The St. Mark's School of Texas is a nonsectarian preparatory day school for boys in grades 1-12 in Dallas, Texas, US accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest.
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History
St. Mark's traces its origins to the Terrill School for Boys, which was founded by Menter B. Terrill in 1906. The six original teachers included Terrill, who had been valedictorian at Yale, as well as his wife, Ada (one of the first female graduate students at Yale), and his father, James, a former college president. Terrill's school was explicitly intended to rival east coast prep schools. Terrill quickly recruited the sons of some of Dallas' most affluent citizens and also boarding students from throughout the southwest. By 1915, Terrill School sent 14 of its 33 graduates to Ivy League colleges.
As headmaster, Terrill encouraged Miss Ela Hockaday to open a girls' school in Dallas in 1913. Schools descended from Terrill have had some affiliation with the Hockaday School for over a century, with shared social events, artistic performances, and some classes.
After Terrill retired in 1916, the school became increasingly seen as a sports school, liberally recruiting "semi-pro athletes" who allowed the school to compete against much larger high schools as well as teams of college freshmen from Rice, SMU, and TCU. St. Mark's sports teams were very successful during the era, often going undefeated and winning state high school championships in both football and ice hockey in the 1920s. In 1930, the football team was undefeated and unscored upon, and the basketball team won a prep school national championship.
The Terrill School soon faced academic competition from Texas Country Day, founded in 1933 with 10 boys and four teachers. Within two years of its creation, Texas Country Day was advertising that its faculty included "Rhodes Scholar and Harvard, Dartmouth, and Amherst men." In 1939, the school recruited the previous year's Heisman Trophy winner, Davey O'Brien, to be its three-days-a-week football coach; 61 of 65 high school boys tried out for spring football that year.
In the context of the Great Depression, World War II, no endowment, and a small student body, Terrill School failed by 1943/44. Terrill re-emerged as the Episcopal-associated Cathedral School in 1944.
Within a decade of Terrill's demise, several local business leaders tried again to create an elite Dallas institution by merging Texas Country Day (1933-1953) and the Cathedral School (1944-1953).
St. Mark's is the result of this merger, and it was immediately and robustly supported by some of Dallas' most successful businessmen of the post-World War II era. Beginning in the 1950s, for example, two of the founders of Texas Instruments donated a total of nearly $50 million, helping to create the solid endowment and modern campus. By the 1960s, Time' magazine called St. Mark's the "best equipped day school in the country."
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Headmasters
- Menter B. Terrill (1906-1916), Terrill School
- M.G. Bogarte (1916-1931), Terrill School
- Sam "Pop" Davis (1931-1946?), Terrill School
- Kenneth Bouve (1933-1949), Texas Country Day
- Robert Iglehart (1949-1956), Texas Country Day and St. Mark's
- L. Ralston Thomas (1956-1957)
- Thomas B. Hartmann (1957-1963)
- Christopher Berrisford (1963-1969)
- John T. Whatley (1969-1983)
- David Hicks (1983-1993)
- Arnold Holtberg (1993-2014)
- David Dini (2014-present)
Traditions
Many school activities take place each year. For example, St. Mark's has a wilderness program that begins with a week-long trip for fourth graders to the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Camping continues through middle school and culminates in the summer before 9th grade with a mandatory ten-day camping trip in the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico. Some students go on to be upper school "sherpas," who help faculty lead this annual rite of passage. The first freshman trip, in 1971, was to the Big Bend of Texas. Annual trips to the Pecos Wilderness began the next year.
Other activities have their own traditions, ranging from the international travel of the choir to a wide variety of community service projects to events and activities that focus on environmental sustainability on campus.
The school uniform features grey shorts and a white button down shirt. Seniors wear blue shirts.
St. Mark's is nonsectarian, with weekly nondenominational chapel services led by an Episcopal chaplain.
The school's motto is "Courage and Honor."
The school today
Approximately 850 students are spread across first through twelfth grade, and the overall student/faculty ratio is 8:1. Of more than 120 faculty and administrative members, 86 have advanced degrees, including nine with doctorates. As of 2016, 23 faculty members have been at the school twenty years or more. There are eighteen endowed chairs for teachers and administrators.
On its 40 acre-campus is an array of buildings, most of which are named after well-known Dallas families. In the 1960s and 1970s, Texas Instruments' co-founders Cecil H. Green and Eugene McDermott donated a math and science quadrangle, the main library, the greenhouse, the planetarium and the observatory.
The early emphasis on science facilities was not random. A former St. Mark's headmaster said: "St. Mark's is a Sputnik school pragmatically established by industrialists who were interested in turning out scientists." The science facilities have contributed to the career development of a number of future scientists, including Alan Stern '75, who traces his current role as principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto to his early participation in the St. Mark's planetarium, observatory, and astronomy club.
