For Head of School Sarah Pelmas, sending strong, proud, fierce young women out into the world upon graduation is not just a job—it’s a calling.

Steeped in independent school culture from her days as a student at Exeter, Sarah focused on both academics and athletics. She rowed in high school, and continued her rowing career at Princeton. The discipline, hard work, and requisite team collaboration she learned on the water strongly inform her leadership style and approach.

Sarah began her career teaching at Stanford, Syracuse, the City College of San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley. When presented with a fortuitous job opportunity at San Francisco University High School, she shifted her career trajectory and has never looked back. She possesses a deep love for the independent school model, noting “how much more there is to education when it includes the whole person.” She stayed at SFUHS for ten years, serving on both the faculty and administration, gaining rich, diverse experience in a variety of roles, from dean of students to interim athletic director.

In 2010, Sarah and her family moved to Washington, D.C. for her roles as associate head and head of upper school at the National Cathedral School, one of the country’s preeminent girls’ day schools. Her time at NCS fostered in Sarah a staunch commitment to girls’ schools, finding that they are “magical places, and different from coeducational spaces in really important ways.” That dedication to girls’ education brought Sarah to Winsor as the eighth head of school in 2016.

At Winsor, Sarah delights daily in the students, and considers working with them to be the very best part of her job. Her work focuses on the day-to-day experiences of Winsor students, as well as their long-term educational outcomes, aiming to graduate students who can “think critically, write beautifully, stand up in any situation for what they believe in, and harness their considerable talents to make the world better.”