which seniors would proposition younger classmates for sexual encounters before graduation, was brought light in the news in 2015, when a former student, Owen Labrie, was charged with the rape of a 15-year-old freshman, Chessy Prout. Labrie was found guilty on three counts of statutory rape, one count of endangering the welfare of a child and one felony count of using a computer to lure a minor. On October 29, 2015, he was sentenced to a year in jail and five years of probation and was required to register as a sex offender. The New Hampshire Supreme Court unanimously denied Labrie's first appeal of his conviction in November 2018. In June 2019, a second appeal, in which Labrie claimed ineffective assistance of legal counsel at trial, was unanimously denied. A confidential settlement was reached with the victim. In June 2019, Labrie was released early from a 12-month sentence due to good behavior and the New Hampshire Supreme Court unanimously denied his appeal for a new trial.
 Chessy Prout, with the help of Jenn Abelson, an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe, published her memoir of the incident, I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor's Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope, on March 6, 2018.
 In July 2017, the New Hampshire Attorney General, with assistance from Concord police and the New Hampshire State Police, started a criminal investigation into the school to determine whether administrators engaged in conduct that endangered the welfare of students. In 2018, the state AG reached a settlement agreement with the school to avoid criminal prosecution. In 2020, the overseer of the settlement abruptly resigned, citing verbal abuse and obstruction by the school of his ongoing investigations.