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When The Out-of-Door Academy was preparing to construct its upper school campus near the Sarasota Polo Club in 1995, it was surrounded by dirt roads.
Laura Murphy, the current director of enrollment management at the K-12 independent school, remembered that time well. She said the head of school at the time, Martha Duffy, had her car became stuck in a ditch the first time she tried to drive to the 90-acre property on Deer Road off University Parkway.
In 1996, ODA opened the upper school to house its high school freshmen and sophomores.
Murphy and the rest of the ODA teachers, staff and administrators who were opening the upper school didn’t know 28 years later, ODA would be celebrating its largest graduating class of 2024 at 93 seniors.
Before the upper school opened in Lakewood Ranch, ODA was home to kindergarten through eighth grade in Sarasota. Once students graduated eighth grade, they went off to private or public high schools or boarding schools.
“It was a huge miss for us not to have a high school,” said Sean Ball, the current head of upper school who has been with ODA for 33 years. “Who would have figured that we’d have all this now? I mean you look at Lakewood Ranch and the amount of growth that’s happened out here. It’s pretty remarkable.”
He said it was Duffy’s vision to recognize the need for a high school that truly drove the entire school toward the future.
Murphy said Duffy developed a relationship with Lakewood Ranch developer Schroeder-Manatee Ranch and was told the master planned community needed a school. ODA trusted SMR would deliver.
Murphy and Ball said other people thought ODA was crazy for opening a campus in Lakewood Ranch. It was an area filled with wildlife, not people. ODA’s campus continues to be visited by alligators, bobcats and other animals even today.
Murphy said Mike Belcher, a past head of upper school, used to come to campus early to go into classrooms to chase out rattlesnakes.
She recalled being at the groundbreaking of the upper school campus and grabbing a shovel and hard hat. They all gathered to take a photo of faculty spelling out “ODA.”
Both Murphy and Ball said they still use the shovels from that groundbreaking at their homes now.
Administrators and faculty imagined a campus that although it would be an extension of the K-8 campus on Siesta Key, it would be its own. They were building from the ground up, literally and figuratively. They had to choose the school colors, mascot and more.
They settled on blue and white for the colors while the lower school was green and white. They chose Thunder for the mascot because the lower school was the Lightning.
“The lightning before the thunder was kind of the thought process behind it,” Ball said.
Murphy said there was an effort to make sure the upper school had its own identity and to give the students taking a risk in enrolling at the upper school ownership of their new school.
As the years passed, the campuses came together and the lower school’s colors changed to blue and white and both campuses’ mascots became the Thunder. Although there were two different campuses, they were all part of ODA.
In 1999, ODA produced its first high school graduating class with 12 students.
“We were doing such great work, pre-K through eight, that it was nice we got to finish the mission. We put a bow on it instead of sending them away to other schools for their high school career,” Ball said.
The enrollment grew by leaps and bounds. The school needed more space, so the middle school was moved to the upper school campus. In 2020, ODA celebrated the opening of the middle school’s expansion on the upper school campus.
“A lot of our population in the school used to come from Siesta Key. Now, it’s all from Lakewood Ranch,” Ball said. “We were the trendsetters. … It was the vision of Martha Duffy and the board of trustees. Build it and people will come. We built it, and they came, and I feel proud to be a part of it.”
Ball said the amount of growth the school has experienced overall would not have been possible without the Lakewood Ranch campus. There continues to be space for the school to expand in Lakewood Ranch.
“It was a blank slate so we could create what we wanted to create,” he said. “We didn’t have restrictions besides the wetlands restrictions. You could really envision what you wanted the school to look like.”
