St. Mark's School

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St Mark's School
Motto Age Quod Agis (Do What You Do)
Established 1865
Type Private High School, boarding
Principal John Warren '74
Students 325 (2004-05)
Location Southboro, Massachusetts, USA
Campus Suburban
Colors Blue and White
Mascot Winged Lion
Newspaper The St. Marker
Website [1]
For the school in Dallas, see St. Mark's School of Texas.

St. Mark’s School is a coeducational, Episcopal, preparatory school, situated on 250 acres in Southborough, Massachusetts, 25 miles from Boston. It is a member of the Independent School League, and one of five schools collectively termed St. Grottlesex.

It was founded in 1865 as an all-boys' school by Joseph Burnett, a wealthy native of Southborough who developed and marketed the world-famous Burnett Vanilla Extract. The school has longstanding ties to the Episcopal Church. In 1977 it merged with the Southborough School for girls to form a larger (but still small) co-educational boarding school.

The School’s faculty, 65 in number, lead 325 boarding and day students through a rigorous curriculum and a full program of co-curricular activities. Class size averages 10, with a student-faculty ratio of 5:1. Each department offers honors and advanced placement sections (numbering 24 in total, more than any other school in the ISL).

Throughout its 140-year history, St. Mark's has maintained a fierce rivalry with the Groton School, of Groton, Massachusetts, culminating in Groton Night in early November. The two schools have clashed in a football game played every November for more than 100 years in which the winning school receives a racoon fur coat that has been passed down through the years.

John Warren ’74, a senior administrator at Milton Academy and a former member of the St. Mark's Board of Trustees, was appointed head of school in November 2005, succeeding Tony and Elsa Hill the following July.

Contents

[edit] History

Joseph Burnett, the school’s founder, was the father of six boys, the eldest of whom was a student at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. Henry Coit, the first rector of St. Paul's – itself an all-boarding private school founded a decade prior – suggested Burnett create a similar school in Massachusetts, one that Burnett’s other five boys could call home.

St. Mark’s has changed much in appearance since its founding. Then, the school in its entirety was made up of one structure—a square, two-story house painted yellow with green blinds. That building and others from those early days, including a large schoolroom and dormitory wing built in 1866–1867, were gradually demolished in the 1890s, to make way for the brick and Tudor-styled structures that now grace the school’s 250-acre campus. To this day, St. Mark’s continues to add new facilities for its students—a new athletic center, dormitory, and performing arts center all within the last twenty years.

Though the means by which faculty can educate students has changed with advances in technology and such, St. Mark’s still looks to its longtime Latin motto as an inspiration for that mission. Age Quod Agis roughly translates as follows for today’s batch of students: Do what you do.

The scale on which this mission is carried out is much grander today than it was in the school’s first academic year. Upon its opening, the school consisted of one faculty member and a dozen boys. The school now employs more than 60 faculty members and welcomes more than 330 students each fall—male and female. In the 1970s, St. Mark’s reached an agreement for coordinated education with the nearby Southborough School, a newly founded institution for girls; four years later, Southborough School merged with St. Mark’s.

To this day, St. Mark’s remains focused on academics, provides a rigorous liberal arts program that stems from a classical tradition, and prepares its students for competitive colleges and universities.

Accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, St. Mark’s continues to educate students from throughout the world.

[edit] Academics

St. Mark's maintains nine academic departments that offers instruction in their respective disciplines.

  • The English Department
  • The Arts Department
  • The Classics Department
  • The History Department
  • The Mathematics Department
  • The Modern Languages Department
  • The Psychology Department
  • The Religion Department
  • The Science Department

Starting in the School year 2007/2008, St. Mark's will be offering a Computer Science department. Even though computer science is considered a science, funding has been provided by alumni for education in computer technology who wish it to be created as a separate department.

[edit] The Curriculum

The St. Mark's curriculum follows a liberal arts tradition. An English course required every year of students. All students take the same English class their first three years, and choose from a selection of electives their final year. Mathematics is required up and until the level of algebra two. Two years of laboratory science is required and one year of art and religion. In addition, one year of American history is required. Students take between 5 and 6 classes each year depending on the difficulty of the classes and their personal ambition.

[edit] Programs

St. Mark's offers several unique programs to its students and others affiliated with the school. The programs are as follow:

  • The Math Insititute
  • The Summer Music Institute
  • Electric Vehicle Engineering
  • Visiting Poet Program

[edit] Facilities

[edit] School Profile

  • Average SAT: 1330
  • School Endowment: $120 million
  • On average 20% of the graduating class attends an Ivy League college
  • SSAT percentile range: 80%-92%

[edit] Notable Alumni

[edit] Notable Faculty

[edit] Trivia

  • Baseball's catcher's mask was first used in 1875 by a St. Marks School catcher. It was originally a fencing helmet he modified so as to protect his broken nose. A Harvard baseball player by the name of Fred Thayer was playing on the opposing team that day and by 1878 Thayer had gotten a patent on it.
  • St. Mark's was originally a feeder school to Harvard
  • Fay School was initially founded to be a feeder school to St. Mark's
  • Featured in The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbach
  • School Ties (1992), starring Brendan Fraser, Chris O'Donnell, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck, was filmed at Middlesex and St. Mark's. Originally, the director wanted to use St. Mark's picturesque Tudor buildings as the primary film site; however, he was unable to get a permit from the local police station that would allow him to close off the street for filming. Thus he decided to use Middlesex School.
  • St. Mark's was referenced to in the Gilmore Girls episode titled "You've Been Gilmored". In it, one of the characters is mentioned to have been kicked out of Groton, St. Mark's, and Rivers.
  • The school is mentioned in F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic first novel, This Side of Paradise.


Members of the Independent School League, New England
Belmont Hill School | Buckingham Browne & Nichols | Brooks School | The Governor's Academy | Groton School | Lawrence Academy at Groton | Middlesex School | Milton Academy | Noble and Greenough School | Rivers School | Roxbury Latin School | St. George's School | St. Mark's School | St. Paul's School | St. Sebastian's School | Thayer Academy

[edit] External links

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