The most important promise for the staff and faculty at Saint Mary’s, both spoken and unspoken, is their dedication to their students. Parents trust them with their daughters, young women trust them with their futures, and the community entrusts them with its reputation. No one is let down. A boarding school, says Coonrod, is a community unlike any other – and Saint Mary’s is no exception. “Its citizens,” she says, “are extraordinarily responsible for and accountable to one another. The choices each of us makes matter to everyone else in our community. On this vibrant residential campus, we live elbow-to-elbow and are in each other’s lives in intimate and meaningful ways.”

And Coonrod is as much a part of that intimacy as are the girls who call Saint Mary’s their school home, whether they hail from Raleigh or from another city or country. A breast cancer survivor, Coonrod recalls “the teachable moment” that her illness became. Diagnosed shortly after the beginning of the school year in August of 2003, Coonrod had been Head of School for three years. “I remember the initial fear as I tried to figure out how I was supposed to use this experience,” she says. “I know that God gives us challenges, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid.” But, in the end, the educator in her knew what she had to do. She called the chaplain, asked him to give her a spot at the next day’s chapel service and told her students that she had been diagnosed with a disease that has great import for women. “I wanted them to hear the news from me. I told them what I knew, what my options were, when my surgery was scheduled, and that I’d be reading as much as I could about the disease and I encouraged them to do the same.” She also encouraged them to talk to her, not avoid her because they didn’t have the right words of support. “If they didn’t know what to say, I encouraged them simply to offer, ‘I wish I had some magic words, but I don’t know what to say,’ and together we learned how to talk to people in trying situations.”

That’s the kind of openness that has earned Coonrod a reputation as a relationship builder since accepting the Head of School position in 2000. Having been a public school educator in her native Texas for 19 years and an independent school teacher and administrator there for 14, Coonrod was approached by a recruiter. “When he said the position was in Raleigh, I said ‘Okay, I can live in Raleigh,’” she laughs. “But I knew next to nothing about boarding schools and even less about single-sex education. What encouraged me most is that I had a daughter, and one of the things that drew my interest was that I had long ago noticed that she internalized things differently from her brother, and I wanted to know why.”

Now Coonrod is well-informed and passionate about the mission and purpose of single-sex education, to say the least. “We have the best information available on how to educate differently for girls,” she says. “Here at Saint Mary’s they don’t sit back and watch the show; they are the show. They raise their hands; they get involved; and, in the process of engagement, they turn into competent, confident women. That’s the goal.”

Coonrod was also partially responsible for the considerable undertaking of the renovation of historic Smedes Hall, the heart of Saint Mary’s School. Built in 1837, five years before the 1842 opening of the school, Smedes Hall had fallen into disrepair. “I’d have alumnae ask, ‘What are you going to do about Smedes Hall?’” she says. “It was really very sad that this once stately gem of architecture had degenerated so.” Facing the challenge, Saint Mary’s embarked on a one-year, multimillion-dollar renovation that now has this 170-year-old antebellum building with its Greek revival porch back to her former luster. But just as importantly, Saint Mary’s is able to use the additional space to house more residential students, more residential faculty, more administrators, more educators and more students; and Coonrod’s office has been moved there as well. “It used to be housed in the academic building,” she says of her office. “But here, I’m just as close to the students.” And to Theo Coonrod, that’s what it’s all about.

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