In more recent years, the natatorium was named in honor of Ralph Rogers, the Lamar Hunt family donated a football stadium, and Tom Hicks funded a new gymnasium. The Roosevelt family contributed a carillon in 2005 and a Letourneau pipe organ in 2013. The Lower School has its own library, while the main library, named after Ida and Cecil H. Green, is heavily computerized but also features 56,000 volumes. St. Mark's was rated in 2016 as having one of the ten most beautiful high school campuses in the state.
Spearheaded by a $10 million donation from the family of Harlan Crow, the Centennial Project raised over $110 million when it ended in June 2013. The Project led to additional endowed teaching chairs as well two new state-of-the-art academic buildings. Centennial Hall houses the Math, English, History, and Administrative departments, while the Robert K. Hoffman '65 Center -- funded largely by Kenneth A. Hersh '81 -- houses the Language, Debate, Journalism, and College Counseling programs, in addition to the Student Store and Senior Lounge. Other major contributors have included Algur H. Meadows, Charles Nearburg '68, Wirt Davis '36, Ross Perot, Jr. '77, Al Hill, Jr., Everett DeGolyer '40, and H. Ben Decherd.
St. Mark's will break ground on a new state-of-the-art science center in July 2017. Melinda & Steve Winn '64 and Chris Winn '99 announced the $10 million lead gift, and funding continued with an additional $30 million donated by 55 other families. When completed, the combined 75,000 square foot Winn Science Center and renovated McDermott-Green Science Building will feature modern laboratory spaces, along with a new lecture hall and maker space as well as a new greenhouse and planetarium (replacing the planetarium and greenhouse that have been in use since 1961). Other features will include state-of-the-art facilities for Lower School science, engineering and robotics, DNA science, and computer science, as well as expanded meeting and study areas to support student and faculty collaboration. A joint project with the University of Texas at Austin will allow students to continue to have direct internet access to observatories in Alpine, Texas and rural Peru.
In contrast to the Terrill School, which was created and spearheaded by its eponymous founder (and then failed after he died), St. Mark's has been driven by donors, most of whom have actively served on its powerful board of trustees. As D Magazine once asserted, "there are some prep schools where the headmaster embodies the institution's traditions and goals. St. Mark's is not one of them. St. Mark's has its roots in its board of directors, which in turn is rooted in the city's most-established establishment - oil, high technology and, in the old days, cotton." At the same time, few of these businessmen have experience in teaching, and so the specifics of pedagogy is left to teachers and a relatively autonomous administration.
The first African-American student entered St. Mark's in 1965. 46% of the school's 852 boys are now students of color, a group that includes boys who identify as African American, Asian American, and Hispanic.
93% of current parents donated to the 2015-16 annual fund, as did 59% of all living alumni (a new school record for alumni participation). A total of $3.4 million was raised for the year.
As of 2015, the school's overall endowment was over $100 million. This translates into an endowment of over $117,000 per student. The annual outlay for financial aid in 2015-16 was $2.4 million. There are eighteen endowed Master Teacher chairs, including three for department chairs and one for the headmaster.
Academics
22% of the overall applicant pool was accepted to St. Mark's in 2016. Of those accepted, 92% enrolled at St. Mark's. 98% of St. Mark's students continued into the next grade at St. Mark's in 2016 (i.e., the school had a 98% retention rate).
St. Mark's Quiz Bowl Teams have won national championships. For example, the 2017 team won the National Academic Quiz Tournaments' Small School National Championship for charter and private schools. In 2016, the quiz bowl team was ranked 2nd nationally among private schools. The Middle School quiz bowl team won the state championship in 2017 and finished second nationally at the 2014 National Academic Quiz Tournaments.
St. Mark's math and science (STEM) teams have also won national competitions. For example, in 2013, a team of 8 SM juniors and seniors finished 1st nationally in an engineering problem-solving competition sponsored by the Technology Student Association, while the 9th/10th grade team finished 1st nationally in 2015. In that year, two different SM 9th/10th grade teams finished 1st and 3rd in state, while three different SM 11th/12th grade teams finished 2nd, 4th, and 12th in Texas.[126]</ref>
Fourth grade classes from St. Mark's finished first in their division in national team WordMasters competitions in both 2015 and 2016. Ten S.M. boys scored 100% on that Wordmasters test, which was 20% of the total number of perfect scores in the country.
In 2016, a senior was a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search; he was one of forty finalists nationwide and the only Texan. Also in 2016, a senior was recognized as a National Student Poet by a program within the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities; he was one of five national winners selected from over 20,000 applicants. Seven St. Mark's seniors have been named Presidential Scholars by the Presidential Scholars Program since 2003. In 2013, a student won the Nestle Very Best in Youth Award, one of eighteen winners from around the country. An 8th grader from St. Mark's won the 76th Scripps National Spelling Bee. In 2014, a St. Mark's student won the national high school chess championship and became a chess international grandmaster, thereby becoming the youngest person with that rank in the Americas. Also in 2014, a student won his second straight Indian national championship in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Two SM students were among the country's 300 semifinalists in both the 2016 and the 2017 United States National Physics Olympiad.
