Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School
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Mary Institute & St. Louis Country Day School or "MICDS" is a nonsectarian, coeducational private school for about 1,200 students in grades K-12. Its 100-acre (400,000 m²) campus[1] (http://school.micds.org/campus/campus.htm) is located in the St. Louis suburb of Ladue, Missouri's wealthiest-per-capita city[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richest_places_in_the_United_States#100_richest_places_with_at_least_1.2C000_households). The school has a strong academic tradition and sends the vast majority of its graduates to prestigious four-year colleges. It was the only prep school west of the Mississippi to be listed in 1980's The Official Preppy Handbook.
William Greenleaf Eliot, founder and chancellor of Washington University, established MICDS' predecessor institutions in the 1850s as part of the university. A boys' school, Smith Academy, was founded in 1854. A sister school, Mary Institute, was founded in 1859 and named for Eliot's deceased daughter. It was the first girls’ school west of the Appalachians.
Smith Academy closed in June 1917; most of its students transferred to a successor school, independent of the university, which opened that September in northwestern St. Louis County. Called St. Louis Country Day School, or Codasco for short (a nickname still used by the boys' athletic teams), it was set up along the lines prescribed by the Country Day School movement. Codasco's campus was in a bucolic environment reached by rail that seemed far from the urban grit of the old Smith Academy.
Mary Institute moved to its Ladue campus in 1931 and became independent of Washington University a few years later. By the 1950s, the tranquility of the Country Day campus was disrupted by the growth of the adjacent Lambert-Saint Louis International Airport. Codasco built a new campus next to Mary Institute, sold its old land to the airport and moved to Ladue in 1958.[3] (http://school.micds.org/history/history.htm) Eliot's grandson, Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, who attended Mary Institute's kindergarten, spoke at the school's centennial in 1959.
Academic coordination between Mary Institute and Country Day began during the 1980s and culminated in the 1992 merger of the schools. Codasco headmaster John Johnson, who coordinated the merger, became head of the combined schools, reprising the role of William Greenleaf Eliot almost a century and a half earlier.
In 2004 to 2005, tuition and fees ranged from $13,510 for students up to fourth grade to $16,345 for high schoolers. About 20 percent of students received financial aid, averaging $10,525 apiece. [4] (http://school.micds.org/admissions/financial.htm)
MICDS has an athletic rivalry with nearby John Burroughs School.
Notable alumni
In the 1980s, three St. Louis Country Day School alumni served together in the United States Senate: John Danforth, (R-Missouri); Thomas Eagleton, (D-Missouri); and Pete Wilson, (R-California). Danforth and Eagleton had both served as Missouri's attorney general; Wilson had been San Diego's mayor and later became California's governor.
Other notable alumni include:
- Vincent Price, actor
- Betty Grable, actress
- William McChesney Martin, Jr., Federal Reserve Bank chairman
- Samuel Pearson Goddard, Jr., Governor of Arizona
- Thomas H. Wyman, Chairman & CEO, CBS; Chairman, Green Giant Co.; VIce Chair, Pillsbury Co.
- Shepherd Mead, author, "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"
- Ada Long, Author, Critic, English Professor, University of Alabama, Birmingham
- Louis E. Loeb, Chair, Philosophy Department, University of Michigan, author, "From Descartes to Hume : continental metaphysics and the development of modern philosophy", "Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise"
- Elizabeth Kendall, Author, "American Daughter, Discovering My Mother"
- Harry Quigley, M.D., Director, Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute and the Dana Center for Preventive Ophthalmology
- Laura X, Director of the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape
- Stephen F. Brauer, United States Ambassador to Belgium
- Linda Wells, Editor, Allure Magazine
- Franc A. Barada, Jr., M.D., Founder and President, Triangle MedSaver, Inc.
- Peter P. Morrin, Director, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
- John F. McDonnell, Chairman, McDonnell-Douglas Corporation
- Lawrence K. Roos, Supervisor, St. Louis County, MO, President, Federal Researve Bank of St. Louis, Interim Chancellor, St. Louis Community College
- Jerome T. Loeb, President, May Department Stores Company
- Walter Gellhorn, Betts Professor of Law, Columbia University
- Joe Buck, sports bradcaster
- William Danforth, M.D., Chancellor, Washington University in Saint Louis
External links
- Mary Institute & St. Louis Country Day School (http://www.micds.org/)