Chinese-owned school holds secret of Trump's grades

Is anybody else amused about the irony of Donald Trump's old high school is now owned by a Chinese businessman and teaches Mandarin?

Since Trump's graduation in 1964, the school located on 525 rolling acres near Pleasantville, 60 miles north of New York, has fallen on hard times.

The New York Military Academy closed in 2015 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but it quickly reopened after a nonprofit entity led by a Chinese investor, Vincent Mo, bought it at a bankruptcy auction and said it would pay off the school’s $16 million debt.

The new owners, the nonprofit Research Center on Natural Conservation was founded by the CEO of Fang Holdings Ltd, based in Beijing and traded on the Stock Exchange. The company is not involved with the nonprofit, its lawyers told the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Trump's parents sent him to the New York Military Academy when he was 13 because of his acting up. With his father's connections, Trump could have gone to schools with better academic reputations, but instead he wound up at NYMA, a mediocre academic institution at the time.

His father, Fred Trump, hoped "the discipline of the school would channel his energy in a positive manner," according to The Washington Post.

Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, in Congressional testimonies and interviews, said that Trump ordered him to make sure his high school and college grades were never made public. 

Cohen said that he had sent threatening letters to Trump’s schools, warning that “we will hold your institution liable” if any of his records were released. 

As Trump has said, he indeed was very active in school. He developed his infamous bone spurs that disqualified him for military service, while playing sports at NYMA, where he participated on the soccer , bowling and baseball teams. 

Those who were aware of the 2011 effort to conceal Trump’s records said the request set off a frenzy at the military academy, according to an article in the Times-Herald Record.

“I know for a fact that in 2011, the decision was made by the superintendent to remove those records and secure them so no one on the staff could get to them,” said Richard Pezzullo, an alum who worked closely with school officials in a drive to save the school, which was then in financial distress. “People had been making inquiries, and there was a paramount interest in securing those records.”

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Donald Trump and his teammates on teh NYMA soccer team.

The boarding school had no formal archive at the time. Jones told the Herald-Record that  he combed through the basement of Scarborough Hall on the academy’s sprawling campus and found the real estate mogul’s transcript in file cabinets containing student records.

“I don’t know if we should be doing this,” Evan Jones, the headmaster at the time, recalled telling his boss, Superintendent Jeffrey Coverdale. “He told me that several wealthy alumni, including a close friend of Mr. Trump, were putting a lot of pressure on the administration to put the record in their custody for safekeeping,” according to the newspaper.

At NYMA, the decision to remove Trump’s records from the files was very unusual, said Jones, headmaster from 2010 to 2011. “It was the only time in my education career that I ever heard of someone’s record being removed,” Jones said. “But people were fearful as a result of whatever call was made from Mr. Trump’s friends. I was told we’re getting a lot of heat about this.”

 “I don’t want to get into anything with these guys,” Cloverdale said. “You have to understand, these were millionaires and multimillionaires on the board, and the school was going through some troubles. But to hear, ‘You will deliver them to us’? That doesn’t happen. This was highly unusual.”

Despite the school's cooperation in concealing Trump's grades, when alumni approached the alleged multi-billionaire for a $7 million donation to save the financially ailing school, Trump turned them down cold.

After hearing their plea, one alumnus said Trump responded, “What do I get for my $7 million?” Apparently not enough, according to Slate. “It’s not a good business proposition,” Trump allegedly said at the time. “The school has had a good run.”Under the new owners, the New York Military Academy is making slow but steady progress on the comeback trail.

Today, 70 cadets are currently enrolled. An additional 25 students from Taiwan are "shadowing" some of the cadets in order to acclimate themselves to the American school system and possibly be persuaded to become future recruits.

Jie Zhang, who became superintendent of the 130-year-old college preparatory military academy in 2016, hopes enrollment will increase to several hundred, according to the Times-Herald Record.

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Donald Trump in full regalia of his high school.

The school's website lists Mandarin as one of the languages taught at the school.

The Academy is not the only property owned by the nonprofit. In 2017, RCNC spent $17.35 million for the property that was once Briarcliff College, with nine buildings on 37 acres, the Westchester Business Journal reported. RCNC hopes to consolidate the acreage with the Academy.

It also owns Arden House, the mansion built by E.H. Harriman right before he died in 1909, "a Gilded Age 100,000-square-foot mansion." Ten thousand acres of the Harriman estate became Harriman State Park in 1910.

Arden House is being run as a destination venue, available to be rented for conferences and other events, according to its website. Its Facebook page has not been updated since 2012.

With room and board, the cost of attending the NYMA is over $40,000 a year. Zhang said one thing NYMA is not is a dumping ground for students with disciplinary problems. Not anymore.

Coverdale, now at another private school in Florida, declined to say where he hid Trump’s records or to identify the people who ordered him to pull them out of the school’s files. No journalists have been able to find Trump's high school grades or his grades at Forham University where he spent two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

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