Barbara McDowell Dowdall
Parent

I am Mara Dowdall's mother and wanted to tell you about a group that formed during our daughters' eighth grade year at Penn Charter. Mara's class was the first half and half class and as they approached upper school, we had two concerns: 1. that admissions of new students in upper school might reduce the proportion of girls back towards a third, and 2. that the conversion to a coed school had not sufficiently impacted the Board of Overseers which was still overwhelmingly male.

Our group began meeting to discuss these issues and it evolved into a combination support and advocacy entity. Our spark and initial leader was Gee Gee White, mother of Kelly (and Ricky and Maggie) and we deeply mourn her death several years ago. During the two or three years that we met (on weekends in one of our homes with refreshments), we assembled overseer candidate lists and gave them to the school, attended conferences on education for girls, raised questions about course offerings, parent programs and summer readings, and generally made life a more interesting challenge for the administration while no doubt causing our daughters embarrassment as well.