Girls Preparatory School
independent all-female secondary day school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
Girls Preparatory School, or GPS, is an all-female college preparatory school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States. It was founded in 1906 by Grace Eliza McCallie, Tommie Payne Duffy, and Eula Lea Jarnagin. GPS enrolls students in grades 6–12. These students are taught by GPS's faculty members, over 69% of whom hold advanced degrees. A trailblazer for girls' athletics in Chattanooga, GPS fielded the first girls team in basketball (1909), the first girls' golf team in Tennessee (1974), the first girls' rowing team in Chattanooga (1994), the first girls' lacrosse team in Chattanooga (2005), and the first girls' squash team in Tennessee (2022). GPS is also home to Terpsichord, one of the longest-running modern dance companies in the U.S. For the 2025–26 school year, GPS enrolled 500 girls from 84 zip codes, with 210 in Middle School and 290 in Upper School.
Its brother school, The McCallie School, was founded a year earlier by Grace McCallie's brothers. As of July 1, 2021, GPS's Head of School is Megan D. Cover.
History
Origins
In 1905, Duffy and Jarnagin, two public school teachers, asked the city school board to provide a fourth year of high school studies, including modern language and a lab science, so that girls, as well as boys, would apply for college. When their request was denied, they decided to create an independent school to prepare girls for higher education and convinced their friend and fellow teacher Grace McCallie to join them.
“Girls Preparatory School” enters the record as independent all-female secondary day school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Girls, Preparatory and School can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5564658. VIAF identifies the subject as 151306847. The Library of Congress control number is n83060758. Authority coordinates are 35.061, -85.299. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1906, 1909, 1974 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Girls Preparatory School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.