Gilman School's headmaster ousted

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - The headmaster of Gilman School has resigned after several “misrepresentations” on his resume came to light last week, the school announced on Friday.

According to a statement from Gilman’s board of trustees, Jon McGill was asked to step down as head of the school after the discovery that he had not been part of an intercollegiate hockey team, as McGill had told the school when he was hired.

“When this was brought to his attention, he readily acknowledged his mistakes, and in keeping with his loyalty to the school and its mission, tendered his resignation,” Charles Fenwick Jr., the board’s president, said in the statement.

Fenwick said that the board came across the inconsistency during an annual evaluation of the headmaster, who has led the northern Baltimore all-boys prep school since 2001. About 1,000 students attend the K-12 school.

In a separate statement accompanying the school’s announcement, McGill acknowledged the fabrication but expressed “shock” at being asked to resign.

“I know, however, that the responsibility for establishing the vision of the school rests with the board, and when the head and the board are not sharing the same vision, it is time to step aside,” McGill wrote.

“Although I removed that reference from my resume in September 2004, I have no one to blame but myself for putting it there in the first place more than 30 years ago,” he added. “I’m sorry for the mistake.”

A Canadian by birth, McGill was well known to the school as an ice hockey enthusiast, often appearing before students in a Gilman hockey jersey.

McGill earned three degrees from the University of Waterloo in Ontario in the early 1970s, though it was not immediately known if that was the university where McGill claimed to have played hockey.

McGill was unavailable for comment at the headmaster’s residence Friday night.

In his statement, Fenwick praised McGill’s accomplishments at Gilman, including improvements to fundraising, financial aid, and the school’s faculty. He declined to elaborate further in an interview on the specifics of the resignation.

Assistant headmaster John Schmick, a longtime faculty member and Gilman alumnus, will serve as the school’s acting head until a replacement is chosen, Fenwick said. The school will convene a search committee for a permanent successor during the summer.

McGill, an experienced educator who served as associate head of New York’s Poly Prep Country Day School before coming to Baltimore, was in the midst of spearheading Gilman’s record-setting $50 million capital campaign. Much of that fundraising effort is going toward the ongoing construction of an new academic center and an overhaul of the school’s main building.

In early 2003, McGill drew praise after soliciting a $10 million dollar donation — the largest in the school’s history — from William Polk Carey, an investor and the grandson of the school’s founder.

McGill, the 12th headmaster in the school’s 110-year history, was preceded by Archibald Montgomery IV, who stepped down after nine years in the post.

In his statement, McGill alluded to the “weight of expectations” imposed on him by the legacy of the school’s previous headmasters.

“The school was looking for, as one board member put it, ‘a combination of Reddy Finney and Henry Callard, the reference being to two esteemed former headmasters,” McGill wrote.

jdavisson@baltimoreexaminer.com

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