St. Mark's School of Texas | |
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Courage and Honor
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Address | |
10600 Preston Road Dallas, Texas 75230 United States |
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Coordinates | 32°53′25″N 96°48′03″W / 32.890363°N 96.800762°WCoordinates: 32°53′25″N 96°48′03″W / 32.890363°N 96.800762°W |
Information | |
Type | Private, day, college-prep boys' school |
Religious affiliation(s) | Non-sectarian Episcopal (historically) |
Established | 1906 |
Headmaster | David W. Dini |
Faculty | 125 |
Grades | 1–12 |
Number of students | 845 |
Campus | 40 acres (16 ha) |
Athletics conference | SPC |
Mascot | Lion |
Endowment | over $100 million |
Tuition | $22,627–$28,149 |
Website | smtexas |
The St. Mark's School of Texas is a nonsectarian preparatory day school for boys located in Dallas, Texas, US. The school offers grades 1–12 and is accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest.
St. Mark's traces its origins to the Terrill School, 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 (who had been one of the first women to attend graduate school at Yale), and his father, James, who had previously been a college president. Terrill's school was explicitly intended to be Dallas' initial effort to supply an education that could rival that of east coast prep schools. Terrill quickly recruited the sons of some of Dallas' most affluent citizens, and also recruited students from throughout the southwest to become boarders at the school. 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, which she did in 1913. Schools descended from Terrill have had some affiliation with the Hockaday School for over a century, with students participating in shared social events, artistic performances, and some classes.
After Terrill was forced to retire because of ill health 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. St. Mark's sports teams were very successful during the era, often going undefeated and winning at least one state high school football championship 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 faced academic competition from Texas Country Day, which was 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.