trailblazers 1940 Mrs. Stella Nahum begins annual school trips to the Metropolitan Opera. 1941 Foote admits 28 British students from Oxford, housed by local families, sent to the U.S. to escape the war.
1943–44 Margaret Foote ’35 (Mrs. Foote’s daughter) teaches fifth grade, and invites her class to Dwight Chapel for her wedding to Franz Oppenheimer. 1948 Foote School grows to 186 students, 16 faculty and staff, has annual operating income of $56,000 and gives out $4,775 in financial aid.
Winifred Sturley English teacher and Headmistress, 1924–1955 Winifred Sturley came to New Haven in 1922, only to return to her native England six weeks later when death cut short her husband’s professorship in Yale’s Physics Department. She came back to visit in 1923 and met Martha Foote one afternoon at the home of art teacher Anna Berdan, where students were performing the play Orpheus and Eurydice. Then and there, Mrs. Foote asked her to join the faculty, and Mrs. Sturley accepted, going on to teach English, math, geography and history before succeeding Mrs. Foote as headmistress in 1935. “Mrs. Sturley is one of the kindest people alive,” wrote student Lisa Farrel (later Lisa Totman, longtime third grade teacher) in a 1956 Foote The third grade in 1943
Notes essay titled “A Remarkable Person.” Amidst a depression and world war, Mrs. Sturley shepherded the school through a period of growth while staying true to its
1940s 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. enters WWII. Many Foote boys served in the war.
1948 Big Bang theory formulated
founding ideals. “We want to help each individual child do the best job of learning that he can do,” she wrote upon her retirement. “We believe that happy living comes from increasing power, which itself comes from happy learning.”
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