GDS's Five Heads of School, A Bridging of Legacies

Each Head of School at Georgetown Day School has left a distinct mark on our institution. This legacy began with founder and first Head of School Aggie O’Neil, whose gifted teaching, love of children, and spirit of adventure helped shape the character of the GDS we know today.

 

Aggie O’Neil

In former Associate Head of School Kevin Barr’s commemorative history of GDS, “75 Years at Georgetown Day School,” he describes Aggie O’Neil, GDS’s founding teacher, director, and first Head of School, as our school’s guiding spirit.

Aggie’s perspective was that learning should be experiential, and in an environment that is socially just, that children learn best in an atmosphere where they feel safe, and that a child’s dignity is equal to an adult's. There is evidence of these perspectives in the principles at work at GDS today. 

A known adventurer full of fearless optimism, who was always learning and pushing boundaries, Aggie had been a teacher at a missionary school in India. She came to Washington in the early 1930s to work for the Roosevelt administration and became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. She helped resettle child refugees in the 1940s and, in the 1950s, trekked across the country each summer with a dozen or so adolescents.

In a 2023 Augur Bit interview with Kevin Barr by GDS alum Ethan Wolin ’23, Kevin said, “We are still just catching up—and maybe not even—to Aggie’s wisdom. She was so far in advance of so many teachers, in terms of respecting kids, respecting kids’ intelligence, trusting kids, making sure that it was a learning process that was mutual.”

 

Edith Nash

Aggie passed this idea of a mutual learning process, along with the baton, to Edith Nash, who took over as the second Head of School in 1961. Edith was one of the founding parents alongside her husband, Philleo, GDS’s first President of the Board. Known for balancing innovation with more well-established aspects of the curriculum, Edith had a straightforwardness to her character. She championed the school's ideals, charging students to think and behave independently and encouraging them to take command of their own learning. She also saw the learning process as a partnership between faculty and students, and she sought to strike balance wherever she could.

Edith said she felt her role was “...to preserve the school’s value system, encourage learning at many levels, promote high academic standards, and, when need be, respect some disorder in the service of learning.”

GDS grew significantly during Edith’s tenure and, in 1965, under her guidance, moved to 4530 MacArthur Blvd. in search of much-needed space. “The School’s premise is that good teaching is the art of bringing the student to knowledge, not vice versa. This idea is reflected in the informal, almost residential, character of the new school,” said a 1965 Washington Post article on the subject of the new building. This character reflected an aspect of Edith’s philosophical approach that embraced some disorder, a belief that learning and the process of growth are often messy and that we have to accommodate space for this.

 

Gladys Stern

Edith also supported teachers, parents, and administrators whom she felt would carry that growth forward. Among these was Gladys Stern, a parent who became Associate Director under Edith and oversaw the creation of a high school at GDS.

Until the late 1960s, GDS went up to the 9th grade only. Students were then forced to move on to other schools. By 1969, the school extended to 10th grade, but the students didn’t want to move elsewhere to finish their high school education. After sharing her concerns with Edith, Gladys was put in charge of facilitating that change. “If you’re really interested in it, why don’t you take care of it?” was all Edith said to Gladys.

“Somehow with the magic all great educators have, Gladys wove a net of excellence,” said board member Frankie Pelzman of Gladys’s overseeing of the school’s expansion. Gladys became the new high school’s principal and, in 1975, moved on to become GDS’s third Head of School.

Seeing education as a moral endeavor, Gladys focused on hiring teachers with emotional intelligence as well as the regular kind. She consistently looked for ways to keep GDS in line with its earliest values, such as learning for the sake of learning. She made it a point to know all of the students by name. Some of them lovingly nicknamed her “Gladys the stern,” but recognized in her someone who always did the right thing. The trust she built with students, parents, faculty, and the greater GDS community formed the School’s most solid foundation yet. “There has to be a basic underlying moral structure that is not only talked about but lived,” said Gladys. “You teach children those things by living them yourself.”

In her 1996 Washington Post article about Gladys’s retirement, education writer Valerie Strauss leads with a quote from a mischievous fifth grader caught in an area of the school where he and his friends weren’t supposed to be: “Don’t worry, it’s only Gladys,” he said. Though she was considered a tough, hands-on administrator, Gladys was so loved and respected by faculty and students alike that she never elicited fear. Known also for her sense of loyalty to students and staff, Gladys once remarked, “...I think it’s important to give students every chance, and if staff is loyal to the school, the school should be loyal to them.”

 

 

Peter Branch 

Fourth Head of School Peter Branch had big shoes to fill when he took the reins in 1996. With sophisticated administrative skill coupled with deep compassion, he was at least off to a good start. He was seen as a leader who would uphold GDS’s values, but also grow and modernize the school to keep it on par with its competitors.

