Prize Pupil

The idea of sending other people's children away to school came to Hill unexpectedly. A former music teacher, she was floored when, in 1975, her son Stephen, then an eighth-grader at the private Potomac School in McLean, told her he wanted to go to boarding school.

"I thought, Oh no, we can't do boarding school. I just had that idea that boarding school was where you sent kids who were bad, or was for rich kids whose parents wanted to get rid of them." But after visiting some campuses with her husband, Caesar, a Census Bureau statistician, she was impressed. "The whole embrace was so welcoming," she says. "The small class sizes, the teachers who lived on campus. We drove through the gates of one of the schools, and my husband and I were going, 'Haaah. . .' We didn't know such things existed."

Stephen, now executive vice president at Black Entertainment Television, ended up at Groton on partial scholarship; his younger brother, Gary, now a senior executive at the Motley Fool in Alexandria, joined him there three years later. Both loved it and went on to Brown.

When Hill saw her sons doing well at Groton, it hit her that other minority students could thrive there, too. In 1979, as her older son was preparing to graduate, Hill began talking with three other students -- children of friends of friends -- who were excelling at their D.C. area schools. She packed them into her red Volkswagen hatchback and ferried them up to New England for a boarding school tour. "I just called the schools and said, 'We want to come see you.' They said, 'Well, who is this woman?'" That first year, Hill got all three students into schools. She'd found a calling.

Over the next quarter-century, Hill estimates she spent $25,000 to $30,000 a year on tutoring, testing, application fees, interview clothes and transportation. A little of the money came from donations; the rest came from her husband's annuity (he died in 1984) and her own small investments.

The job consumed her time and savings, but it didn't feel like a sacrifice: "I think if you have a purpose, you don't think about what you give up." It was reward enough to help students with so much potential.

These days, Hill needs no introduction to most admissions offices. She has served on the boards of many schools (she was on Groton's board for years; now Stephen is) and has conducted workshops nationwide on how schools can identify promising minority students and help them succeed.

"She's had a dramatic effect on independent schools across the United States -- just this one person," says Rebecca Gilmore, Foxcroft's director of admissions.

As she built Project Match, Hill discovered that skeptical parents had to be wooed. Some refused to consider sending their children away, or backed out at the last minute. She also met opposition from local public schools. "I'm doing what they call 'creaming' -- I'm taking the best students out of the system. What does that do to their scores? What does that do to their role models? And I understand that. But my first concern is for the kids."

Some public school guidance counselors contacted her anyway. "Please do not tell anyone I called you," they would whisper, "but I have a student I think should go to a boarding school. Her situation is not good."

"Not good" often meant violence or neglect. Hill, a matronly woman with a neat cap of gray curls, has walked through apartment buildings past men playing dice who made lewd remarks. Her heart has pounded as she climbed stairways, her spectacles dangling from their gold chain, and entered apartments where the floors were strewn with mattresses and the adults were stoned.

She remembers one girl's house where "there were all these hangers-on, the father's in jail, there's an aunt that was feebleminded, or not sober, a brother that might be in a gang." With Hill's help, the girl began attending Sandy Spring Friends School in Maryland. During the girl's freshman year, her brother was shot in the face and killed on 14th Street NW, but she stayed on and graduated. A few years later, Hill was at a downtown TGI Friday's restaurant when a young woman ran up calling, "Miss Hill, Miss Hill!" It was the girl from Sandy Spring Friends. Now in her twenties, she'd graduated from college and landed a job with an accounting firm. It was her first day of work, and she was celebrating with her boyfriend. After chatting with Hill, the young couple returned to their table. Hill sat at hers and wept.