The leaf blowers howled next to a reporter attempting to do a standup television broadcast on Roland Avenue in front of the Gilman School on Tuesday morning. She’d been told the noise would stop when she left, the reporter shouted to her audience.

It was a not-so-subtle message from the elite, private boys school signaling how it felt about the unwanted national attention.

Gilman teachers, administrators and board members presented a nearly united wall of silence after news broke that Luigi Mangione, a 2016 graduate had been arrested in connection with the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, in midtown Manhattan. Behind the scenes, text messages and calls were blowing up phones among faculty and alumni of the North Baltimore neighborhood’s private schools, which are all at least a century old.

The sprawling, stately brick buildings of Gilman’s 57-acre campus are set on a wide, tree-lined street that cuts through the neighborhood. Two all-girls private schools — The Bryn Mawr School and the Roland Park Country School — sidle up to Gilman’s campus. Down the street is Boys’ Latin School of Maryland and the Friends School, whose athletic fields nearly abuts Gilman’s.

These institutions, and a half-dozen more scattered farther out in the Baltimore County countryside, are a Baltimore not seen on “The Wire,” but they are threaded through the culture of the city. In Baltimore, where adults still ask each other what school they attended — not their college but their high school — the answer portrays a window into their roots and social class.

Mangione stunned the nation by reaching the pinnacle of this world — as valedictorian of the city’s most elite private boys school and a graduate of an Ivy League college — and then being accused of doing the unthinkable: brazenly shooting Thompson in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk.

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“I feel really bad for Gilman,” said Wally Boston, a McDonogh School graduate and board member who lives in Austin, Texas. For Gilman to have little comment on the turn of events can be expected, he said, because unlike the charges of a teacher’s sex abuse which upset the campus a year ago, this did not happen on their grounds.

“I don’t think they are huddling to protect their brand. I think they are trying to say the story isn’t us,” said Boston, who said he is expressing his own opinions and not speaking for the McDonogh board.

Myra McGovern, vice president of external relations at the National Association of Independent Schools, said when national attention is focused on a school, every teacher can get emails from the press and the school can feel overwhelmed by the attention. The reaction, she said, is often to first try to protect their community — in this case, the alumni and friends of Mangione. Usually, she said, the head of the school tries to respond.

“It may just be that they were caught off guard. They don’t have the capacity to respond,” she said. Henry Smyth, Gilman’s head of school, did not speak on Mangione’s arrest. Instead, the school issued a short statement.

But it wasn’t just the school leadership that remained quiet. Nearly everyone The Banner contacted in Gilman’s circle appeared to draw the wagons in tight.

The reputation of the Gilman School is important. The school depends on annual giving in the millions, and it is vying for students in a community thick with private schools at a time when the population of kids is declining.

“There is lots of choice in our market, and it is not like a 5% acceptance rate at Dalton,” said Boston, referring to the exclusive Dalton School in New York, where families are paying $67,000 a year and tuition assistance comes for families earning as much as $800,000.

Tuition at Gilman is $37,690 a year. Across the street at Bryn Mawr it’s nearly $42,000. A couple of kids in private schools can eat up $80,000 of a family’s income. Financial aid is given out to about a quarter of the student body, and even families making more than $200,000 can receive tuition assistance.

For decades, students in Baltimore’s private schools came from a limited group of families. Among the list of Mangione’s classmates are family names that have appeared on generations of Gilman’s enrollment rolls. But in recent decades, private schools have taken in more diverse student bodies. Today, 41% of Gilman boys self-identify as students of color.

Still, the parking lots are filled with expensive cars, the class sizes small. And the hope is that a private school education will give your child a shot at attending the best colleges in the nation and connections that carry them throughout their lives into an elite club.

At Gilman, four full-time counselors guide the grades of just over 100 students through their college application process. Between 2019 and 2023, some of the most popular colleges for Gilman alumni included Ivy League institutions like Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, where Mangione earned his degrees.

Charlie Shapiro, a 2018 Gilman graduate, was one of the few alumni willing to speak publicly after Mangione’s arrest. He said Mangione was a mentor to him, an intelligent student he looked up to.

The news, while shocking, doesn’t color Shapiro’s perception of his time at Gilman, which he said was positive.

“I am concerned about what might happen to their reputation in the future,” he said, but “from my own perspective, there’s nothing someone can do or someone can say to change my opinion of the school.”

Baltimore Banner reporter Kristen Griffith contributed to this story.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.