Peter hailed originally from New England but had just come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had successfully headed Holland Hall. He demonstrated the same fierce loyalty to faculty that his predecessor did and pressed the Board for raises for teachers. He also sought funds to enable teachers to pursue professional development during their summers.

During his tenure, Peter oversaw the expansion of the Lower/Middle School at 4530 MacArthur Blvd., then the High School at 4200 Davenport. He doubled the size by having them dig down two stories in an effort to provide spaces for athletics and dance, along with a common area that could accommodate the entire student body and faculty for assemblies and meetings.

“Peter managed to transform the academic, physical, and social environment while keeping Georgetown Day School’s culture distinctive, different, and even daring," wrote Marc Fisher, GDS parent, alumni parent, and Board Member (2008). “Those who worked most closely with Peter in designing the two building projects were struck by how often and how deeply he dove into the blueprints to better align the architect’s plans with his concept of how physical spaces best supported progressive education.”

Peter also established an office of diversity, expanded efforts to hire a diverse faculty, and instituted the first Free to Be Me assembly at the Lower/Middle School, along with Pride Week at the High School, making it publicly clear that all staff and all families were welcome.

Ultimately, what always mattered most to him were the students. According to Marc, Peter often said, “...appropriately inappropriate behavior should be treated as grounds for education, rather than punished as a crime.”

 

Russell Shaw

Russell Shaw took over as the fifth Head of School in 2010, when Peter retired. Prior to coming to GDS, he had been an assistant head and middle school director at Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, PA. Russell had also served as project manager for an E.E. Ford Foundation grant to support action research on multi-racial pedagogy, which demonstrated a philosophy that aligned with our school’s values. Like three of the four previous heads of school, Russell was also a GDS parent.

Throughout his tenure, he has contributed a strong sense of creative energy. He has read poetry, lip-synced songs, and starred in internal videos informational in nature, such as announcing new traffic procedures or upcoming snow days, and also in messages welcoming students back from summer break. Each year, at high school Christmas assemblies, he has performed “The GDS Christmas Blues,” an original, evolving song for which he writes new lyrics annually to reflect on the state of the world, school events and happenings, and inside jokes.

Most significant in his 16-year tenure as Head of School was the achievement of unifying the campus. Completion of the new Lower/Middle School building next to the High School coincided with our school’s 75th anniversary, and all anticipated a big celebration on the new unified campus. But the unfurling of “One GDS” didn’t initially go as planned. Russell writes about this anticipation in a blog post: “The ribbon cutting would bring together hundreds—or even thousands—of community members, past and present. Together we would take pride in our School’s new home, marveling at the warm, expansive lobby, the cozy, brightly furnished library, the playground’s natural wood and magnificent towers. We had it all figured out. And then, COVID. A pandemic which demanded that we remove the new, collaborative furniture from classrooms and replace it with single desks and chairs, arrayed in rows in order to accommodate distancing requirements and reductions in classroom density. Instead of lunch in our state of the art dining facility, students would eat in the parking garage, and later, their classrooms, sitting silently at their desks.” He closed with an affirmation that our purpose as a school transcends bricks and mortar, that it resides in “...interactions between community members and the purposeful engagement of those community members both within and beyond our School’s literal and metaphorical walls.”

Eventually, the pandemic would come to pass, and all could enjoy a unified campus. Russell would come to blog more later about the realization of the years-long dream of a One GDS, and a “...chance to forge connections between Hoppers of different ages.”

“… This school year, we are beginning to experience the richness that comes from having buildings that are hundreds of feet apart rather than several miles,” he wrote. He mentioned events that transpired where students and staff of all grades could at last intermingle, such as a varsity soccer game where Middle School students cheered loudly for the team that they hoped to join in a few short years. He also described faculty and staff forming new relationships, sowing seeds of collaboration that would strengthen our school’s community.

One GDS

What emerges across these five tenures is not a series of separate administrations, but a continuity of creating education with purpose, integrity, and imagination. From Aggie O’Neil’s radical belief in the dignity and agency of children, to Edith Nash’s insistence on balancing innovation with the tried and true, to Gladys Stern’s moral clarity and lived example, to Peter Branch’s expansion of both space and belonging, to Russell Shaw’s emphasis on connection and community, each Head has added a distinct voice to a shared philosophy. That philosophy focuses on the necessity of grounding ourselves in trust in one another, and remembering that learning is not a transaction but a partnership among students, faculty, and parents—one that is dynamic and sometimes messy, but fundamentally human. Their common legacy is that each Head of School has acted not only as a steward of what GDS has been, but as a bridge to what it is today, and to what it could eventually become.