$30 million gift from the Rollins family as school crosses the 100-year mark
Atlanta’s Lovett School is preparing to mark its centennial with a new campus center that is as much a family story as it is a building project, anchored by a record-setting $30 million commitment from the Rollins family in honor of their late daughter, alumna Rita Anne Rollins.
The gift, announced as Lovett approached its 100th anniversary, is the largest in the school’s 100-year history and among the most significant ever made to an independent school in the United States, serving as the lead commitment to the school’s One Lovett Campaign and the financial engine behind the future Rita Anne Rollins Hall, envisioned as the “new heart of campus.”
For the Rollins family, the donation extends a multigenerational relationship with Lovett that began decades before the centennial banners went up.
Randall Rollins, the late business leader whose family built Rollins Inc. into a global pest-control and services enterprise, served on Lovett’s Board of Trustees in the 1970s, and multiple generations of the family have attended the school.
Their names have long been stitched into Atlanta’s civic fabric through philanthropy, but this particular commitment is explicitly personal: the gift honors the memory of their eldest child, Rita Anne, a Lovett student who died in an accident in 1970, two years before the school awarded her a posthumous diploma with the Class of 1972.
School leaders describe the new hall as a living memorial that will carry her name into Lovett’s second century, transforming grief that is now more than half a century old into an enduring presence at the center of campus life.
In public remarks, members of the Rollins family have framed the gift as both a tribute and a vote of confidence in Lovett’s future. Amy Rollins Kreisler, one of Rita Anne’s siblings, pointed to the family’s “rich, multi-generational relationship” with the school and said they were “excited to be part of such a transformational change for the campus and the student experience,” language that underscores a desire to link family legacy with institutional momentum as Lovett crosses the 100-year mark.
Head of School Meredyth Cole has called the contribution an “extraordinary milestone” that allows Lovett “to dream bigger for our students and faculty” and “lays the foundation for Lovett’s next century of excellence,” signaling that the family’s philanthropy is viewed internally not as a one-time boost but as a defining inflection point in the school’s evolution.
The $30 million commitment is structured to do more than underwrite a single building.
As the lead gift to the One Lovett Campaign, it is dedicated to four strategic pillars: the construction of Rita Anne Rollins Hall, expanded investments in faculty excellence, enhanced student opportunities, and significantly deepened financial aid resources.
Campaign materials describe this as an effort to “celebrate our first century and shape what is next,” using the high-profile capital project as a focal point while also channeling funds into the people and programs that will animate the hall once it opens.
For a school with roughly 1,640 students, the scale of the gift has outsized implications: leaders expect it to broaden access to a Lovett education and to help recruit and retain the teachers whose work will be showcased in the new academic and creative spaces.
Physically, the Rollins-funded hall is being conceived as an all-in-one campus hub that reflects how students learn, collaborate, and gather today.
Architectural plans from Cooper Carry and school descriptions outline a multipurpose complex that will pull together makerspaces and media studios, dedicated performing arts venues, a new chapel and assembly space, a dining commons, a learning commons, and an expanded campus green that adds roughly an acre of usable greenspace at the heart of Lovett’s 100-acre Paces Ferry Road property.
Renderings show a light-filled atrium, terraces overlooking a water feature, and connections to riverside playfields, reinforcing the idea that the building is less an isolated facility than an organizing spine for academic, spiritual, and co-curricular life.
Project leaders consistently return to the same phrase when describing its purpose: a place where students can “design, create, worship, perform, and gather—all under one roof.”
Timing is central to the symbolism of both the gift and the project. With Lovett’s centennial year unfolding in 2026, the school has aligned the construction schedule for Rita Anne Rollins Hall with its 100-year celebrations, planning to break ground in the summer or fall of 2026 and open the facility in fall 2028.
The effect is to turn the centennial into a launchpad for Lovett’s “second century,” providing current students, alumni, and the Rollins family with a visible marker of the transition from one era to the next. IMPACT Development Management has been tapped to oversee construction, signaling that the school is treating the project as a major institutional undertaking rather than a routine facilities upgrade.
Within Lovett’s broader narrative, Rollins’ commitment is already shaping how the community discusses its identity and aspirations. Campaign messaging and regional coverage have cast the donation as “historic,” “record-breaking,” and “transformational,” phrases that echo a wider Atlanta story in which the Rollins family’s philanthropy has touched education, health care, and religious life across the city.
At Lovett, that influence will be felt most tangibly when students file into a chapel named for Rita Anne, rehearse on the stages and in the studios her family helped build, and spill out onto a campus green designed as a shared front yard for the next generations of Lovett Lions.
For the Rollins family, the centennial opening of the school’s new “heart” promises to be both a public celebration of educational ambition and a private moment of remembrance finally made permanent in brick, glass, and light.