St. Mark's School of Texas

St. Mark's School of Texas

St. Mark's School of Texas opened in 1906 as a non-sectarian college-preparatory day school for boys in grades 1 through 12, educating approximately 900 students on a single campus in North Dallas. Its endowment emerged as a separate asset pool over decades of capital campaigns, including contributions from alumni like Ross Perot Jr. ('77) and private equity investor Tom Hicks, whose names appear on campus facilities. The school itself — not a family office — governs the endowment through a board committee, making it a rare case where K-12 institutional capital operates with governance DNA transplanted from private markets. The investment committee runs a diversified strategy spanning public equities, fixed income, private equity, real assets, and hedge funds — the full institutional toolkit — applied to a pool we estimate at roughly $200 million. The chair, John Rocchio, co-founded TPG Growth, linking the committee's lens to a platform that has backed companies such as Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify. Board trustee Robert Kaplan brings the macro perspective of a former Dallas Federal Reserve president. This dual private-markets-and-macro architecture means the committee can evaluate venture and buyout co-investments alongside traditional asset-liability work in a single room, a structural advantage few secondary-school endowments possess. The school discloses no headcount for the investment office, relying instead on the volunteer committee and outside managers. The endowment supports operations alongside the St. Mark's Fund, an annual giving vehicle, and planned giving programs including the Terrill Society. In May 2026, the school hosted President George W. Bush as its Spring Convocation speaker, reinforcing the Dallas network that feeds both philanthropic support and the committee's pipeline of investment relationships. What separates this endowment from its peer secondary schools is not size but governance density. A TPG Growth co-founder chairs the committee; a former Federal Reserve president sits on the board; the former CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center previously led the board. This layering of private equity, public policy, and philanthropic leadership creates an investment committee more typical of a mid-sized foundation or university than a K-12 school — and suggests decision-making shaped by access, not just asset allocation models.