Nan Bone

Bone, 56, who graduated from St. Teresa's in 1969, attended Northwest Missouri State University earning a degree in education. After her marriage to Bill Bone, the couple moved to Shenandoah, Iowa. She taught and served as special projects coordinator in schools in Shenandoah for 26 years and served as a principal in Tarkio, Mo., for three years.

The family returned to Kansas City in 2004, so that Bone could take the job as principal of St. Peter School, which she had attended with her brothers and sisters. She served as principal there for three years.

"I'm now beginning my 33rd year of teaching," she said. "Those 30 some years set the stage for where I am now. I spent them honing the skills I originally learned here at St. Teresa's."

She is a third generation alumna of the academy. Her grandmother attended the school at the Quality Hill location at the end of the 19th century, and her mother attended the Brookside campus, graduating in 1940. Bone feels a visceral connection to St. Teresa's and to Catholic education, despite the cost.

"My parents didn't even think about, they just did it," she said. "They sent all eight of their children to Catholic schools. It was a huge sacrifice back then, and it is even more of a huge sacrifice now with tuitions inching up on $10,000 a year."

Bone and her husband are parents of two children, Adam, 25, and Abby, 22, who is attending Northwest Missouri State University. Abby graduated from St. Teresa's in 2003. Thus Bone is aware of the sacrifices parents make to send their children to Catholic schools.

"Back when I was in school," she recalled, "there were still many Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet here who taught in the school and lived on the third floor of the Music and Arts building. They were paid around $100 a month for room and board. Many of them started teaching before finishing college. Even today, when the lay faculty is better educated; many with master's degrees, our teachers are only paid about 70 percent of what a teacher in a comparable public high school is paid."

In order to keep going, a school has to factor into tuition costs the maintenance of the school buildings, operational costs, including heating, light and air conditioning, and faculty health insurance, as well as teacher salaries.

"We try to keep tuition costs as low as possible," she said. "and offset the difference between the tuition charged and the actual cost of educating a young woman by our fund raisers and auction.

Bone said that "a recessive gene for marketing and development" runs in her family. "Out of the eight of us, four are in sales," she said. "So am I, in a way," she said. "I sell education, especially the learning opportunities offered by single sex education.

"And here I am. This job is almost too perfect."

Bone said she feels fortunate to be able to serve the school and has lots of ideas for the upcoming months.

"I love beginnings," she said. "I am looking and figuring out ways to make St. Teresa's better. This is a school with a good solid tradition of more than 140 years. I have no timeline except we are beginning to devise a strategic plan for the next 5 to 10 years which has to go before the board of directors in the spring."

The first thing she did after moving in to her new office was to sit on the floor with files littering the floor around her. After reading through each file, she either re-filed them under her system or shredded those she considered not worth keeping, such as board of director meeting minutes from 15 years ago.

It took her several weekends of skimming and shredding to get through all the files, but she has a command of their contents now, she said.

"When we are framing our strategic plan for the academics, campus and buildings, and our relationship to the community, I plan to be able to use those files as references or to jog my memory on how certain issues were addressed in the past."

Bone has several goals in mind for the school. First she plans to work on building up the tuition endowment fund so that more girls will be able to attend St. Teresa's. As of now, the endowment fund stands at $3 million. "That's good," Bone said, "but we plan to work to up that to $10 million."

Her second goal is to improve the diversity of the school. "We need to make St. Teresa's more affordable to girls of all races and faiths," she said, "and increasing the endowment fund will help to accomplish that.

"But it needs more," Bone said. "We may have girls coming from public schools, so we will need to work with incoming eighth graders to bring their skills up to pass the high school entrance tests."

Plans and ideas will be running through her head as she stands at the school entrance on Aug. 22 welcoming incoming freshmen to St. Teresa's. Bone is especially excited about seeing students she remembers from St. Peter School.

"I'm new here and they will also be new, but we'll know each other," she said.

END