Table of Contents
A Denver high school named after Robert F. Smith, the Black billionaire founder of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, will close after the city's school board voted 4-2 to shut it.
The Denver Public Schools Board of Education approved the closure of Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy on Thursday, Nov. 12. The school will close at the end of the 2026-27 school year.
The vote came less than a month after the district recommended the closure in October, citing low enrollment. The school had 24 students at the time.
Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy opened about six years ago as a small high school built on the model of historically Black colleges and universities, with a focus on science, technology, engineering, arts and math.
The school had plans to grow. In December 2022, the board approved moving it into the former Barrett Elementary building, a site that gave it space to add students. That growth did not come. In August, the district cut the school's ninth-grade class, leaving it without a new group of freshmen this year.
Smith's Denver roots
Smith, 63, was born and raised in Denver and graduated from the city's East High School. He earned a chemical engineering degree from Cornell University and an MBA from Columbia Business School, and worked as an engineer and later as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs before founding Vista Equity Partners in 2000.
The Austin, Texas-based firm invests in enterprise software companies and grew into one of the largest private equity investors in the sector. The firm made Smith one of the wealthiest Black Americans.
Smith is also one of the best-known Black philanthropists in the United States. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2017, committing to give away at least half of his fortune.
In 2019, he told the graduating class at Morehouse College, a historically Black men's college in Atlanta, that he would pay off their student loans. The gift, which later grew to cover the debts of graduates' parents, was valued at about $34 million.
He has also funded programs aimed at bringing more Black students into science and engineering fields, the same mission the Denver school was built around.
The intelligence satisfies curiosity. The paid briefings satisfy strategy.
Every Monday, Elite subscribers receive an Investor Memo breaking down the deal, the structure and the positioning behind the week's most consequential African wealth story — the kind of analysis that doesn't appear anywhere else.
Twice a month, a Wealth Intelligence brief profiles a single billionaire's holdings, cash flows and expansion pipeline in detail no public source matches.
→ Executive ($25/mo): Daily newsletter + Deep-Dive Reports
→ Elite ($75/mo): Everything above + Investor Memos + Wealth Intelligence + Quarterly Analyst Briefings
Subscribe now
