St. Mark's School of Texas

The St. Mark's School of Texas is a private, nonsectarian, college-preparatory day school in Dallas, Texas. Established in 1906, St. Mark's educates roughly 900 boys in grades 1-12.

History

Terrill School for Boys In 1906, Menter B. Terrill started the Terrill School for Boys in Dallas. The former president of North Texas Normal College (now the University of North Texas), Terrill had found himself out of a job in 1901 when the State of Texas acquired the formerly private institution. The thirty-year-old Terrill elected to get his second bachelor's degree from Yale, and graduated in just two years as the class valedictorian. After a year teaching at Pennsylvania's Hill School, Terrill moved back to Texas to start his own private school. The six original teachers included Terrill, his wife Ada (one of the first female graduate students at Yale), and his father, James, a former college president.

Terrill sought to build his school "in the manner of the great eastern prep schools." He heavily prioritized academics. By 1915, Terrill School had sent 14 of its 33 graduates to Ivy League colleges. The school also fielded an excellent football program, which went 144-23-8 from 1910 to 1932. 19 of Terrill's 23 losses were to college freshman squads.

In 1916, Terrill sold his school to a new headmaster, citing health problems. The school began to decline, in part due to competition from the Texas Country Day School (see below). In 1946, it transferred its assets to the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas and re-emerged as the Cathedral School for Boys.

Terrill also foresaw a need for a strong girls' school in Dallas. He encouraged Ela Hockaday to open a girls' school in Dallas in 1913, and put her in contact with prominent Dallas businessmen who wanted their daughters to get a high-quality education. 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.

Texas Country Day School In the late 1920s, several Terrill School parents worried that Menter Terrill's successors were focusing too much on football and not enough on academics. They recruited the semi-retired Terrill to tutor their sons. Following Terrill's death in 1931, these parents started the Texas Country Day School (TCD) in 1933. Within two years of its creation, TCD was advertising that its faculty included a "Rhodes Scholar and Harvard, Dartmouth, and Amherst men."

Under the leadership of board chairmen Wirt Davis (the head of Republic Bank) and Eugene McDermott (the founder of Texas Instruments), TCD heavily prioritized academics in the same manner as the early Terrill School. To bankroll his aspirations, McDermott recruited his Texas Instruments co-founder Cecil Green as another key donor. However, a devastating campus fire pushed the school to consider a merger with another school.

Merger In 1950, Texas Country Day School merged with the Cathedral School for Boys to form St. Mark's School of Texas. TCD headmaster Robert Iglehart headed the merged institution, but representatives of both schools sat on the board of trustees.

The new St. Mark's was and still is a nonsectarian institution, but the religious name reflected Cathedral's influence, and the school continued to employ an Episcopal chaplain. Several St. Mark's headmasters have gone on to run leading Episcopal schools, such as Christopher Berrisford (who took over Los Angeles' Harvard School and New York's Trinity School after the St. Mark's board fired him in 1969) and David Hicks (who became rector of New Hampshire's St. Paul's School in 1983).

In 1964, St. Mark's integrated by admitting the African-American Lee Smith, who graduated in 1965 and became "one of the approximately 30 Black Harvard students in the graduating class of 1969." In 2024, the school reported that 52% of the student body were nonwhite.

Academics The school has continued to emphasize academics following the merger. In 1982, Stanford's admissions dean praised St. Mark's as "among the top handful of schools in the country." In 1995, 19 of St. Mark's 67 seniors were National Merit Scholarship semifinalists. In 2024, 25 of St. Mark's 96 seniors received that distinction. The Class of 2025 had a middle 50% SAT range of 1400-1570. Five SM seniors have been named U.S. Presidential Scholars between 2020 and 2024, including two in 2024.

Niche ranked St. Mark's as the nation's best private K-12 school in 2020, 2021, and 2022, as well as #2 in 2019 and 2023 (although St. Mark's is not actually a K-12 school). The school is said to downplay these rankings, as no one school is the best fit for every boy and it is difficult to compare schools in different areas and with different goals.

Since the merger, St. Mark's has heavily emphasized science. Headmaster Ted Whatley called St. Mark's "a Sputnik school founded by industrialists to improve science and math education in Dallas." Green and McDermott donated extensive math and science facilities in the 1960s and 1970s. At least one alumnus, Alan Stern, traces his NASA research to his participation in the St. Mark's planetarium, observatory, and astronomy club. The school redeveloped its science facilities in 2019, when it unveiled the Robert A.M. Stern-designed Winn Science Center. The new facilities also expand an ongoing project with the University of Texas at Austin which allows students to have direct internet access to observatories in Alpine, Texas and rural Peru.

In 2016, a senior was a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search; he was one of forty finalists nationwide and the only Texan. In 2020, a St. Mark's student finished 5th out of 16,000 participants in the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad. In 2019, he finished in the top 20. In 2014, a St. Mark's student won his second straight Indian national championship in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Donors and base In contrast to the Terrill School, which was spearheaded by its founder and failed after he died, St. Mark's has been driven by donors, most of whom have actively served on its board of trustees. This was necessitated by both predecessors' precarious financial positions; donor Ralph B. Rogers joked that "two broke schools merged to form one broke school." As D Magazine asserted in 1982, "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." McDermott and Green donated nearly $50 million to TCD and St. Mark's over five decades. In addition to McDermott and Green, notable donors include the families of Harlan Crow, Kenneth Hersh, Lamar Hunt, Tom Hicks, and Elliott Roosevelt.

