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St. Mark's School of Texas

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St. Mark's School of Texas
St. Mark's Crest
Location
Dallas, Texas
USA
Information
TypePrivate, Non-sectarian
MottoExcellence
Established1906
HeadmasterArnold E. Holtberg
Faculty106
Number of students822 boys
Campus40 acres
MascotLion
Athletics17 sports
Websitewww.smtexas.org
*Admission Office

The St. Mark's School of Texas is a nonsectarian preparatory day school for boys located in Dallas, Texas, USA. The school begins at first grade and continues through the twelfth grade.

History

St. Mark's was created in 1950 by a group of Dallas businessmen. The original name was to have been St. Stephen's, but St. Stephen is associated with the lamb. St. Mark's was chosen because a lion was thought a more suitable mascot.

St. Mark's was developed out of three less-financed private schools: Terrill School (1906–44), Texas Country Day School (1933–50), and Cathedral School (1944–50). The school traces its history to Mr. Terrill's school, which he founded in 1906 as the city's first effort to create a private school that could rival its east coast counterparts. The Hockaday School for Girls was founded in 1913, and it became a "sister" school to St. Mark's.

The school today

The school was historically fairly homogeneous and geared towards the sons of doctors, lawyers, and affluent businessmen. St. Mark's has made significant gains in terms of financial aid and minority recruitment, however, and now 28% of the school is composed of "students of color." Approximately 10% of students are involved with the financial aid program at St. Mark's as of 2005-2006.

Eighty percent of the 106 faculty members have advanced degrees, while 25% have been at St. Mark's for more than twenty years. There are twelve endowed teaching positions, including nine endowed chairs.

Neatly organized across its forty acres are an array of buildings, most of which are named after well-known Dallas families. Texas Instruments' co-founders Cecil H. Green and Eugene McDermott donated the math and science quadrangle, the main library, the greenhouse, the planetarium and the observatory. The Roosevelt family contributed a carillon in early 2005, Ralph Rogers provided the natatorium, the Lamar Hunt family donated a football stadium, completed in the fall of 2005, and Tom Hicks, the owner of MLB's Texas Rangers and the NHL's Dallas Stars, funded a new gymnasium. Its arts facilities are also impressive. Time magazine once called St. Mark's the "best-equipped day school in the country." D Magazine also rated it the best school in the Dallas area.

The most commonly attended colleges by graduates between 1992 and 2002 were University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, Emory University, Vanderbilt University, Southern Methodist University, Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Texas A&M University, Princeton University, and Yale University

St. Mark's has long resisted efforts towards coeducation, though there are a half dozen courses that students can take with Hockaday students at the Hockaday campus. Its uniform has remained unchanged for decades: grey shorts or pants and white oxford shirts; seniors, though, wear blue shirts. The school's mascot is the lion, and the official colors are navy blue and gold.

Student life

Its 817 students, frequently known as Marksmen, are spread across first through twelfth grade. Lower School classes average about 15 boys, and there is an overall student/faculty ratio of 8:1.

Extracurricular activities and sports are an integral part of campus life. Its sports teams compete against similarly sized private schools in the Southwest Preparatory Conference , an athletic conference created by the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest. Certain teams—such as swimming, wrestling, golf, and tennis—compete against the largest schools in the state, while such teams as crew, water polo, lacrosse, ice hockey, and fencing are played at St. Mark's but are not widely followed in the large public schools of Texas.

St. Mark's offers 36 Upper School clubs and academic teams, a list of which can be found here. St. Mark's students have long been nationally prominent in policy debate. The school also hosts one of the biggest debate tournaments in the nation, the St. Mark's Heart of Texas Invitational.

The Upper School newspaper The Remarker, literary magazine The Marque, and the yearbook win national awards nearly every year. For example, in both 2005 and 2006, St. Mark's was the only school in the country in which each of its three publications was a finalist for the Crown awards, given annually by Columbia University ; no other school has placed three finalists in one year for at least fifteen years. In 2006, all three St. Mark's publications won Gold Crowns. Many of the other teams are similarly prominent in contests involving math, robotics, science, and languages.

Typical SAT range (25th–75th percentile) is 1320–1530 .

Notable alumni

External links

Southwest Preparatory Conference
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