William B. Carr, Jr.
OPC ’69, Overseer
I came to Penn Charter from public school as a second grader in the fall of 1958. My teacher was a young English woman named Miss Bolton, and there were girls in my class. (One of my classmates was Betsy Linton, Bert’s daughter. I remember telling my mother that I hoped to marry Betsy.) Back then girls attended Penn Charter from kindergarten through second grade, but they could not remain thereafter. My all-male education commenced in the third grade; my teacher, Mr. Harris, was also my first male teacher.
I enjoyed Penn Charter tremendously for the next 10 years, but it did come to trouble me that the school was not coeducational. I had sisters and there were plenty of girls in my East Falls neighborhood, so I was not without female friends, but it did seem to me that a school with both boys and girls would be a more natural way to grow up, and a better way to grow generally. The circumstances leading to it now escape me, but in my senior year I somehow ended up sharing my views with a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Perhaps more surprising I thereafter found myself selected to speak at graduation. In addition to some other institutional criticisms -- I was 17 years old and this was the 1960’s – I noted that I was “sorry that since the second grade I have not had a chance to dip a girl’s hair in an inkwell.”
I was invited to become an Overseer 11 years later in 1980; Penn Charter was still an all-boys school. The first Overseers meeting I attended coincided with the initial discussion of a subcommittee report recommending the conversion of the School to a coeducational institution. It was not simple, quick, or without controversy. Consensus was ultimately reached that coeducation was the way for Penn Charter to become the best educational institution it could be, and thereafter the gradual process of adding girls one year at a time was undertaken.
I am fortunate to have spent two thirds of my life as a Penn Charter student or Overseer. To me the most precious and distinctive aspect of Penn Charter in the 45 years since I entered second grade (and from what I know about the previous 270 years) is the School’s genuine and enduring Quaker mission and tradition. I also believe that the most important and valuable change in the School’s history has been the advent of coeducation. The deliberative and searching discussion leading to that decision revealed the dedication of the participants to the Quaker process of determining the right course of action. The vibrant coeducational institution Penn Charter has become confirms for me both the quality of the decision-making process and the undeniable correctness of the decision which was made.
I find myself having enjoyed the bookends of a coeducational Penn Charter as a second grader and as an Overseer, with an all-male interlude in between. (And I understand that Betsy Linton, who went off to Germantown Friends, turned out okay, too.)
