The school that a group of St. James parents built inside a 1910 estate has just finished the biggest addition of its modern era. Harbor Country Day School cut the ribbon Friday on a new three-story academic wing, an 11,841 square foot building that is the centerpiece of an 8.5 million dollar renovation of its campus on Three Sisters Road. Students are already learning in it this fall.

What the new wing holds

The building packs a remarkable amount of school into three floors. There are 11 new learning spaces serving every grade, along with dedicated new classrooms for grades five through eight. The shared spaces read like a wish list a faculty lounge might produce if nobody told it to be realistic: a library, a Music Learning Center, a STEAM Center for science and engineering projects, an art studio, a Convocation Hall and a performance space.

The wider renovation reaches beyond the new building. The project also brings an upgraded dining area, infrastructure improvements across the campus and an accessible elevator, a meaningful change for a school whose oldest architecture predates the First World War.

The work was designed and built close to home. Jericho based MDS Architecture designed the wing, with Metro Group of Long Island and RDA Landscape Architecture rounding out the project team.

Paid for by the families themselves

What sets the project apart from most new school construction on Long Island is where the money came from. There was no bond vote and no line on anyone's tax bill. The renovation was funded by donations from current and former Harbor Country families, alumni and trustees, the same community that has kept the school running for almost seventy years.

The school's board chair, Cynthia Wong Lippe, framed the building as a physical expression of that support, the belief of generations of families made visible in the spaces their children and grandchildren will learn in. Town of Smithtown Supervisor Ed Wehrheim, who joined students and staff at Friday's ceremony, called the wing an investment in education, creativity, accessibility and the students who will walk through its doors.

A school with an origin story worth retelling

Harbor Country Day School exists because of an act of parental stubbornness that has aged very well. In 1958, a group of local parents took over a grand St. James estate called Tulip Knoll, built in 1910, and converted it into classrooms. The school has grown around that original house ever since, adding adjacent land for athletic fields, and today it teaches children from preschool age two through eighth grade, with a summer day camp filling the campus in July and August.

That history gives the new wing its particular flavor. Plenty of schools build additions. Not many bolt a contemporary three-story academic building onto a Gilded Age estate house and have both sides of the arrangement look better for it. The school describes the campus as a place where timeless architecture and mature trees meet modern classrooms, and the new construction leans into that contrast rather than hiding from it.

What it means for St. James

A private school completing an 8.5 million dollar campus renovation, funded entirely by its own community, is the kind of story a hamlet does not get every year: a local institution betting heavily on its own future, in public, with a ribbon and scissors.

For families with young children anywhere in the Smithtown area, the practical takeaway is that one of the area's smallest schools now has some of its newest classrooms. The independent school teaches roughly a decade and a half of childhood under one roof, from two year olds to eighth graders, and every one of those grades gets some piece of the new building, whether that is a science project in the STEAM Center, an instrument in the Music Learning Center or a first school play on the new performance stage.

The estate house on Three Sisters Road has watched more than a century of Long Island childhoods go by. As of Friday, it has a new neighbor built to watch the next one.