Gift to St. Mary’s Honors Smith Daughter — $5 Million From FedEx CEO’s Family Will Build Middle School

By Ruma Banerji Kumar banerji@commercialappealcom

The family of FedEx founder and CEO Frederick W. Smith announced Friday it’s giving St. Mary’s Episcopal School $5 million to build a new middle school.

The 45,000-square-foot building will serve about 250 students in grades 5-8 and will most likely be built on the southeast corner of Walnut Grove and Perkins Extended.

The largest single gift in the school’s 158-year history comes in honor of Smith’s late daughter, Sandra Windland Smith Rice, who died in May of a rare genetic heart rhythm disorder.

Rice spent kindergarten through 12th grade at the East Memphis private school and graduated in 1988. The new middle school’s library will exhibit Rice’s award-winning nature photographs.

The family, through remarks made at a ceremony Friday by AutoZone founder and chairman Pitt Hyde, said the school would be an ideal memorial for Rice, who cared deeply for the school’s work to develop young women.

The gift gives a solid boost to the school’s goal of raising $30 million for capital improvements, bringing the amount raised to $17.5 million.

Middle school classrooms haven’t been upgraded for decades. St. Mary’s board of trustees chair, Brooke Morrow, says students today are studying in the same classrooms she used in the late 1960s. The classrooms are increasingly cramped, as enrollment has nearly doubled in the last decade.

“We’re so humbled and incredibly grateful that out of this terrible tragedy, the Smith family has chosen to honor us in this way. It means the world to us,” said Morrow, who graduated from the school in 1974.

The capital campaign started in October 2003, with work on a 17,000-square-foot addition to the upper school that houses students in 9-12 grades. The second phase yielded a new early childhood center for 3-to-5-year-olds, which opened in August.

In the third phase, money will be used to build the new middle school, but will also be used to beef up financial aid to increase opportunities for need-based scholarships to families who cannot afford St. Mary’s tuition. The money will also help improve teacher recruiting efforts.

“We’re really trying to bring the best and brightest here,” said head of school Marlene Shaw.

– Ruma Banerji Kumar: 529-2596