The school continues to raise large amounts of money from deep-pocketed donors, completing a $112 million fundraising campaign in 2013. In the 2020–21 school year, St. Mark's had a financial endowment of $167.8 million.

In 2018, Architectural Digest named St. Mark's the most beautiful private high school campus in Texas. In October 2019, an EF-3 tornado damaged multiple buildings on campus. Classes quickly resumed, and certain buildings were repaired or rebuilt. However, the school's athletic facilities were badly damaged, prompting the school to redevelop its athletic campus.

Headmasters Primary source: Menter B. Terrill (1906–1916), Terrill School M. B. Bogarte (1916–1931), Terrill School Sam "Pop" Davis (1931–1945), Terrill School Charles Puckett (1945–1946), Terrill School Rev. Charles A. Mason (1946–1948), Cathedral School"The Gargoyle, 1947" Cathedral School for Boys, Dallas, TX Rev. Alfred L. Alley (1948–1950), Cathedral School"The Gargoyle, 1950" Cathedral School for Boys, Dallas, TX Kenneth Bouvé (1933–1949), Texas Country Day Robert Iglehart (1949–1957), Texas Country Day and St. Mark's L. Ralston Thomas (1957–1958), St. Mark's (interim) Thomas B. Hartmann (1958–1964) Christopher Berrisford (1964–1969) John T. Whatley (1969–1982) George O. Edwards (1982–1983) (interim) David Hicks (1983–1992) J. Robert Kohler (1992–1993) (interim) Arnold Holtberg (1993–2014) David Dini (2014–present)

Admissions and student body

In 2024, St. Mark's reported a 15% acceptance rate, with an 89% admissions yield rate.

In the 2024-25 school year, the school educated 917 boys, with 152 Lower Schoolers (grades 1-4), 337 Middle Schoolers (grades 5-8), and 428 Upper Schoolers (grades 9-12). There are 102 seniors in the Class of 2025.

Finances Endowment and expenses St. Mark's' financial endowment stood at $181.0 million as of June 30, 2024. During that academic year, the school reported an operating budget of $43 million and total assets of $367 million.

The 2022-23 annual fund yielded over $5 million from over 3000 individuals. Donors include 85% of current parents and, for the 15th consecutive year, over half of all living alumni.

Tuition and financial aid In the 2024-25 school year, St. Mark's charged students an average tuition of $35,683, ranging from $31,435 for first-graders to $39,355 for twelfth-graders. 14.7% of students were on financial aid, which covered, on average, $21,000. The school's website states that for students with household incomes under $140,000, the average grant is approximately 90% of tuition; separately, approximately half of scholarship students come from families with household incomes over $175,000.

In the 2023-24 school year, the Dallas ABC affiliate reported that St. Mark's charged the third-highest tuition in Dallas, after the Greenhill School and the Episcopal School of Dallas.

Athletics

History During the decade of the 1910s, Terrill began to recruit enough athletes (including boarders in a postgraduate year) to successfully compete against much larger high schools as well as teams of college freshmen from Rice, SMU, and TCU. The football team's record during that decade was 67 wins, 2 ties, and one loss (in 1915 to the freshman team from the University of Texas at Austin). Five games between 1912 and 1918 ended with Terrill's football team shutting out their opponents while scoring over 100 points. These undefeated seasons continued through the 1920s, with the teams often being led by well-known coaches. For example, one head coach of that era, Eugene Neely, had starred in football at Dartmouth, despite having lost an arm in a hunting accident at age 14. Another coach, Monroe Sweeney, left Terrill for Major League Baseball, where he umpired 412 games. Another, Pete Cawthon, left Terrill to coach at Austin College, bringing with him 7 of his Terrill players; Cawthon went on to become head football coach for Texas Tech and the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National Football League as well as the athletic director for the University of Alabama. In 1930, the football team was undefeated and unscored upon, and the basketball team won a prep school national championship.

Athletic program St. Marks fields 45 Upper School teams in 16 sports. Varsity teams primarily compete with the sixteen other private schools in Texas and Oklahoma comprising the Southwest Preparatory Conference (SPC).

For the 2022-23 school year, St. Mark's won the SPC Directors Cup, an overall measure of conference success. This was the school's 13th Directors Cup in the last 16 years (the school finished 2nd those other 3 years).

Some individual teams have had lengthy periods of success. Lacrosse won 9 conference championships between 2004 and 2013. The swim team won 20 conference championships between 1995 and 2016. The tennis team won 13 conference championships between 1975 and 1990. Water polo won 15 regional championships between 2001 and 2016. Wrestling won 37 conference championships between 1973 and 2015, as well as 13 state championships. The water polo team won 7 Texas state championships between 2014 and 2022.

Notable recent athletes