Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012

St. Mary’s leads way on single-gender education

Examples guide our way. They can show us where to go, how to get there and why we ought to try.

As the fourth oldest all-girls school in the nation, St. Mary’s School on Hillsborough Street is our paradigm of single-gender education, an offering Wake County has adopted effective fall 2012 with two new leadership academies: one for girls, one for boys housed at newly co-ed William Peace University.

“I think they’re smart,” said St. Mary’s Head of School Theo Wilkes Coonrod of Wake County’s move. “They’ve picked an age for these academies that makes sense … developmentally.

“It’s a great alternative.”

It’s an alternative parents have chosen at St. Mary’s since it was founded in 1842. In 1998, it became an independent, Episcopal, college-preparatory, boarding and day school for girls.

“It’s not hard to find a school that offers top-notch academics, but not enough schools offer an environment where children can thrive, healthy environments for children,” Coonrod added. In a broad sense, she said, healthy environments are places where students can take risks, and feel safe emotionally, intellectually and socially, while gaining confidence.

“We want environments where the word ‘can’t’ is eliminated,” she said. “We want can-do schools for kids – and that’s what we are.”

At 5:30 p.m. Feb. 7, St. Mary’s and Woodberry Forest School, its Virginia-based, all-male counterpart, will host an evening with Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist, family physician and expert on the emerging science of the difference between boys and girls.

“Why Gender Matters: What parents need to know about girl/boy differences in the era of Facebook, YouTube and Call of Duty” will be held in St. Mary’s Pittman Auditorium. It is free and open to the public with tickets for limited seating available beginning today. Registration at www.sms.edu/smswfs ends Friday.

The forum invites the community to learn more about excellence in single-gender learning environments from an expert scholar. Sax has written extensively on the subject and will talk about the attributes and benefits of single-gender education.

Coonrod and Woodberry Forest headmaster Dennis M. Campbell will field questions and share “how we put into practice what we know about the benefits of single-gender education.”

“It just makes sense, even if you know nothing about education, to put (students) in an environment where they are free from gender stereotypes,” Coonrod said. “For girls, a single-sex education gives them a place to be themselves, to be who they are, without the constant reminder of their gender.

“Every peer role model is a girl – the team captain, the club leader, the star on stage, the prefect, are all girls,” she added. “They get to see how girls lead and then, by seeing it, they can imagine it for themselves.

“We can’t be what we can’t imagine.”

New leader

Coonrod, a Texas native, will retire from St. Mary’s this summer after 14 years at its helm.

The school recently named the Rev. Smokey Oats as Coonrod’s interim replacement for the 2012-13 school year. Oats, a St. Mary’s trustee the past three years, is this year’s interim leader at St. James Episcopal School in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Oats is the founding Head of School of Trinity Episcopal School, an independent, co-ed K-8 day school in Charlotte, where he served from 1999 until 2011. Before that, he was headmaster and rector at All Saints Episcopal School in Tennessee.

For Coonrod, St. Mary’s 12th leader, the need for single-gender education became her passion as an eighth-grader, soon after a school vice principal warned she’d never be elected student body president.

“Why?” she asked, noting she was the same age St. Mary’s begins recruiting girls for its boarding and day school programs.

His reply: “Because you’re girl,” she recalls.

She didn’t win. Neither did the next girl who ran for president. The third girl to run won, Coonrod said.

“I just became determined nobody was ever going to tell a girl should couldn’t do something because she’s a girl,” she said.

Once fully operational, each of Wake County’s academies will serve 400 students in grades 6-12 and will follow the college preparatory model like the single-gender system in Greensboro’s Guilford County, where high school students saw a 100 percent graduation rate.

According to the National Association of Single Sex Public Education, only about 12 public schools offered single-gender classrooms in 2002, the year it was founded by Sax. This school year, the NASSPE reports at least 506 U.S. schools offer opportunities for single-sex education. About 390 are co-ed schools that offer single-gender classrooms, while 116 qualify as single-gender schools.

“We’d be happy to serve as a resource for best practices in all-girls education for Wake County teachers,” Coonrod said. “Public-private partnerships are important in a community.”

Now that’s leading by example.