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Tom Bonnell is a highly accomplished educator and administrative leader who served for six years as the middle school director and then the associate head of school at the Dalton School in Manhattan and most recently for the past five years as head of school at the Savannah Country Day School in Savannah, Georgia.

At Dalton, Tom created a more cohesive, vertically and horizontally integrated middle school, a system to support students who needed additional help and a process to evaluate veteran faculty, including annual departmental evaluation by an outside team. At Savannah Country Day School, a Pre-K-12 coed school of approximately 1000 students and 200 faculty and staff, Tom led the school in developing a vision of teaching excellence, creating a more diverse student body and building much-needed new academic buildings. He also initiated a program called “Creative Minds,” which brought speakers of national prominence to the school and to Savannah to address issues of contemporary interest and concern.

Before coming to Dalton, Tom was a middle school director at Fort Worth Country Day School and The John Cooper School, where he also served as the school’s first director of admissions. Tom began his career as a high school Latin teacher, first at St. Thomas High School and then as a master teacher at Episcopal High School, both in Houston.

He received his B.A. in Greek and Latin from Duke and his M.A. in Greek and Latin from the University of Texas at Austin. Tom has authored articles that have appeared in Education Week, Independent School, Principal, and Schools in the Middle.