Between the 2013 and 2016, 105 seniors were named semi-finalists by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation; this number represents about 30% of the graduates during those 4 years. In addition, over 60% of the seniors were named either National Merit Semifinalists or Commended students during that time frame. For the class of 2016, the average SAT was 2160 on a 2400-point scale.
Surveys in 2016 and 2017 ranked St. Mark's as the best all-boys school in the U.S., and the best high school in the state of Texas. Multiple other surveys have ranked St. Mark's highly in regards to academics and college placement.
Athletics
St. Mark's sponsors seventeen varsity sports teams which compete with the sixteen other private schools in Texas and Oklahoma comprising the Southwest Preparatory Conference (SPC). St. Mark's has won fifteen consecutive SPC "Directors Cups" (2002-2016), which is a measure of a school's overall performance within the conference.
Some SM sports teams compete against public and private high school teams from throughout Texas. The following SM teams have won Texas state championships.
Some well-known alumni were athletes while at St. Mark's. For example, Luke Wilson was part of a 1989 St. Mark's track quartet that still holds the fastest 4x400 relay time in SPC conference history (3:21.38), while Tommy Lee Jones went on to become an all conference offensive lineman for Harvard's football team. Boz Scaggs was a track and soccer star while at St. Mark's, though it was also during high school that he took his first guitar lessons from a classmate, Steve Miller; while in high school, they created a band called the Marksmen.
At least seven alumni have played in the National Football League: Ty Montgomery '11, Emmanuel Acho '08, Sam Acho '07, Kalen Thornton '00, Jabby Andrews '29, Deck Shelley '25, and Bill Vaughn '20.
In recent years, about 10% of St. Mark's graduates played intercollegiate sports in college, including
- Eighteen in lacrosse since 2001.
- 23 in track/cross-country since 1989.
- 81 in NCAA football, with 39 signing to play for college football teams between 2000 and 2016.
Between 2014 and 2016, St. Mark's alumni signed to play collegiately in the following sports: baseball, basketball, crew, fencing, football, golf, lacrosse, soccer, tennis, track/cross country, volleyball, water polo, and wrestling.
Extracurricular activities
As of 2016, St. Mark's recognized 55 clubs for the 350 Upper Schoolers.
Both the school newspaper and literary magazine won 2017 Gold Crowns, the highest award given by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. About a dozen publications win Gold Crowns in each category each year in the U.S. The 2017 award was the 14th straight Gold Crown for the newspaper, and sixth straight for the magazine. As of 2017, the school yearbook had won either a Silver or Gold Crown for nine consecutive years. The newspaper won six National Pacemaker Awards between 2005 and 2016, while the yearbook won its fifth Pacemaker Award in six years in 2016 (its 10th overall). In 2017, the middle school literary magazine also won a Gold Crown from Columbia, one of two middle school magazines to be awarded the highest honor out of over 1000 entries. In 2015, the middle school literary magazine won a Gold Circle Award from Columbia by finishing third in "use of typography," which is notable since they were junior high school students competing against over 11,000 high school and college publications.
St. Mark's seniors have been named journalist of the year in the state of Texas for five consecutive years (2013-2017) by the National Scholastic Press Association; in 2016, St. Mark's seniors finished first and second in this statewide competition. Three of these SM students also placed among the top three high school journalists in the country.
The debate team has won four national policy debate titles, most recently winning the National Debate Coaches Association title in 2016. In addition, the team won the "world championship" at the 2015 International Public Policy Forum. The school itself annually hosts one of the most prestigious high school debate tournaments in the country, the Heart of Texas Invitational.
The school's photography program has been named best in state by the Association of Texas Photography Instructors for ten consecutive years (2007-2016). At the 2017 Texas High School Shoot Out (hosted by the photography department at Texas A&M), St. Mark's students won half the available awards, including Best in Show and Best Portfolio, as well as first place in the categories of Smartphone, Still Life, and Landscape.
Two of the 10 finalists in the nationwide 2017 YoungArts competition in design are current SM seniors. Since 2010, multiple SM students have had their films selected for inclusion in the SXSW film festival. One student had his work profiled in Popular Photography magazine, and another earned 17 Palm Awards on the road to being an Eagle Scout (a feat achieved by 2 dozen boys in the history of Scouting).
The avidity with which students pursue extracurricular activities is mocked in the film Rushmore, which was co-written by Owen Wilson '87, who -- like the film's protagonist -- was asked to leave the school prior to graduation. Rushmore was set at a fictional cross between St. Mark's and Houston's St. John's School, the alma mater of the other co-writer and director, Wes Anderson. The film features a protagonist who participates in dozens of clubs and activities.
The local press has long written about ways in which St. Mark's blends in and differs from the rest of Dallas.
Notable alumni
Notes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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