"That's the old Barnster. The fourth grade class had a little contest painting his portrait," says Neale, headmaster of Boys' Latin, an independent K-12 school in north Baltimore. Barney, his eleven-year-old Swiss Mountain Dog, accompanies him to his office most days and has been adopted by the students as an unofficial mascot. "I think Joe's here is my favorite," he said, pointing to the painting centered directly behind his desk. "He has the tail down pat."

As headmaster, Neale is essentially the school's CEO; he is the direct administrator of operations on both a daily and strategic level. He also teaches two classes, an unusual feat for a headmaster. Having taught just about everything from spelling to anthropology, these days Neale stays mostly with history, his major at Hampden-Sydney College. "I have a passion for what I teach," he said. "But it's the contact with students that breathes life into my day."

Neale has been involved in secondary education since graduating from Hampden-Sydney. He had originally gone pre-med, but in his senior year, with his medical school possibilities looking grim, he was offered a job teaching at Gilman School, another independent school in the Baltimore area. He took the job on a lark and moved to Baltimore. After receiving his master's in education from Towson University, Neale knew he was in the right field. For the next 27 years, he taught at Gilman School in various capacities. During that time he earned a master's at Johns Hopkins and a doctorate at the University of Maryland. In 1994 he assumed the helm of Boys' Latin.

Like Neale's alma mater, as well as more than 50 independent schools in the Baltimore-Washington area, Boys' Latin is all male. And Neale feels this feature offers distinct educational advantages. Contemporary research suggests that boys and girls learn differently, and there is no question they mature at different rates. Segregating by sex allows the school to match instruction more acurrately to boys' and girls' different learning styles and developmental stages. In addition, single-sex classrooms also help to remove social distractions from the academic process.

Another distinct advantage of single-sex status, says Neale, is that it allows Boys' Latin to remain small, a characteristic of which he is hotly possessive, and one that he says underscored his experience at Hampden-Sydney College. For example, Neale explains, to have a good lacrosse program-which conference champ Boys' Latin certainly does-they need nearly 100 of their 270 upper-school students to try out. If they were coed, they would have girls' teams for each sport, which means they would need another 100 students going out for that team. To think that nearly three quarters of the school would try out for one sport is unrealistic. Therefore, theoretically, the school would have to double in size to maintain its full range of quality programs if it went co-ed.

Mercer Neale '67 with his Swiss Mountain Dog, Barney.

"We're determined to remain the smallest K-12 single-sex school in the area," he said, prizing their eight-to-one student-to-teacher ratio. "The things that make us a good small school aren't necessarily the things that would make us a good large school. When everybody doesn't know everybody else, that's too big for us." While Neale vows to preserve the school's size, he is by no means leery of a progressive future. Staying responsive to the evolving needs of today's students, Neale said, is one of his biggest challenges-and the most promising. "Kids today are extraordinary in what they do," he said. "And the older I get, the more optimistic I become. I'm in awe of their accomplishments every day."